Style Preferences

Single-mindedly working on getting this book done. Just sent the following note to Peter and Wendy who are going over the parts as they get them.

Movie names should be italicized. I haven't been doing that. So please put an xx after them. You don't have to write "italicize." I'll know what to do. I think you know that I don't like quote marks around names so even if it's a short story or article or anything that's supposed to have quote marks I'd rather use italics or nothing. I also don't like quotes around words used as unfamiliar terms, nicknames, or words used as words if the meaning is clear without them. Quote marks around quotes are fine of course. So anything I've neglected which is most of it, please just xx.

I think I got my aversion to quotes from reading people's year end letters that were full of them with such sentences as <We all had a "wonderful time" this summer.> Really. It drove me batty.

One word that's been lost but which I like and miss is fewer. I don't like to see less used for number but it's locked in now. (See - it doesn't need quote marks because it's obvious.) I like may as in "may I borrow this" though "can" doesn't bother me. (I thought can needed some help there.) Can has been accepted for may since I was a kid so people can't answer to "Can I go with you?" anymore with "I don't know, can you?"

As James Kirkpatrick pointed out forty years ago, "We've lost the word 'gay.'" (He would have used the quotes around gay there.)

The worst to me that is close to becoming accepted is "I" as the object as in, "He gave the book to JIm and I." It's everywhere. 

I don't know what to do about who and whom. I can see whom is going out of style and sometimes it seems stodgy. But I can't say "for who the bells toll." 

My father had a problem with who and whom going out of style too - but in a different way. He was into diction and his generation pronounced the H in who and whom and other words that began with wh. It had H air in it like an F sound has F air. He used to grill me on it. I was hopeless though.

An ideal Situation

This message was sent to me by an anonymous person who asked me to post it. 

I am a woman trapped in a man's body. That's one strike against me in today's world so I keep it a secret. It's not so difficult to do so because I am attracted to women. I am a lesbian - that's the second strike against me - a lesbian trapped in a man's body. I did not think it fair to have a female mate and not tell her so I was celibate, celibate until I met an unusual woman, one I could confide in. It turned out that she was a gay man trapped in a  woman's body. I shared my situation. We are a perfect match, each other's soul mates. Please publish this so that others with my condition can know that there is hope. Thank you. 

Where are we?

 Maybe we're all in a cosmic lost and found.

FAIR

 As I was waking up this morning, I heard how long ago women were referred to as the fair sex. I see that started around 1600 and meant fair as in pretty. So if women are the fair sex, then what are men. Ah yes - the unfair sex. That sure applies.

Heart to Heart Post

I'm only able to keep up with the minimum right now as I'm lethargic and sleeping a lot. Since I knew I wouldn't get much done, I went to a doc today for a yearly heart check. I'd gone to a nearby tiny clinic a couple of weeks ago because a pharmacy read my blood pressure at 150/100. The doc at the clinic said you can't rely on those digital tests and did a manual and got 130/85 which is good but said I had bronchitis. He also said I had an irregular heart beat and to check it out with an EKG. Today the cardiologist at the nearby public hospital, the newest and most modern in Bali, said it was 150/100 and to take some mild blood pressure med. But he said the EKG was good. My heart's fine, beats a little slow and the irregularity isn't bad and I've had it a long time (he could see my whole medical history). So I went back to the clinic and the young Saturday doc there said my blood pressure was 110 over 70 (unusally low) after he did a manual and said they only do manual and my irregular heartbeat is normal, not bad, because it adds a beat which makes up for it being a little slow. He also said that lethargy following bronchitis is normal especially for my age because there was a battle going on in my lungs and bombs were dropped and so forth and now it's being rebuilt. He drew me a picture of normal and good irregular and bad irregular and explained that the top number in blood pressure is systolic, the blood to the body, and the bottom one I forgot the name - like pistolic - is the blood to the lungs. Never knew that. Anyway, walked four kilometers going from place to place which made me feel better than lying down. Still only on cardio aspirin. Oh - total cost of the today's doctor's visits and EKG was about thirty-four bucks. - DC

Conceptual Art on the Prairie

 My sister Susan wrote and asked if I remembered the Cadillac Ranch.

Yes I do. I've been there several times. The Ant Farm did that Cadillac project just off some road of Stanley Marsh's ranch in Amarillo. All the cars were vandalized but that didn't really detract from the overall impression from the road. I took a piss off to the side and got a heck of a shock when it hit an electric fence. The 2nd time I was there it had been moved behind the fence.  I went on a tour inside the ranch. That was only one conceptual art piece. There was a peace symbol large enough to be seen from airplanes, a huge banana, a huge pool table with bean bags for ball and cue, a mesa with a fence running along it painted the usual color of the sky so that the top of the mesa seemed from a distance to be floating. The tour was conducted by a cowhand named Stanley who said he got the job because of his name. He said after what he'd seen in the cattle biz he wouldn't eat meat. He said Stanley Marsh got a trademark on the name Cattleyak and his cowhands had try to force breed cattle with yaks. They tried other mixes, one with the largest type bovine with the smallest type. Stanley Marsh was a madman. There was a feature on him in that Texas magazine that was so good called the Mad Hatter of Amarillo (or something). That's because he attended Cullen Davis' trial for murders in Amarillo with a different hat every day. He also got in trouble when he was old for past pederasty. Stanley cowhand said that during Davis trial he and other cowhands had to move the pool table to the top of a building that was within view of Cullen Davis' jail cell, that they had to change the positions every day, and that Marsh told the news people that he was secretly communicating with Davis that way. Stanley cowhand said it was a most interesting job.

Here's more on him: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stanley_Marsh_3#

Stair Slope Calculator

 This stair slope calculator rates our stairs as just within acceptable on the steep side - 47.36 degrees. Acceptable is between 20 and 50.  

Ant Antics

The tiny tiny ant. They come in so many sizes. I saw ants in Malaysia that were like half an inch long - while walking in zori in approaching darkness. We've got a few sizes here in our home, all pretty small, almost always black which never seem to bite. I do feel little stings sometimes walking barefoot and I think maybe that's an ant I'd stepped on that I didn't see. There was just one on the book I was reading that is as tiny as I've ever seen. It was like a 64th of an inch maybe. I blow ants off my computer screen and books. Don't worry about them. So I blew on this one. Wow. It's still there. So I blew harder. Still there. No matter how hard I blew, it just kept walking. So I banged the book on the table. Still there. I banged hard. I realized I had to brush it off but it was so small I was afraid to hurt it. I'm not afraid to hurt them by brushing them off onto the floor as I wouldn't off a high cliff. It went into the binding and I couldn't find it. It seemed to me to be greatly more tenacious than its larger cousins. At first I said to it, "You must be the strongest thing on earth," surely an exaggeration, but one it had earned.  But then I thought it might hang in there not with its strength as much as its design or composition. The little cacak lizards that populate and bless our home I guess have suction feet because they walk on the ceiling as easy as the floor, and much more safely. Maybe the antlet has suction feet or barbed feet that hooked into the paper. Maybe they're aerodynamically built so that wind whips around them with minimal interference. I'm sure there are ant experts who could clarify all this but I don't think it's likely I'll get that far. For now I'll just marvel.  

Happy Wedding Anniversary

 to Katrinka!

7 years of marital bliss

18 Years together

Looking forward to more of this.

Love,

David

Where have we been?

Haven't been posting much here on the nonZense blog. There's still plenty of nonZense but I am so concentrated on other stuff - the podcasts, making an audiobook for Thank You and OK, wasting time on getting songs of mine recorded here and online. I'll try to do better. Let's see now, I could mention I spent some time with US news yesterday. I generally avoid news except science and environment news. But all this stuff about a coup is sort of compelling. Sure takes them a long time to deal with it and I bet they can't even do anything about it except make an ironclad case. But then there's the alternate reality folks and I get "the other side" from one of my few close American friends here. He quotes Info Wars, Russian bot sourced info, and that from the prior president's acolytes. So I get informed enough and go back to science news. 

To All mothers

 Happy Mother's Day!

Thanks for bringing us here.

Love,

David

Mourning Cat

 Katrinka had a a large hairy dog for years named Lady Jane. Katrinka's once feral cat, Frida, and Lady Jane had an interesting relationship. Frida was constantly catching rodents, mice, rats, almost anything, cleaning and eating them. Frequently Lady Jane would come and eat the parts Frida had removed or left behind. There were a couple of glands she'd pull out and often left heads and other body parts. Sometimes Lady Jane would come up to dining Frida and let out a deep woof! Frida would run off and Lady Jane would finish the feast. More and more it seemed to me that Frida would bring her catch near Lady Jane to eat as if tempting her to intervene. Another social dining habit she had was to eat in front of Katrinka and me. Lady Jane got old and died. Frida sat by Lady Jane's body and watched as son Clay buried her in the front yard. Frida stayed by Lady Jane's grave for a few days.

A day of the Heart

 Good news. Katrinka said she'd be my valentine. Mission accomplished.

Significant Date

Just noticed saving a page in my computer that the date is 2/2/2022. It could be written 2/2/22. In this case the US method of writing month/date/year is same as almost everyone else writing day/month/year. Usually they're different. I find the best is year/month/day because that order is best for sorting if one is sorting by the date. In that case it would be 22/02/02. But the great day was this date two years ago when it was a palindrome written either way. 02/02/2020 or 2020/02/02. According to this article in the Hindustani Time, it had been close to 900 years since a palindrome date like that and that the next one would be 12/12/2121 or 2121/12/12.  

Training a Dog

 I was in high school. I hadn't had a dog since I was a kid in our old home. There was a fairly small stray dog I took pity on and started feeding it. It hung around. I asked mother if we could keep it. She said yes but it can't be in the house. I said why not? She said because she didn't want dog hair on the carpets. We spent a good deal of our time in the family room or den and the kitchen and the adjoining breakfast area and the floors there were some sort of attractive composition and linoleum. It was a good size area. I told mother the dog will stay in that area. Since it was open to the dining room, living room, and hallway to the bedrooms, and all that area was carpeted, she doubted what I said was possible. Doubted it with finality. I said it won't go on the carpet. She was adamant that there was no way to keep the dog off the carpets. I said, it will go on the carpet a few steps for a few times but then it won't. After that if it goes on the carpet it can't come in the house. Okay? So she said okay. I let the dog in. It went around the room smelling. I stood in the living room on the carpet. It started to come in. I said No! forcefully and it understood and backed away. It kept trying and I reprimanded it each time. I did it from the carpet side of each of the three interior doorways out of that area. After not too long it understood. Then I called it and when it stepped on the carpet I fiercely scolded it. After a while it learned not to come onto the carpet even if I begged it to. Took about half an hour. 

I don't remember what I called it. I think it was female. We really weren't close. She had mental problems and didn't relate well with people. Just needed a home. Bit me once for no reason I could see. It tried to bite the postman when he was friendly. She was outside a lot. Dogs didn't have to be restrained back then. 

She did come on the carpet a couple of times and was allowed to - during thunderstorms. Went and hid under my bed.

After half a year or so one day I came home and mother told me she had been run over by a large truck. The driver came and told her. He said she ran in front of his truck. He stopped and looked and didn't see her but apparently she was scared and didn't move - right in front of one of his large tires. The city had already cleaned up her remains. I wondered if she committed suicide but that didn't seem very dog like. I found an eyeball in the curb. 

Dreams

I was in a dream of son Clay's with a little poodle in my lap and he wondered in the dream why our dog Bandi wasn't there. I asked him if he was aware that we've been keeping a toy poodle for five months and he said,  Really? It's no stretch at all for me to see that as being ESP but in this case I'd say it's more likely he saw the doggie's photo on Instagram and his subconscious stored it. He sees my Instagram posts which are few and both he and I follow very few others - mainly family. Senior son Kelly's mate Daniela is a psychological counselor. She has a client from Portland who was sent to her by a dream that gave her the first name, city, and an image with of her with long black hair. They do have a mutual contact, a shaman who also lives in Spokane through which her client found her. I'd say in that case, as with Clay's dream, likely the subconscious was reminding the conscious of something forgotten. But either way - doesn't matter. To me everything is mysterious and amazing. Some things are just more unusual and harder to explain.

Happy New Year!

Christmas Island/Kiribati celebrated the new year first on earth at 6pm Bali time, 2am US West Coast time on the 31st. and at 8pm on the first here in Bali and 4am in the US West, much of the US Minor Outlying Islands, Baker Island, Howland Island will be the last. So it's becoming New Years somewhere on earth for 26 hours. So on earth, a day is 26 hours long. - hmm

Concern Repelled

Today a close friend here who won't have a credit card because he's a monk, asked timidly if Katrinka might bring him back some special vitamins and nutrition suppliments, not much, and said he worried about bothering us for days before asking me. Said he didn't want to impose I told him this was no imposition and anyway if I wanted something from him, I wouldn't think about whether it was imposing or not but whether I he'd do it if I asked and what was the most effective way to ask to get him to do it. But then maybe that's how he was thinking and I'm just being cleverly manipulated. But then again, I'd say yes no matter how he asked. He persevered with concern and how he didn't want to cause any trouble or bother us and I said that his concern was getting to be an imposition and was bothering me. Now he's unconcerned.

 

Remembering

 Fifty years ago today, Shunryu Suzuki died. I'm most grateful for his teachings - both Zen and nonZense. - dc

Katrinka will Vanish

 Just getting ready to go to sleep. Tomorrow Katrinka flies to the US for six weeks - unless she gets stuck there for four months like last year. So I'll be sleeping alone for six weeks - except for dogette Bandita and guest dogita Bumbu. She's a cute little toy poodle. Her real name in Bumble but that's hard for a lot of Indonesians to say and bumbu is easy. It means spice. They like the name Bumbu. She's with us for five months. Jason arrive January 6 to tak her to his place but he'll probably have to quarantine. Quarantine just went back to a week - in a hotel room you can't leave. I bet he'll bring her back here for visit days. She'll miss Bandi and all the action and people. And she'll miss Katrinka most of all. Like me. - dc