Today's Post Is Not Here

I've written my post for today elsewhere. If you know how to find my baby blog, you'll see today's post there. If you don't, well, let's just say you can take a break from my month-long onslaught today.

Dreams of Africa

And now for something a little different.



In case you can't view the video or can't understand the narration, here's what I'm reading:

Some days I feel like getting on a plane and flying to Africa. I'd disembark in Nairobi and drive north through the savanna, the baobab and acacia, the giant migrating herds and the packs that follow them with grumbling bellies until I get to the highlands of Ethiopia. There I'd hang a slight right at Addis Ababa, still heading mostly north until I get to Dessie. There it'd be another right and a 150 miles where I'd stop there in the desert, pick up my phone and call my wife to say, "I'm in Djibouti." I think my life would feel complete then and I could die, finally, without regret.

She's Gone Again

She was in my class a year ago and she hated me. I was relieved on those days she didn't bother to show up. She was angry and I never could really find out the source, but she took it out on everyone, including me. She was one of those who was offended by polite questions, requests, and redirection. She only lasted a few weeks before she dropped out of school. I can't say I hated her. I won't lie and say I've never hated a student. I've hated a few. It's a simple fact, one most of us try to pretend is false, that some people are just bad and it starts to show pretty early on. I didn't think she was one of those people. But I was glad when she was gone. I couldn't find a way to break through and show her that I wasn't one of the bad guys in her life and the class was much easier to teach without her. She left, and another girl left, and the class turned into one of my best.

That's why I worried a bit when I saw her name on my roster at the beginning of this year. She showed up that first day, dead-eyed and looking like she would be as unpleasant as ever, but as the days passed I realized that the attitude was gone. Smiles replaced grimaces. An A average replaced the 12 she had the first time around. I actually liked having her in my class. She made me feel like a teacher. My class was her favorite, she said, and I thought maybe I had actually reached a student, helped change their life for the better. She gave me a boost, made me feel like a real teacher, made it easier to come to school each morning.

Only, she stopped coming to school a few weeks back. When she did bother to show up, the good attitude had faded. She now longer took out her bitterness on me. She'd been in class long enough to know that I was one of the good guys. She just didn't care about school anymore. I tried to get her focus back where it should be, but it didn't work. Eventually, she stopped coming at all. I still set her work for her on her desk every day thinking she may come back, but her sister dropped by today to tell me she was probably gone for good.

She wasn't the first kid who convinced me that maybe I could make a difference, who made me temporarily feel like I was doing something worthwhile, but every time I think I may have reached a kid this seems to happen. They go to jail. They just can't hack the stress of school. Their home life just sucks to much. They or parts of their life out of their control always manage to screw things up for them in the end. The only ones I can truly seem to help are the ones who didn't really need it to start with.

The Passing of an Era

I'm aware that yesterday's post sucked. You don't need to point this out. That's just one of the side effects of NaBloPoMo. Sometimes you just have to shove out a post that's as stupid at the event's nickname.

It would seem that the last of my purebred araucana chickens is dead. Long live the last of my purebred araucana chickens. I have no hard evidence of this, of course. Unlike the normal poultry-based loss at my house, there was no stiffened corpse or ripped-apart carcass for me to find when I went out to feed the birds one afternoon. I just haven't seen the little black hen with the ear tufts and no tail for more than a week now. I'm assuming that this means that one of the neighborhood foxes (we have both reds and grays in the area) or a large owl or hawk swooped in and carried her away.

The weird thing is that there weren't even any feathers or a sign of a struggle in my back yard. If I were a TV police detective, this would suggest to me that the killer was someone the hen knew and trusted. I really doubt this hen was stupid enough to trust a fox. The more likely answer is that chickens tend to be pretty damn deep sleepers and whatever took her just plucked her from her perch and trotted or flew away. I guess the ducks could have been involved as they once shared a back yard and would have been familiar and known for peaceful behavior, but the ducks are too fat to fly over the fence now and they lack the appendages to open the gate. They don't even have thumbs. How are they going to work the latch? We're not talking archeopteryx here.

For those not good with paleontology humor, archeopteryx was one of the first animals considered a bird or at least a link between dinosaurs and birds. They still had gripping claws on their wings. Perhaps they could have opened the latch on the gate, but they don't exist anymore. Being extinct kind of rules you out in a murder mystery. Of course the hoatzin still exists and also has claws on its wings, but its claws are pretty pathetic. I'm pretty sure it'd be unable to work the latch even if I did live in the Amazon basin. Also, ducks are neither archeopteryx or hoatzin, which was my original point.

Either way, this kind of sucks because I spent over a hundred bucks a couple of years ago to buy the small flock of purebred araucanas I had for a while. Unfortunately, they brought with them a respiratory infection that wiped out most of my other birds and over the past two years I've had most of them gradually just die (like chickens are want to do) or be killed by wild and domesticated animals.

Honestly, I'm kind of over the whole chicken thing. It's a pain in the ass to keep them fed and watered when I'm away, and I tend to be away when I don't have to work. Luckily, I'm pretty much down to the the pullets and cockerels that the little black hen hatched back in the summer and these buggers are fairly wild. I can't get close to them and they fly over the backyard fence at will and have managed to survive several visits by my parents' dogs, who gladly kill chickens when they can catch them. Considering the fact that the ducks turned out to be safer when I let them roam free than when I put them up for the night (we lost half of them in the span of a week when I penned them up at night and haven't lost one since I stopped bothering), and the last of the chickens are half wild, I'm thinking I'm just going to let them be. If something gets them, well, it's just a chicken and these were free. If they live out four or five years before they finally kick the bucket, well, then they deserved it.

And If I die of some mutated strain of bird flu that finally managed to make the jump from birds to humans effectively and lethally, then I'll just chalk that up to irony. If I want to consider myself a writer, I have to be willing to die for irony.

Happy Veterans Day

Today is Veterans Day and I have to admit that in recent generations, there aren't that many in my family, especially if you use the narrower definition of veteran that requires a person have served in combat to earn that title. My mom's parents were too young to be involved with World War II and too old for Korea. Her dad was in the Navy and Merchant Marines, but wasn't old enough to join until after the war had ended. He did spend some time in occupied Japan, though.

My dad's parents were almost a decade older, however, and his dad actually did serve in the Marines while the World War II was still ongoing. Still, I never much thought of him as a veteran. First, he rarely mentioned his time in the war and whenever he or anyone else ever talked about it they usually described him as having spent the entire time in the Philippines peeling potatoes. He had run off at a younger age to Atlanta to join the military, but his dad chased him down and dragged him back home to wait until he was drafted. By then, the war was winding down and Granddaddy didn't get deployed until many of the Pacific islands had been largely cleared of the Japanese. He did occasionally tell the story of his first day at boot camp. He'd never learned to swim and he said during physicals the sergeant threw him in the pool, he passed out, sank to the bottom, and when he woke up he was in uniform on a ship without a speck of land in sight.

Of course it doesn't mean that I don't respect what veterans have done to keep the rest of us safe just because my granddad wasn't what we typically think of veterans. K's grandfather had a much more distinguished military career than any of my grandparents. He was injured twice by shrapnel, once in the leg and once in the face. One of those times came shortly after he stormed the beach on D-Day. I never would have thought it only knowing him in his old age as I did, but the guy had apparently been a badass during the war. Guys like him are the reason for this holiday. Even now when I don't exactly think many of the wars after World War II were fully justified, I fully respect the risks and sacrifices veterans make.

Of course, it hasn't always just been the soldiers who worked so the rest of us could stay safe. My dad's mother actually was a Rosie the Riveter. The only way that descriptor could have fit more literally was if she had actually been named Rosie. She spent the war putting rivets into bombers at a factory in Atlanta, so when I tip back a beer in honor of the veterans today I'll have her in mind as well as people like K's grandfather and, yes, even mine.

I'm Just so Cool

By the time most of you read this, John Allen Muhammad should be dead. If you don't recognize the name, Muhammad was the elder of the two Beltway Snipers who killed 10 people around Washington, DC, in October 2002. He is due to meet the executioner just hours after I post this.

There are a few times in my life when I say something out loud and then a while later I am shocked at my own prescience and appalled at my friends' and family's inability to hang on my every word. First (and perhaps more compelling), I declared that Barack Obama would be the first black president while he was still giving his keynote speech at the 2004 Democratic National Convention for John Kerry's run for president. I actually said this out loud while sitting at the copy desk at the newspaper where I worked at the time. It may be hard to remember this now, but Obama at the time was still an Illinois state legislator and I was watching the damn speech on mute while I worked. What I did was freaking mind blowing. Unfortunately, four years later when Obama actually won, no one remembered me saying this. Stupid piss ants.

Another amazing encounter with my inner clairvoyant came during the 2002 shooting spree. This took several weeks to unfold and when news of the first deaths started rolling out, I made a joke along the lines of "It seems unfair that all of the good serial killers are white. This seems to be unfair discrimination. Why aren't there any black serial killers?"

Then a couple of weeks later it turned out that the two killers were, in fact, black and it kind of looked like I controlled the world there for a few seconds. But seriously, if I could control the world, I seriously hope it wouldn't be limited to dictating the race of serial killers. I'd like to think that I'd focus more on ending poverty and ignorance or something.

Then again, I've done very little of importance with the limited abilities I actually have, so who knows.

Thank God It Was the 90s

I've been sitting on this story for a while now. I'm sure it will entertain, but considering the nature of it, I've always been a little hesitant to share it in this fairly public medium. See, in high school, I have reason to believe that I was on an FBI watch list for domestic terrorists.

It all started when I was in high school and I went to the post office to get a PO box for me and my friends to share. I'm not entirely sure why I decided this would be a good idea. Perhaps it was because I wanted to get porn without having to worry about my parents finding it in the mail, although I never actually ordered any porn, so that seems unlikely. More likely was that I wanted a separate address for the two e-zines I published at the time and it would give me a little more privacy with my mail order purchases of CDs. There was no real need for this, but I was a teenager. I hid things from my parents I didn't even need to hide.

This in itself was no problem. I'm now a little surprised that the United States Postal Service just allows teenagers to rent boxes like that, but they did. The problems started when the only box number left was 666. This is a superstitious area, so why the local post office had that number at all is strange. A lot of tall buildings don't even have a 13th floor. Why does the post office have a PO Box 666?

Next came the bombs. First, one of my friends had a demolitions supply catalog shipped to our PO box and I brought it to school to give to him. Unfortunately, during band class the catalog slipped behind my saxophone case and the assistant band director found it later in the day. Considering the facts that many of the items for sale in the catalog were intended to blow things up, my friend had used the name James Hetfield, lead singer of Metallica, and the address was PO Box 666, he felt the need to turn this in to the administration.

The next day we were called into the office and had to talk to the school resource police officer about the situation. Nothing really happened to us. We were excellent students who never got into trouble and I honestly think my friend got the catalog entirely to satisfy his curiosity. Seeing whether they'd send a catalog of explosives to a 16-year-old may have been the main goal, even.

The scarier bomb-related instance had nothing to do with the PO Box, which we discontinued after the demolitions catalog incident. This instance had to do with the bombing of Wal-Mart. Most of my friends were in the band and on the afternoon before we were to leave for a road trip, a couple of my friends and I drove over to Wal-Mart to waste some of the time we had between the end of school and the time we had to be back to load up the buses. When we got to the store, the power in the building was out, so we got back in the car and drove away. So far, so good. It wasn't until the next Monday when we were called in to the police station to be interviewed by a detective for the bombing of Wal-Mart that we even knew anything had happened that afternoon. Apparently, not long after we left, someone pulled up to the front of the store, opened their door, and rolled out a two-liter bottle containing aluminum foil and an acidic cleaning product that exploded next to the lawnmowers.

Now, I will say emphatically that we had nothing to do with this. In fact, we didn't even have to get our stories straight because we just had to tell the truth of what happened and the stories would already be straight. The informant who fingered my friend as the one who had been driving said the car had driven past the front of the building, slowed down, and then had driven out the side entrance. We had parked near the back of the parking lot and had just gone straight out the front entrance without ever passing near the front of the builidng. We were as innocent as could be in the case...

Except that we had been messing around with similar explosives using aluminum foil and household chemicals. We'd heard about some of our classmates getting probation for making these things and then sticking them in people's mail boxes. We agreed that was pretty stupid, but thought trying them ourselves would be smart. I can't really vouch for my practical intelligence during this time period. Anyway, we were cowards, so we used 20-oz bottles instead of two-liters and we always made ours out in the woods as far away from people and pets as possible and we only made a handful on one occasion. I'll admit it was stupid because there was no way to know exactly how long it would take the thing to blow or any way to stop it if something or someone got too close while the pressure inside was building, but it's too late to change that now. By the time the Wal-Mart thing happened, we'd not even thought about these things for months. Combine that with the fact that we'd gotten caught with a demolitions catalog a year earlier and the fact that we had nothing to do with the bombing felt a little irrelevant. I was already a blossoming liberal. I didn't exactly trust the legal system to not wrongly convict me. I mean, if they could put an innocent guy on death row on occasion, they could surely put me on probation for a bomb I didn't make. After all, we had been there around the time of the incident and an eye witness had identified our driver by name as having driven the group of people who did this.

Luckily, the detective believed us and let us all go without any problem. It helped that the eye witness was known by the cops to be untrustworthy on occasion. We were lucky with the timing, though. I'm not so sure the cops would have been so lackadaisical had this happened in 2002 instead of the late 1990s. Unfortunately, I've always had the feeling that my dad really didn't believe us, but didn't really care. That always struck me as a little weird.