Category: Before

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.

Ingrid, lighting a cigarette, tells me, “I’m going to quit.”

“You are?”

“Yes.”

“When did you decide?”

“I’ve been thinking about it for awhile.”

“I didn’t know that. . .”

“Yeah. It’ll be in a month at the latest.”

“So soon? What are you going to do?”

“Well, I need to prepare myself, mentally and physically, first.”

“Okay. But what are you going to do after you quit?”

” . . . I don’t know.”

“When’s your next vesting date?”

” . . . For my stock options? I don’t know. I don’t really pay attention to that.”

“You might want to figure that out, and make sure you time it right.”

“Okay, I guess so. . . Are we talking about the same thing?”

Letter found near a park:

7/4/94

Dear Forrest,

You’re probably still in Georgia but here’s your letter just like I promised. Finally. So how was your vacation? Did you bring me back anything? Just kidding! So how’s everything in Kent? How was your Fourth of July? Mine wasn’t shit. I worked 2-11. It was just like any other day. I still remember that one Fourth of July that we spent together. We were at my cousins house and my dad was so drunk that when I asked him for money for fireworks, he emptied his wallet and pockets and gave me like 40 dollars. Those were the good ‘ol days.

I went to court on the 1st. Nothing really happened. The district attourney made a deal of 1 felony count and 6 months in county jail but I didn’t take it so now I have to go on trial. Cool huh? Yah – I can’t wait!

Not much else is going on. Work sucks and I gotta figure out what classes I want to take this semester. I’m actually half way to graduating. That makes me happy. Well, I’m gonna go because it’s 2 AM and I’m hella tired. So I’m gonna go throw this in the mailbox. Write back soon.

Love,
Sharon

Since I can’t leave to come visit you, you should come down here to visit me . . . . Soon!

Call me.

They’ve decided they don’t like the silly politics that others play at, they prefer straight talk. So it comes as a surprise when they realize they’re in the midst of one of the silly games they’ve rejected. They interrupt the game for a frank discussion, deciphering the situation in complicated inwardly spiraling conversation. Soon they find that their neuroses have been aired and their motivations are now understood. They laugh ironically at their folly, their belief that they might be immune to those reindeer games. One settles in, waiting for the other to finish the game. The other settles in too, erroneously believing that identifying the resolution of the game was the same as delivering it. (Go back to start.)

Also, “weirdo” is a compliment and silly is a virtue.

Dale is in his 60s, a retiree. He hangs out in coffee shops and plays chess. Sometimes when he doesn’t have an opponent, he talks to me. He’s always fishing for some piece of information, but his questions are too vague for me to figure out what his angle is.

Dale asks me what I think about the stock market. “Are we bound for a recovery?”

“I don’t really know. I don’t follow it, I don’t understand it as well as I should. My brain doesn’t think that way.”

He prods a little more, his face never revealing what he thinks of my answers. “What do you think of the economy in general? Are people you know finding jobs?”