Year: 2002

We talked things through and over. We walked through our planned evening, spending our already paid for tickets. We traded friendly greetings with acquaintances, common and uncommon. We walked back, saying the wrong things – because there were no right things to say. When we hugged before you left, my hand found a familiar place on your back that I’d forgotten was there.

Jason stops the boat, takes down the jib(?), and goes for a swim. I change into Ingrid’s shorts and jump in feet first. There’s a bit of a shock when I hit the water and a shot of Lake Washington up my nose. What am I doing? I remember to swim and paddle up to the surface. The others are laughing. What? What did I do? Did I look funny when I jumped? A wave hits me and I take in another mouthful of Lake Washington. The boat is slowly creeping away from me. I can’t quite manage a reasonable breaststroke (I chalk that up to the choppy water.), so I just dog paddle after it. The waves aren’t helping, it seems like I’m not moving at all. Jason tosses a little buoy out in case one of us gets too far away. (The buoy immediately detaches itself from its line and floats away.) Finally I manage to reach the boat, I clutch the pontoon and just hang there for awhile, sometimes relaxing and letting my body float to the surface, sometimes wrestling with the waves or with the boat.

Scott believed in lucky pennies. When I visited him in Oakland a few years ago, we went out walking. He stopped occasionally, picked a penny up from the ground, turned it over in his hand, and set it back down. I asked him what he was doing. He explained that the pennies we’d seen had all been tails up and were therefore unwanted – because lucky pennies are always found heads up. But by turning the penny over, he was making it lucky for the next person who came along. He explained that his roommate had laid out the idea after Scott had caught him doing it. I chewed on this for awhile, I’d never realized that lucky pennies had to be heads up, I’d assumed any unexpected penny was a lucky one. I didn’t recall ever having claimed a penny as anything other than one cent, so I figured I was going to be okay. I asked Scott, “What if you came upon a penny that you’d turned over the day before – would it be lucky for you?” This seemed to unsettle him, “I think if enough time passed . . . – I don’t know.” I don’t know if he just shrugged that off or not. I hope he wasn’t disillusioned. I hope he still has faith in pennies.

The utility maintenance worker spends his day repairing equipment with several different companies’ names cast, embossed, printed, or hand-written on them. The company he works for isn’t the one that was created in a court-ordered break-up twenty years ago, though they bear the same name. His company is the end result of a web of mergers, acquisitions, sheded subsidiaries, new markets, bankruptcies, and other transactions. The company name came from one transaction, the manhole covers from another, and the board of directors from yet another.

Somewhere in a closet someone has a dusty old telephone with the words “Property of [The Company]” embossed onto the plastic shell. If the phone were ever returned (even though it has The Company’s name on it), the equipment would have to be dated and they’d have to backtrack through the various mergers to find out if the phone really belonged to them.

In a park on Bainbridge Island my niece, Masha, freed herself from her stroller and trailed along behind her mother and me.

Natasha and I crossed a little bridge and looked back at her. She was tearing a leaf apart and pushing the leaf flesh through the little gaps in the bridge floor. When she was finished, she stood up with the leaf stem held out in front of her, and said something in Russian.

Natasha laughed and translated for me, “She says, ‘Now it’s a stick!'”

On the ferry ride back to Seattle, after calling out in English some of the letters from the brand name printed on the stroller, Masha made a declaration in Russian.

Natasha translated again, “She’s been saying that she’s a cat lately.”

I asked her, “What’s ‘cat’ in Russian?”

“Koshka.”

So I started babbling back to Masha, “Masha Koshka. Are you a Koshka, Masha?”

She answered; and Natasha translated, snickering, “‘Yes. A cat, with stripes.'”

I posted the 101st horizon shot today.

We first saw the slice of American cheese on the roof of Ingrid’s car when we got back from the beach. It was already melted around the edges – or better to say, the corners had settled in and fused a bit with the car’s paint.

“How do you think it got there?”

“I don’t know – maybe it fell.”

We both turned our heads and looked up.

“But from where?”

“Maybe from an airplane?”

“Maybe someone was trying to make a sandwich and they mistook the car for a slice of bread.”

We left the cheese where it was and drove away. I looked when we got back to Ingrid’s place and it was still there.

The only sign of it the next morning though, was an oily 3×3 square and a few crumbs baked into the paint.

“Whoever put it there must have come and gotten it.”

A somewhat controversial idea to consider: The world would be exactly the same as it is now if there had never been a Scooby-Doo show, except people wouldn’t think to do the “Rut-Roh” voice. I would tentatively suggest that the hypothetical world with no Scooby-Doo would be a better one then the world we live in today – not remarkably better, just marginally better.

Amazon is following Google’s lead, scanning printed catalogs and integrating them throughout the website.

It’s a totally backwards idea of course, though it makes sense in the end.

The search-engine for scanned text is pretty neat – I’ll give them that. In a reasonable world though, someone who could put together a printed catalog, would be able to dump all the data from the catalog into an easily parsed flat-file that could then be handed over to any E-commerce company that wanted it.

Sick and wrong as it is, the concept makes sense. Amazon is finding a way to do business with vendors with whom they have a technology gap (or they’re finding an easy way to enter a market more quickly without having to bridge the technology gap first?)

Maybe Amazon will be able to learn something from the way customers browse the print catalogs that would be helpful in the designing their own pages.

My thesis is starting to wander, so I’ll just finish up by delivering the punchline that I’ve been meaning to squeeze in here:

These catalog companies are all a bunch of shills. They know nothing about quality or value, so instead they offer Val-U. [That wasn’t it. Here it comes.] Take, this catalog from Google’s collection, for example. [There it goes.] Blah blah blah. I didn’t blagedy blah blah four years blah blah blah!

The night’s cloud cover is lit up by the city’s light pollution. It’s a greyed-out something, washed out by the rain – a tone that your eye would only be able to catch if there were another color held up against it. I’m leaning towards orangish, but I’m not really confident about that. Maybe it’s that beige color-of-the-universe.