A few days ago, I came upon my white-haired father muscling a squat metal cube about the size of a picnic cooler onto the concrete apron near his shop. The object was mounted on wheels, but they weren’t turning much, and when one of them did break free and rotate a quarter-turn or so, it only happened with the agonized squeal of metal long-frozen by rust; Dad was dragging the object more than he was wheeling it.

I trotted over to give him a hand — he’s been pridefully ignoring the problem, but his back isn’t what it was — and also to get a better look at this… whatever-it-was. The fabulous Bennion Compound holds a lot of mysterious artifacts I cannot identify, but I at least recognize them as part of the collection. I couldn’t recall ever seeing this one, though, so I asked the natural question: “What the hell is this thing?”

“It’s a gas-powered welder,” Dad replied, as if it were the most obvious thing in the world.

“Oh,” I said, still not really understanding what I was looking at.

Dad elaborated. “It’s an arc welder with its own generator, so you can weld out in the field where there isn’t any electricity.” Ah. Now I got it. Now I could see that the unit was actually two machines in one, an engine on one side and a boxy appliance festooned with electrical hook-ups and outlets on the other.

“Where’d it come from?” I asked.

“Oh, Jack Smith gave it to me at some point. It’s been out in the barn underneath a bunch of stuff.”

Jack was our next-door neighbor as I was growing up, a kindly if sometimes exasperating old guy who sort of resembled Fred Scuttle, a moon-faced, mischievous character from the old Benny HIll Show. At one time, Jack had been a welder at the famous Kennecott open-pit copper mine that has eaten away a good chunk of the mountains on the west side of the valley. He’s also been dead for nearly 20 years, which meant this welder had probably been tucked away for 30 or 35 years.

“I used to have another one,” Dad continued, “but I got rid of it a while back. I remembered this one and thought I’d see if I could get it going.”

It seemed like a dubious prospect to me. The machine was ancient — the ghost of a logo I could see on the side looked to my eye like a 1960s font — and the whole surface of it was reddish-brown and scaly with corrosion. But I’ve seen Dad accomplish miracles with less, so I didn’t doubt too much.

“I just hope it hasn’t had gas in it all this time,” Dad said, reaching for the screw-cap on top of the engine. Like the wheels, it was frozen by the passage of time, and Dad had to wrap a rag around it and bear down hard to get it to move. When it finally broke loose, it spun nearly all the way off, releasing a puff of foul-smelling air. If you’ve never smelled gasoline that’s turned to varnish, trust me: there are few stinks on this planet that are worse. Maybe that weird flower that smells like rotting corpses. Or whale farts. But that’s about it. Seriously, it’s bad.

The smell of old gas is a satanic layercake of sickly sweet tones and acrid highlights. And an engine that’s full of that stuff may as well be packed with chewed bubblegum, because it has approximately the same effect. I knew Dad would be at this for a while, so I wished him luck and went about my business for the rest of the day.

Later that evening, I checked in with him again and asked how it was going with his new/old toy. His face broke into a grin and he motioned me over to the antiquated box. He wound a starter cord around the pulley — yes, this thing was so old, it didn’t even have an automatic recoil on the pull cord like every small-engine machine built since, oh, the Korean War or thereabouts — and gave it a tug. The ancient motor turned over once or twice, coughed, hesitated for a long enough beat I thought it had frozen again, then abruptly broke into a steady rumble. Dad pushed the throttle linkage a couple times and the engine obediently revved up and down. When Dad pressed the kill button after a few more seconds, the motor at first refused to die, as if it was reluctant to return to its decades-long dormancy. Not only did he get it running, I mused, he got it so running, it won’t stop.

“So how’d you do it?” I asked. Dad proceeded to tell me how he’d poured lacquer thinner into the gas tank to break up the varnish, and then crafted a new fuel line out of a piece of small-gauge copper tubing he’d found, because the old rubber line had dried up and cracked with age. There were probably other things as well, but to be honest, I stopped listening at some point. I was too busy thinking how amazing my old man is in the way he can take a rusty old hunk of inert metal that I would’ve hauled to the dump and breathe life into it, like Victor von Frankenstein and his accursed monster. Moreover he does it just for fun. Just to see if he can. I, on the other hand, can barely change my own oil.

I’m ashamed to admit there was a time in my life when I didn’t appreciate his gift, and truthfully, I doubt if he himself appreciates it to this day. He doesn’t even see his skills as a gift. They’re just what he does. Me, I can look around and see all the instances of misused apostrophes on signs and menus (dear god, why don’t people understand it’s versus its?). But so what? Nobody wants to listen to a scold and there’s always another typo to be found. Dad, on the other hand… he can work a genuine form of magic on the real world, the practical world, the world of moving parts and hand tools. He can rebuild a car or rewire a house. He knows plumbing and carpentry. He can estimate distances accurately with his eye alone. He understands how things fit together and what needs to happen to achieve a certain physical effect. He can make things. He is a man in an old-fashioned sense of that word. He is, in fact, the manliest man I’ve ever known. I don’t begin to measure up to his example.

It was once impossible for me to say this, for reasons I still don’t entirely comprehend, but it’s becoming easier for me to say this with every passing year: I am proud of my dad. I just wish I was more like him.

Happy Father’s Day, everyone.

Driving southeast between Scipio and Salina, two of the smaller dots on the map of Utah. We missed the rain, but the hummocky two-lane highway is still wet, and it shines in the golden light of late afternoon. The asphalt has a pinkish tinge, a pale derivative of the vibrant orangey-red soil we occasionally spot through the dense brush that crowds the edges of the road. A sweetly acrid odor of sage infiltrates the Jeep Liberty I borrowed from my parents; I know from past experience that the smell is always most noticeable right after a storm, when the plants are still steaming. It smells fresh and clean to me. Anne is sneezing and rubbing at her eyes.

We’re three hours from home and haven’t encountered another car in nearly 20 minutes.

***

Dinner at Mom’s Cafe, a two-story brick building that’s stood at the corner of State and Main for a hundred years. A red and green neon sign buzzes over the entrance; a good ol’ boy in a ratty Harley t-shirt sits at the counter and flirts with his waitress. Our own waitress, a cute teenage townie with a blue bandana wrapped around her forehead, is getting frazzled by a late dinner rush. On the wall above our booth, there’s a signed photo of Willie Nelson with his arm around someone… “Mom” herself perhaps. His handwritten inscription notes how much he enjoyed his steak.

Coal trucks rumble past outside, their massive shadows intermittently darkening the whole interior of the cafe. We gobble cheeseburgers. The buns are toasted, the onion slices crispy and not too sharp-tasting. The meat is so fresh and flavorful, it was probably standing in a nearby field only the day before.

***

A black man sits on the concrete jersey barrier at the edge of I-70, midway up Salina Canyon. He wears knee-length shorts, a sleeveless green t-shirt, and a friendly smile for the passing cars. A stuffed and well-worn backpack sits on the ground between his ankles. He makes no attempt to raise his thumb, but I consider stopping and offering him a ride anyway. I don’t. I’ve heard too many horror stories about crazy people. So I blow on past and feel a nagging sense of guilt for the next ten miles. I hope he gets where he’s going.

***

I awake cold and aching from a light doze, the first sleep I’ve managed since going to bed six hours before. I’m curled in a ball beneath a pile of afghans and quilts that’s done nothing to stop the chill rising up from beneath me. The thermostat says its 55 degrees inside the camp trailer. I think to myself that I’ve surely endured worse nights, but offhand, I can’t think of any.

***

I spend the day in a groggy haze. I keep reflecting that my idea of “roughing it” is staying in a historic motor lodge somewhere away from the freeway ramps.

I feel like a hopeless city slicker, a tenderfoot, a real lame-o with no manly skills whatsoever. Earlier, I tried to connect a propane tank. For the first time in my entire misbegotten, everything’s-backwards-because-I’m-left-handed life, I actually remembered the “righty tighty, lefty loosey” meme. It turns out propane tanks are the one thing in this humiliating world that are threaded the opposite direction of everything else. If I’d turned the nut the “wrong” way on my first try, as I always have before, it would’ve worked.

I wonder what the hell I’m doing here.

***

The clouds finally blow past just before sundown. The camp grows dark with the coming of night, then darker still as the others turn out the trailer lights and bed down. The encircling trees become a shadowy rim for the enormous black bowl that has settled over the world.

Back home in the Salt Lake Valley, I live at the bottom of another bowl, and there’s so much light pollution from the city and its surrounding ‘burbs that about all I can see in the night sky is Orion and the Big Dipper. Here, though… here the bowl arcs up over my head, infinitely deep and deeply black. There are so many stars up there that it’s actually hard to pick out those two familiar constellations against the multitude.

As my eyes adjust, even more appear, and I start to perceive their colors, too: white-hot, gentle yellow, sullen red, intense blue. A shooting star etches a path across the bowl of the sky, like in a Spielberg movie. An orange spark crosses overhead, too high and too fast to be anything but a satellite.

The longer I stand there with my head cocked back and the darkness seeming to grow denser around me with every passing minute, the more I can see. Its as if the universe is an origami chrysanthemum unfolding itself, opening in a slow, sensual pace, revealing its secret inner surfaces to me. Then the final glory fades into view: a hazy white fog that gradually reveals itself, the longer you stare at it, to be composed of billions of individual points of light. The same points of light that have shone down on the human race since we walked out of Olduvai Gorge; the same points that will be there when one of us sets foot on Mars. I’m watching the entire galaxy as it watches us.

I think I hear something moving out there in the trees. Supposedly a bear has been seen on this mountain, and elk, too. But whatever it is, assuming it’s not just my imagination, comes no closer. The air is growing cold. And I am alone with the stars…

When my webmaster Jack first shut off my back-end access to this blog last summer in a last-ditch effort to keep the old server running just a little longer (details here, if you don’t know what I’m talking about), I underwent an emotional process not unlike the Kubler-Ross stages of grieving. At first, being unable to post was a major frustration. I’d see an article or something I wanted to share, or I’d have an experience or otherwise think of something I wanted to blog about, but I couldn’t. I was suffering from bloggus interruptus… blue blogs… I’d been blog-blocked. You get the idea. (I know, I know, I could have written the entries in Word or something and posted them later, but for various reasons, I didn’t. And anyhow, I’m trying to develop an idea here, people!) But after a couple weeks of bloglessness, the irritation started to fade. In fact, I began to feel… relieved. As if I were on vacation. I noticed parts of my brain and body relaxing that I hadn’t even realized were tense as it gradually sank in that I was free. Free of the nagging sense of obligation that comes with running a blog, the feeling that there’s this gaping, grasping, begging, mewling, insatiable maw out there, eternally hungry for fresh content and single-mindedly focused on the now, and that I, as the sole proprietor, have to constantly produce in order to feed that thing. I’ve struggled a lot with that feeling in recent years as I’ve gotten busier and had less time for blogging. I hate to say it, but what was supposed to be an outlet for my writing urge and a harmless little hobby — what was supposed to be fun — eventually became a huge source of stress and anxiety for me. But then, I should’ve expected that. The same thing happened, more or less, with the offline, paper-based journals I used to keep back in my pre-blog days. I dug myself into quite a hole with those; at one point, I was literally months behind but obsessively unable to just skip to the present and forget all the stuff I hadn’t gotten around to writing about yet. I had to catch up… and circumstances were making that more and more impossible with every passing day. The anxiety of constantly feeling like I couldn’t catch up — like I couldn’t keep up — became so bad I finally had to abandon journaling altogether; I just couldn’t go on feeling like such a miserably inadequate human being any longer. And to be brutally honest, I had begun to feel that way about this blog, too, before the crash… like it would be better to just walk away rather than keep tormenting myself about my inability to stay timely.

So, yeah… the break was nice. Nice enough, in fact, that I’ve been having trouble getting back into the swing of regular blogging. You may have noticed.

It’s not that I don’t want to do write in this space, or that I can’t find anything to write about. (That’s never been a problem, believe me!) But the urgency I used to feel seems to have dissipated, and I don’t know if it’s going to come back. I used to feel compelled to stay up ’til the wee hours hammering out the entries; lately, though, I find myself thinking it can wait one more day. Thinking I’d rather go fire up the BluRay player, or work on one of my many other long-neglected projects, or just get the damn dishes done so I can enjoy a clean kitchen for a few minutes. It doesn’t help that I really wonder these days if there’s any point anymore, now that the heyday of blogging seems to have come and gone.

Mental vacation and navel-gazing meta discussions aside, though, there is a downside to being out of the saddle for so long, and it’s this: there is a significant chunk of time for which I don’t have much of a record, and some pretty major things happened during the blackout period that I’d like to remember. This blog was never intended to function as a diary, but it has often ended up serving that purpose; without it, all I’ve really got of 2013 is some cryptic notes on an outdated wall calendar I’m ready to recycle. (I did talk about some of this stuff on Facebook, but given the lack of a decent search feature for old posts on that platform, as well as its notorious tendency to change for no good reason other than the need to justify the programmers’ salaries, I don’t think that place counts as any sort of documentation.) So, if you’ll bear with me, I’d like to note the highlights of  2013, as copied from my calendar (I’m including items from the entire year here, as there were things even before the blackout that I didn’t blog about):

1/22/2013: Shatner’s World: We Just Live In It
William Shatner’s one-man stage show is a hugely entertaining journey through the Shat’s life and career, narrated with nearly equal amounts of pathos and self-deprecating humor. Shatner has a reputation for being an egotistical ass, and he certainly can be, but he strikes me as far more complicated than merely that. This show seems to get closer to the truth of the man than any of the other autobiographical works he’s written (he’s done several), and that truth is often very sad, frankly. Honestly, I don’t know that I actually like William Shatner, even though I’m a huge fan of his work. But I do find him an immensely sympathetic figure… even a tragic one, in some sense. This show was recently presented in movie theaters across the country in a one-night-only event; I’m hoping that event might lead to a DVD/BluRay release…

2/22/2013: Birthday party for the Wade twins
Over 21 years have passed since I quit my job at the multiplex movie theater where I worked during my highly impressionable college-student years, but I remain inordinately fond of the people I knew there, as well as deeply nostalgic for that whole period of my life. So naturally I was deeply pleased to get an invitation to a surprise 40th birthday party for the Wade sisters, who were among my favorite candy girls back in the day. The event was a bit awkward, since I didn’t really know anyone there other than the twins’ older sister and one of my fellow “Dudes” who came with me, but the expressions on their faces when they recognized a couple of theater people made it all worthwhile. I’m only sorry I had to miss a similar party earlier this month for another of the concession-stand crew, the lovely Krickett, who I wrote about last year.

3/6/2013: Jen Larsen’s book launch party at The King’s English
My friend Jen wrote a memoir. She launched it at a local bookstore called The King’s English, and Anne and I were there. Jen seemed happy to see us, and the book was a big success. She’s now working on a Y/A novel, I believe…

3/23/2013: Mummies of the World exhibit at The Leonardo
At one point, it seems like Anne and I were going to “event exhibitions” at our local art museums every other month… exhibitions about the Etruscans and Masada and the bronzes of Rodin and the art of the Muslim world… I loved those things, because they appealed to my Indiana Jones fantasies and made me feel like a sophisticated man-about-town. But that whole scene eventually proved to be a sort of fad, and inevitably it petered out. Mummies of the World was a throwback to those heady days, and a pretty fascinating one too, the takeaway of which is that there are great many more types of mummies, both natural and otherwise, than just Egyptian ones. If you don’t know about it, The Leonardo is the former Salt Lake City Public Library, now reborn as a science and technology museum.

4/10/2013 ON3 at Liquid Joe’s
Anne’s former coworker Gary plays guitar in a rock band called ON3. They landed a gig at a local nightclub, and we went to check them out and provide a little moral support. They’re pretty good… and even though I was never a big clubber back in the day and haven’t set foot in one in years, it was cool to go out to one again, at least for one evening…

4/13/2013: dinner with Travis and Ellen
Old friendships are curious things. You go for months, even years, without seeing someone, then suddenly something will remind you of how long it’s been and you get together and have a wonderful time… and then another year passes.

4/20/2013: SLC Nerd w/Ted Raimi
My friend Ben Fuller helped launch SLC Nerd — a small, one-day sci-fi/fantasy/comic-book convention — several years ago, but in spite of his annual invitations, I never managed to go before last year. I should’ve made more of an effort, as it turned out to be a fun use of an afternoon, and I got to meet B-movie actor Ted Raimi, probably best known for playing Joxer the Mighty on television’s Xena: Warrior Princess, as well as the brother of director Sam Raimi. (For what it’s worth, he seemed like a really nice guy.) It’ll be interesting to see how (or whether) SLC Nerd goes forward now that a two-ton gorilla named Salt Lake Comic Con has arrived on the scene; my sense is that last year was a sort of watershed for Nerd, which finally broke through and garnered some attention, only to have SLCC show up in the fall and suck all the air out of the room. I hope I’m wrong about that…

4/25/2013 – 4/29/2013: San Diego vacation
Great little weekend getaway for Anne and me, during which we visited our friend Jeremy and celebrated 20 years as a couple. If you find yourself looking for dining options in San Diego, I recommend Vigilucci’s on Coronado, which really made a nice fuss over our anniversary and was delicious to boot.

5/18/2013: Laura’s skating show
Our friend Laura ice-skates. We watched her show her stuff.

5/22/2013: Alleigh’s graduation
Anne’s niece Alleigh, whom Anne thinks of as her “mini-me,” graduated high school, thus making Anne and me officially old. Thanks, Alleigh.

7/5/2013: Pat Benatar and Neil Giraldo concert
With all the ’80s bands touring on the nostalgia circuit in recent years, I’ve been able to catch pretty much all of the acts I wanted to see back in the day but never did, with only a small handful of exceptions (I’m still kicking myself for deciding Tina Turner’s farewell tour was too expensive when it passed through SLC a few years ago!). Pat Benatar was the last artist on my “A list,” i.e., the “must-sees,” so when I heard she was going to play the Cache Valley Cruise-In — an annual weekend-long car show my parents always attend, and which Anne and I often go to as well — it was a no-brainer. I’m pleased to report that not only did I get to cross the last name off my list, but the show turned out to be absolutely fantastic, easily one of the best concerts I’ve ever seen. Pat and Neil — her longtime guitarist and husband — are personable, funny, and highly entertaining, and those famous pipes of hers haven’t lost one iota of their power. I really should write a complete entry about this show, actually; I liked it that much.

7/23/2013: Huey Lewis and the News concert
Anne and I saw Huey and the boys out in Wendover a few years ago; sadly, we weren’t too impressed on that occasion. Huey’s voice was weak, and they were too focused on new, unfamiliar material, so I was hesitant to see them again. But they were my buddy Jack’s favorite band, and this tour was built around performing the entire contents of their breakthrough album Sports, which was commemorating its 30th anniversary last year, so we agreed to take another chance. Huey still struggles with the higher notes these days, but whether it was being in the company of friends or the playlist, we had a much better time.

7/26/2013 – 7/28/2013:  Wells Fun Run
Another summer, another weekend out in boondocks of Nevada, watching my dad show off.

8/24/2013: Dave and Amber’s wedding
And here we get to one of the main events of 2013, the marriage of two of “The Usual Suspects,” the circle of people who have become Anne’s and my primary friends over the past decade. Getting married at Tuscany, a fancy Italian restaurant tucked into a secluded corner of the valley, was unconventional yet very classy and beautiful… just like the bride and groom. Anne and I were honored to be such a large part of the proceedings.

8/29/2013: Chris Isaak concert
Chris Isaak performs somewhere in the Salt Lake area nearly every year, and Anne and I have been trying to catch his show for years, but somehow something always gets in the way, or the shows sell out too quickly, or something. Finally, though, we and our friends Geoff and Anastasia managed to see him… and it was worth the wait. A great show. He actually reminded me quite a bit of my Main Man, Rick Springfield, in the way he interacted with the audience, made self-deprecating jokes, and generally appeared to enjoy playing as much as we enjoyed watching. I’d definitely see him again… assuming I can get tickets!

9/5/2013 – 9/7/2013: Salt Lake Comic Con
Anne and I have heard tales of the legendary San Diego Comic Con for years, but we didn’t have a lot of confidence that Salt Lake’s first one would amount to much. We went to it out of curiosity as much as anything, figuring we’d better enjoy it because it would likely be the last. Boy, did we misread that one! Turns out, there are lots of nerds along the Wasatch Front. SLCC was the biggest-ever first-time Comic Con, the fourth largest one nationwide (they hold them in many cities besides San Diego, if you don’t know), and the largest convention of any kind to ever hit Salt Lake City. It was successful enough that the organizer, Dan Farr, is trying to hit the jackpot twice this year, with the just completed SLCC FanXperience (FanX, for short) and the second regular Comic Con coming up in September. I remain dubious about whether this market can support two of these things a year — Anne and I decided to attend FanX, but likely won’t go to Comic Con in the fall, because of the expense — but we’ll see…

9/21/2013: Steph and Mike’s wedding reception
Two more old friends tie the knot… 2013 seemed to have a definite theme…

10/4/2013: Rick Springfield concert
The annual overnighter to the Nevada/Utah border to see my Main Man with our friends Jack and Natalie…

12/5/2013 – 12/9/2013 Thunderhill
Now here was something different: a road trip with my friend Mike Gillilan to photograph (him) and write about (me) an endurance race called 25 Hours of Thunderhill. We drove from Salt Lake to Willows, California, in a crappy little rental car, shared a hotel room, ate too many In n Out burgers, slept way too little, and generally had ourselves the sort of adventure middle-aged farts like us rarely do.  My coverage of the race for The Daily Derbi blog can be found here, here, and here, and a gallery of Mike’s photos from the race is here. My own snapshots from the event can be viewed on Flickr.

12/28/2013: Dudes Reunion dinner
Continuing a tradition of nearly a decade, I got together over my holiday break from work with some of “The Dudes,” the guys I used to work with at that multiplex I mentioned earlier. It was only four of us this year, but it’s always good to see the old gang… even if there are a lot of topics we really should avoid these days!

And finally, there was… this:

Yes, that’s exactly what it appears to be, a pic of me dressed like Sonny Crockett, officiating at the wedding of my good friends, the aforementioned Geoff and Anastasia (this happened on 9/14/2013, just for the record). Like several of the other items above, this is something that really deserves its own complete entry, because performing a wedding is frankly one of the last things I ever expected to do in my life, and how I came to do it is something of a tale… but at least I’ve got this much of it down for the record now…

And that is that. If anyone is still reading, I apologize for the length of this, but honestly this has been one of those entries that’s more for my own benefit than anybody else’s anyhow…

I’m not one to give much thought to dreams, assuming I even remember them, which, most of the time, I don’t. And I certainly have no wish to bore anyone by rambling on about the warped movies that run behind my closed eyelids at night. God, is there anything more tedious than somebody telling you about a dream they had?

But…

I had a dream a week or so ago that just won’t leave me alone, so I’m going to become one of those tedious bores for a moment. Sorry.

In this dream, I was in the kitchen of my Grandma June’s old house on the west side of Salt Lake. Grandma’s been gone for years, and she didn’t live in that house for years prior to her death, but my parents still own the place — they use it as a rental property — and I’ve helped my dad remodel and freshen it up several times, so it’s as familiar to me as my own house. In the dream, though, I knew — in that weird, ineffable way you simply know stuff in dreams — that this was not my parents’ rental, but rather Grandma’s house. She was there in it somewhere, and if I’d walked around, I likely would’ve found her. Perhaps in that front bedroom that used to be her office, seated at the fabulous antique roll-top desk I always loved as a kid, punching keys on her old-fashioned adding machine. (I never did figure out how that thing actually worked.)

I did not go looking for her, though. I was occupied with my guest: President Barack Obama. He was leaning against the bar that separated the kitchen from the tiny dining area, his shirt sleeves rolled up to the elbow. We were both drinking beer — plain old Budweiser from long-necked bottles, nothing fancy — and laughing about something, just shooting the shit like old friends.

Now, here’s where things get weird. (Really? Drinking cheap beer with the president in your dead grandmother’s kitchen — which hasn’t been her kitchen since you were a teenager, and yet somehow you’re a grown man in this scenario — isn’t weird yet?)

It was raining outside, and by raining, I mean raining. Cats-and-dogs, how’s-Noah-coming-on-that-ark rain, the sort we very rarely get out here in the desert, and when we do, it lasts only minutes. But this was sustained, rather like a storm I got caught in a few years ago in Washington, D.C. (Briefly, my buddy Robert and I were on foot, exploring the FDR Memorial, which is pretty spread out and also a good walk away from the parking lot; we were soaked to the skin by the time we got back to our car, and I ended up throwing away the waterlogged shoes I was wearing that evening.) Enough water was coming down that the four-lane road in front of the house had become a shallow river, and leisurely swimming up and down in that river — leisurely in spite of the fast-moving currents, mind you — were a number of day-glo green alligators.

And… that’s about it. There’s no punchline here. Nothing actually happened in this dream that I can recall. I have the impression that Barack and I were amused by the alligators, which we could see through the little window over the sink, but I don’t think we said anything about them.

I have no idea what any of this could mean, if it means anything at all. Which it probably doesn’t. But I have no idea where this little tableau came from… what inspired it, I mean. And I have no idea why the image keeps haunting me.

Maybe I need therapy.

I spent much of this fine, breezy springtime day helping my dad take down a tree that was overhanging the Bennion Compound’s property line. He’s become increasingly concerned over the past couple years about a branch coming down on the patio furniture at the rec center next door, and the potential damages he doesn’t want to be liable for.

At one point, as he was trying to gingerly back his way up a near-vertical limb that he once would have just fearlessly Tarzaned, he stopped, wiped his brow, and said to me, “I guess it’s pretty silly for a 70-year-old man to be scrambling around a tree like this.?”

“Yeah, it is,” I agreed.

Cramming his hat back on his snowy-white hair, he responded, “Good thing I’m not 70 yet, isn’t it?”

And that’s not even the funniest thing he said to me today. That came first thing this morning, when he asked me for my help. “This should only take an hour,” he said…

Bruce Schneier is an acclaimed security expert whose commentary has informed much of my own thinking on what we ought to be doing in response to terrorism, and why much of what we have done has been pointless, if not downright harmful (e.g., the entire ridiculous kabuki act we have to endure to get on an airplane these days). He’s written an essay for The Atlantic in response to the Marathon bombings that I think ought to be required reading for everyone in the country. Definitely click the link and peruse the whole thing — don’t worry, it’s not very long — but here are the highlights:

Terrorism, even the terrorism of radical Islamists and right-wing extremists and lone actors all put together, is not an “existential threat” against our nation. Even the events of 9/11, as horrific as they were, didn’t do existential damage to our nation. Our society is more robust than it might seem from watching the news. We need to start acting that way. 

 

There are things we can do to make us safer, mostly around investigation, intelligence, and emergency response, but we will never be 100-percent safe from terrorism; we need to accept that. 

 

How well this attack succeeds depends much less on what happened in Boston than by our reactions in the coming weeks and months. Terrorism isn’t primarily a crime against people or property. It’s a crime against our minds, using the deaths of innocents and destruction of property as accomplices. When we react from fear, when we change our laws and policies to make our country less open, the terrorists succeed, even if their attacks fail. But when we refuse to be terrorized, when we’re indomitable in the face of terror, the terrorists fail, even if their attacks succeed. 

 

Don’t glorify the terrorists and their actions by calling this part of a “war on terror.” Wars involve two legitimate sides. There’s only one legitimate side here; those on the other are criminals. They should be found, arrested, and punished. But we need to be vigilant not to weaken the very freedoms and liberties that make this country great, meanwhile, just because we’re scared. 

In other words, as tiresome and cliche’d as the expression has become in the past few years, keep calm and carry on. It’s what I wish we’d collectively done 12 years ago instead of what we did do (the PATRIOT Act, the Iraq War, Gitmo, torture). It’s what we seem to be doing now. I hope I’m right…

My first thoughts were of my old friend Andy and his wife Krickett. I met both of them during my Cinemark days, when I was working at that multiplex movie theater I reminisce about all the time. Andy was an usher, a skinny kid with hair so meticulously combed and gelled that we used to tease him about being an android (or, as the android character Bishop in Aliens dubs himself, an “artificial person”), because no natural human could possibly have had such perfect hair. Krickett was a candy girl. I imagine they probably call them “concessionists” or some other politely neutral term these days, and I’ve noticed there’s no longer a gender-based distinction in theater jobs as there was in my day, when boys were ushers and girls were behind the counter. But just keep in mind that my day was the Pleistocene, and all the way back then, in the dim mists of pre-history, we had candy girls. Anyway, Krickett was cute and vivacious and kinda-sorta resembled Julia Roberts, back when the whole world had a crush on Julia Roberts. She and Andy were almost immediately besotted with each other. Hopelessly besotted. They were also very young, just 16 I think, and being a wise old jaded cynic at the age of twentysomething, I honestly didn’t think they were going to last.

I lost track of Andy and Krickett for a long time after I finally left the projection booth for good, but of course I eventually came across the two of them on Facebook, as you inevitably do in the 21st century, and I was pleased to learn I’d been wrong about them. It turned out their teenage romance had had a happy ending after all. They got married, had some kids, and are still together and still happy after two decades. As it happens, Andy has become a long-distance runner in that time and — I’m sure you can see where this is going — he was in the Boston Marathon yesterday, fulfilling one of his “bucket list” goals. On his wife’s birthday, no less. So when news of the explosions came flashing across the InterWebs, my immediate reaction was to hope the two of them were safe.

They were, thankfully. Andy checked in with me later in the afternoon and reported that he had already completed the race and they were both back at their hotel when the bombs went off. I felt a surprising amount of relief, considering I haven’t actually seen either of them in the flesh since Jurassic Park was in theaters the first time.

I’m also relieved to see that, so far anyway, the country doesn’t seem to be going bananas over this. The Marathon bombings were an obvious act of terrorism, and in the minds of many people, that means Muslims. I read this morning that every major Muslim group in America has already issued press releases condemning the attack, essentially trying to pre-empt the hysteria that inevitably gets directed their way following a terrorist attack. It depresses me that these groups feel it necessary to do this, but I understand why they do. Personally, I think it’s just as likely what happened in Boston yesterday was perpetrated by some self-proclaimed “patriot,” a white, Christian, anti-government, Timothy McVeigh-type protesting against income taxes or something. (It strikes me as significant that yesterday was April 15, tax deadline day.) Or it could have been a nondescript nutbag with no particular cause at all, other than to hurt some people and create mayhem. We just don’t know yet. But regardless of who the eventual suspect(s) turn(s) out to be, it gladdens me that I’m not encountering a lot of paranoid, xenophobic, reactionary chatter online. In fact, other than pro bloggers and news sites, I’m not seeing a lot of chatter about the bombings at all. People are tweeting and blogging and Facebooking about the same old stuff… movies and hobbies and jobs and family, what they had for lunch and what funny things are happening to them. Normal life. Could it be that finally, twelve years after everything changed on 9/11, we’re finally beginning to heed the wisdom of that old slogan, “Keep calm and carry on?” Maybe so. (Of course, there could be lots of chatter happening that I’m not seeing due to what I personally choose to follow online. I prefer to think otherwise, though.)

I don’t have much else to say about this whole terrible event. What is there to say, really? Any remaining sentiments of mine were already better expressed by the comedian Patton Oswalt anyhow. The comments he posted on Facebook yesterday have already been disseminated far and wide, but they’re so eloquent, so on-target, that I’m going to repeat them here as well, just in case somebody reading this hasn’t seen them yet:

Boston. Fucking horrible.

 

I remember, when 9/11 went down, my reaction was, “Well, I’ve had it with humanity.”

 

But I was wrong. I don’t know what’s going to be revealed to be behind all of this mayhem. One human insect or a poisonous mass of broken sociopaths.

 

But here’s what I DO know. If it’s one person or a HUNDRED people, that number is not even a fraction of a fraction of a fraction of a percent of the population on this planet. You watch the videos of the carnage and there are people running TOWARDS the destruction to help out. (Thanks FAKE Gallery founder and owner Paul Kozlowski for pointing this out to me). This is a giant planet and we’re lucky to live on it but there are prices and penalties incurred for the daily miracle of existence. One of them is, every once in awhile, the wiring of a tiny sliver of the species gets snarled and they’re pointed towards darkness.

 

But the vast majority stands against that darkness and, like white blood cells attacking a virus, they dilute and weaken and eventually wash away the evil doers and, more importantly, the damage they wreak. This is beyond religion or creed or nation. We would not be here if humanity were inherently evil. We’d have eaten ourselves alive long ago.

 

So when you spot violence, or bigotry, or intolerance or fear or just garden-variety misogyny, hatred or ignorance, just look it in the eye and think, “The good outnumber you, and we always will.”

Amen, brother.

As part of the New and Improved Lifestyle I’ve tried to establish over the past year, I’ve been taking afternoon walks every day, workflow permitting. Most days I seem to end up wandering through the Avenues, one of Salt Lake’s oldest residential neighborhoods, which is little more than stone’s-throw from my office. It’s a lovely place for a stroll, with lots of big trees and an eclectic mix of housing styles: turreted Victorians, cozy bungalows, mid-century ramblers, even a few art-deco apartment buildings.

I was up there earlier today, in fact, walking through a steady rain with one hand jammed deep into my pocket and the other growing cold on my umbrella handle. I could smell the faint but distinctive odor given off by my leather jacket when it gets wet, and water was seeping through cracks in the soles of my worn-out sneakers. A pretty young thing on a bicycle smiled at me as she rolled past, a tiny diamond stud winking from the side of her nose while raindrops glittered in the thick, flat braid of chestnut hair that ran down the center of her back.

My iPod chose that moment to summon an Allman Brothers tune, one that sounds cheerful on the surface but always evokes an unaccountable bittersweet feeling in me, and it occurred to me that if I kept walking in this direction long enough, I’d end up on the campus of my alma mater, the University of Utah. And suddenly my head filled with half-remembered emotions and half-forgotten ambitions, the flavor of a time in my life 25 years past. I found myself thinking of other springtime rainstorms, of a girl who meant everything to me until the day she didn’t, of stories I’ve never written and places I haven’t gotten around to visiting.

Then I had the weirdest sensation that my younger self was nearby, not just metaphorically but in close physical proximity, as if he was walking along this same sidewalk, beneath these same trees, smelling and sensing all the things I was, but separated from me by some kind of membrane. Something permeable enough to detect a presence on the other side, but unbreakable. A time barrier, I suppose, if we want to get all Doctor Who-ish. I could feel his restlessness, his idealism, his curiosity about the world and his naive certainty that he’d someday get everything he wanted, just because he was him. I wondered if somehow he could feel me too, and what, specifically, of me he felt. My disappointments and regrets? My banal middle-aged anxieties about health and money and getting old too soon? Would he even recognize me as the person he was to become, or would I just seem like a stranger to him?

To be honest, sometimes, when I’m walking in the rain, I seem like a stranger to myself…

I shared my train ride into work this morning with a platoon of third-graders on a field trip from their suburban elementary school to the Clark Planetarium downtown. Normally, any scenario in which I’m shut up inside a metal box with 60 excitedly chattering eight-year-olds would leave me huddled in a corner, rocking back and forth, and muttering nonstop profanities aimed at a universe that could be so cruel and indifferent. Today’s experience, however, wasn’t that bad. Today my irritation was offset by amusement at one particular little boy and girl sitting across the aisle from me.

The boy was bending the ear of an adult woman — a teacher maybe, or perhaps a PTA mom, but definitely someone with the group who shared some level of intimacy with the boy — holding forth in a very intense manner about all the things he does not eat. First on the list were peanuts, which his sister is allergic to. If she were to eat one, her throat would close up and she would most likely die within seconds (this is a pretty close approximation of the boy’s actual words, incidentally; in addition to being terribly solemn and intense for his age, he was also surprisingly eloquent). Because of this danger, there are no peanuts in his home, and that is fine by him, because he does not like them. (He virtually spat out the words describing his distaste for the humble but potentially sororicidal goober.) He then went on to enumerate numerous other foods which do not pass his personal muster, spelling out in great detail exactly what he dislikes about each, then pausing after each mini-rant to let the steam rebuild before launching himself anew.

As I eavesdropped on this overwhelmingly one-sided conversation, I had a sudden, very clear impression of this boy as a crotchety old man, leaning on his cane, maybe slapping a Formica table-top (or whatever synthetic surface they’re using on tables 70 years from now) for emphasis, haranguing some poor waitress or nursing-home aide with exactly the same opinions he was spewing today. I am certain I saw exactly what this boy will someday be like, and it was exactly what he is right now.

That vision made me smirk a bit. But what really pulled a smile out of me was the little girl sitting beside him. While the grown-up woman was nodding and saying encouraging but vaguely disconnected things like “uh-huh” — as you do when a child is babbling at you and you’re really not paying attention — the boy’s classmate was making a supreme effort to ignore him, staring out the window with the intensity of a hawk on a telephone pole watching for a kangaroo rat. However, she couldn’t block him out entirely, and would occasionally glance at him as if to try and determine if he was finished yet. Then he’d start complaining again and she’d turn back to the scenery. On one of these occasions, I saw her make an impatient little hand gesture and roll her eyes, and I could practically hear her thinking to herself, “oh, please.” And I saw then exactly what she was going to be like as an old woman.

People never really change that much, in my opinion. It seems to me that our basic temperament and personality is locked in pretty early, and even though we do change and grow over time, there is a core part of us that is what it is. Sometimes, when you look at a child, you can see it. You know what the eight-year-old will be like when they’re eighty. And sometimes, when you look at an eighty-year-old, you see the eight-year-old they must’ve once been.

Those two kids are probably going to end up married, you know.