the Magdalene

the beloved disciple's my tantric squeeze
but things do not only end there

she'd do anything she could just to please
massages with oils and her hair

she teaches a word than will never be heard
and they took her away from my side

they make her my mom--a virgin!--absurd
instead of my heart song, my bride

her lineage hid, despite what she did
like judas, my friend, she was scorned

our bodily bliss they excised and forbid
despite how our love joy adorned

but Mary's full glow still pulses, you know
the truth of our union still shines

and the gifts from below we've yet to bestow
are just waiting for your open signs

No More Rice Krispies

It happened as Brentworth passed through the store's automatic doors. A random incongruity of this magnitude hadn't been seen for aeons. That's why I was there.

"Greetings, customer."

"Excuse me?" said Brentworth.

"Why, no excuses needed, valued customer."

The boy had a bad case of acne and wore a dirty-red uniform with a name tag that read: LOKI. Inside of Brentworth's bodymind, I recoiled. This was far worse than I'd thought.

"Where's your popcorn?" Brentworth asked.

"Ahh, Zea mays averta, first discovered by aboriginal Americans many moons ago."

I walked Brentworth away, shaking his head.

Passing through the beer section, Brentworth grabbed a bottle of pale ale. A Latino with long sideburns and a bushy mustache, wearing a Tecate T-shirt and dusty jeans, ran down the aisle singing:

"Aiyyy-yaii-yaii-yaii,
I am the Frito Bandito.
I love Fritos corn chips,
I love them I do"

The Bandito disappeared around the corner, warbling something I couldn't quite make out.

"Is that a bottle in your hand, or are you just glad to see me?"

Brentworth turned. She was blond, petite, and gorgeous, wearing skimpy shorts and a halter top. She was so stunning Brentworth almost immediately jumped her. I could barely hold him back. Reality was unraveling. I might have to call in a tactical strike team here, I realized.

"I like a clear man," she said. "Certainly attractiveness counts, but give me a man who's there 100%, present, and strong. I'll take Harrison Ford over Brad Pitt any time."

Before Brentworth could even gasp, she turned and left. Must be a full moon tonight, I made feel Brentworth think.

I had him grab a box of popcorn and head for the checkout.

He was so absorbed in keeping an eye out for the blond, he didn't notice the circus clown until he was right next to him. Holding a cereal box, the red-nosed clown danced down the aisle, singing operatically: "No more Rice Krispies. I've run out of Rice Krispies!!" I felt tingles of sadness coursing through Brentworth's body.

I led him to the checkout counter. The cashier was an Asian woman with a radiant smile. She wore the same dirty-red uniform as Loki. Her name tag read: KALI.

I had Brentworth put his purchases on the counter. Before I could stop him, he asked, "Is something strange going on?"

"You are referring to the incongruities? Fleeting but intense instances of strangeness in an otherwise numbed-out world? Discreet hiccups of oddness in a universe overbalanced with conformity? Yes, it is mightily strange."

Okaaaaay, I thought. Definitely tactical strike time here. Brentworth wanted to pop the beer open and chug it then and there, and I almost let him. "How much for these?" I had him say.

"Six dollars, sixty-six cents."

Brentworth handed over exact change and chose a plastic (not paper) bag. I walked him to the automatic doors.

The incongruity, of course, righted itself as soon as he left the store. Instantly, he was back to normal. I hovered over him, watching, waiting to call in the strike.

He started towards his parked car but then stopped. Jeez, what was it now?

He went back into the store, as did I.

I felt him wanting something his ex used to put on their popcorn. Brewer's yeast? Something like that.

Shit. this was going to be one long-ass night.

Tether

I tether you with my pleasure
i tether you at my leisure
i tether you as my treasure
I tether you beyond measure

I tether you as my pleasure
I tether you through the weather
I tether you with my lever
I tether your regions nether

I tether you for my pleasure
I tether you with a feather
I tether you using leather
I tether us both together

I tether you to my pleasure
I tether you or not whether
I tether your moaning never
I tether you free forever

I've Been Carrying A Torch For You So Long That I Burned A Great Big Hole In My Heart

Deep Purple. Here are two words that, depending on your age, can define an entire generation. Who knew?

What led me onto this particular revelation was Facebook, or maybe it was iTunes, or a combination of them both. See, a former squeeze several months back sent me an invite to Facebook. I signed up because I sign up to all social networking services. I find them fascinating and flawed and evolving, like primordial creatures trying to survive and pull themselves out of the muck and ooze.

Over the months I've played around with Facebook apps, looked at the API, and watched the company become more and more successful. Last month I added the iLike app to my profile and downloaded its plugin for iTunes. iLike adds a sidebar to iTunes that lets you add music to your profile, for others to see on Facebook.

I haven't paid much attention to iLike until today, as I trid it out by adding some songs to my profile. In this process is where I ran across a group of songs I have in iTunes that I have no idea where they came from. I don't know if they originated one of the ancient MP3 players I've managed to accumulate over the years, or from a CD I stumbled across from who knows where, or what.

But I listened to a catchy song that seemed to be titled Deep Purple.

Now, all I knew of Deep Purple was that it was a band that did songs like Smoke on the Water and My Woman From Tokyo. As a young stoner growing up in Albuquerque, Smoke on the Water had been sort of a teen counter-culture battle cry.

At the time, I didn't know that the song was based on actual incidents involving Frank Zappa and the Mothers of Invention--then including Flo (aka "Phlorescent Leech") & Eddie after they'd left the Turtles--in Montreux, Switzerland where the concert hall in which The Mothers were performing burned down in 1971.

Getting back to the song I had relatively unidentified in iTunes, I was curious so I transcribed some of the lyrics and did a search on the net. It took me a couple of attempts, but I finally found it: a song called Deep Purple recorded by the Dorsey Brothers.

The Dorsey Brothers? The song I had in iTunes didn't sound like the Dorsey Brothers, unless there was a Dorsey Sister involved, reading the lyrics mid-song instead of singing them.

So I dug a little deeper. And of course I found a Wikipedia article: en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Deep_Purple_(song)

Deep Purple was written by pianist Peter De Rose in the 1930s. It became so popular in sheet music sales that lyrics were written in 1939 by Mitchell Parish (who was also the lyricist on the songs Star Dust, Volare, and Moonlight Serenade). Deep Purple became a gigantor hit, reaching number one on the charts. It was a favourite with Babe Ruth, etc, etc.

Nino Tempo and April Stevens (brother and sister) recorded the version I somehow have on my computer. It won the 1963 Grammy for best rock and roll record.

It is also notable for April Stevens' speaking the lyrics in a low voice during the second half of the song while her brother sings. Apparently she did this because her brother forgot the words. Somehow the version with her speaking the words was included in the release, and it became a huge hit, even though it was the B side to their intended hit song: I've Been Carrying A Torch For You So Long That I Burned A Great Big Hole In My Heart, which is still on record for being the longest title of a flip side of a Billboard number one record.

Donny and Marie Osmond revived Deep Purple as a hit in 1976.

Wikipedia Deep Purple Trivia:

The band Deep Purple got their name from the song after guitarist Ritchie Blackmore's grandmother repeatedly asked if they would be performing the song, her personal favourite.

The Tempo and Stevens version of the song was No. 1 on the Billboard Top 100 the week before John F. Kennedy was assassinated.

The 45 rpm recording of the song by Tempo and Stevens is notorious for sounding unclear, perhaps due to improper processing or duplicating during manufacture.

Hell, no wonder it took me a couple of tries to find the following lyrics:

Woooo, Wo-o-oo-wo-wo, Wo-o-oo-wo-wo, Wo-o-oo-wo-wo
When the deeeeep purple falls
over sleepy garden walls
and the stars begiiin to twinkle in the ni-iyiy-ight
in the mist of a memory
you wander all back to me
breathing my name with a sigh-eyigheyighee, ooh whoo.
In the still of the night
once again I hold you tight.
Tho' you're gone your lo-ooovve lives on when light beams
and as long as my heart will beat,
sweet lover, we'll always meet
here in my deep purple dreams.

(lines spoken then sung)

When the deep purple falls
Over sleepy garden walls
And the stars begin to twinkle
In the night
In the mist of a memory
You wander all back to me
breathing my name with a sigh
In the still of the night
once again I hold you tight.
Tho' you're gone your love lives on when moonlight beams

(back to just singing)
And as long as my heart will beat,
sweet lover, we'll always meet
here in my deep purple dreams.
And as long as my heart will beat,
sweet lover, we'll always meet
here in my deep purple dreams.
Wo-o-oo-wo-wo, Wo-o-oo-wo-wo, Wo-o-oo-wo-wo

Finally, you can listen to this compelling tune here: www.youtube.com/watch

Coffee Break Canicula

Okra pickled in brine is mighty fine. I made a batch of these babies, and they taste great.

Pickles are good, m'kay? I'm not talking about the vinegar- and sugar-soaked abortions hawked these days in grocery stores. Now that I've got the calabashes (read: bottle gourds) drilled and set up as evilsuckers rubber banded to the patio deck grating, I can hardly bring heinous crap like vinegar/sugar pickles into the house without alarms going off, and animules barking, meowing, and causing a major uproar ("Major Uproar, reporting for duty, suh!")

I'm talking the sort of pickles produced by actual age old lacto-fermentation in salt water and spices. Takes about a week to make. Vegetables, salt, water, dill, pepper, chili for the adventurous. Mmm, mmm, good.

As a gnaw on a pickled Abelmoschus esculentus delicacy, there doesn't seem to be anything else left to do. My day has been stopped by an Internet outage.

First call to Time Warner ended up being yer typical runaround. The tech wouldn't listen to me. There had been a storm the night before. I know what I'm doing when it comes to computers and network connectivity. All I bloody wanted to know was if there was an outage on Time Warner's end.

"If you would just give me your email address-"

"Wy do you need my email address?"

"Well, sir, you don't need to give us your email address."

"I just want to know if there's an outage now in Austin."

"Are any lights blinking on your modem?"

"All the lights that should be blinking on the modem are blinking. I know all about modems and networks and computers. ALL I need to know from you is if there is now an outage in Austin."

But it was useless. Corporation-speak was all the tech was capable of. I don't know if she was sitting in Banglor or Memphis or Botswana. It didn't matter. It was obvious that nothing would get through that wasn't already in her limited and useless to me script.

I hung up, and after 45 useless, frustrating minutes of unplugging routers, modems, bridges from power, plugging them back in in the correct sequence after 60 seconds, restarting computers, releasing and renewing LAN connections, playing with router settings, plugging a laptop directly into the cable modem to eliminate other possible router or cabling problem vectors, I knew that it was highly probable that it was nothing on my end.

In the next Time Warner call, the tech immediately tells me that yes there is an outage on their end. Well, duh. You probably know about it now because of my earlier call to your idiot sister in Banglor. But, no. I did not say this to her. I curse at reality regularly, converse with Tilley (a Tibetan terrier) about life and evil, but I know better now than to waste time venting at a corporate customer service tech. Instead, I thank her, hang up, eat another okra, and breathe, stopping to smell the damp, pink roses growing on a bush off the deck.

Have you seen your mother, baby? Standing in the shadows...

The situation has at least one silver lining: it's forcing me just to write. No internet diddling around. No looking up word definitions, rhymes, or synonyms. No checking email, no visiting favorite sites. No knowing whether the world has gone to hell in a handbasket. No proceeding along with my planned day of working on my online classwork or cyberbilling my clients.

I simply just write, as i look out at the roiling grey clouds over the lake and feel the chill of the drizzly winds blowing over the water and through the trees. And the roses.

Uh oh.

The internet came back on just now. So the temptation now begins: do I start doing my classwork? Check my email? Diddle around the net? Blog?

I Raise My Head an a Touchy Situation

My car broke down Thursday.

If I'd paid more attention earlier, things might have played out differently.

I almost knew. It was tickling at the back of my grey matter. For about a week there had been the sound of a squealing fan belt, which I simply dismissed as some irrelevant happening, maybe coincident with the slightly colder weather here in Austin of late.

Yeah, that's right, that's the ticket. The weather's a little colder and--unlike all the other days over the past few months that have been just as cold or colder--on *this* almost-cold day *that* must be the reason my aging '95 Sidekick's fan belt is squeaking and squawking all of the sudden like a stuck pig.

We often ignore all the clues that are constantly arising, don't we? Whether--as Seth is fond of saying--from the inside or the out.

I ignored that unexpected-fan-balt-squeak clue for several days. Then, Thursday, my CD player started pissing me off.

Wait a second, let's rewind.

A coupla year ago, when I was moving myself back to Austin from Boulder, my trusty steed died one night just on the other side of Lampasas, just on the other side of twilight.

I'd been Sidekicking along, the second and final transport of myself and my belongings from dry, over-for-me Colorado to green, green, alive Austin, and the steed had some electrical issues. Radio/CD problemas on and off, no interior lights, and then--twilight's last gleaming--dimming, dimming, dim, dying headlights, as I roll off the side of the road into YHVH knows what sort of challenges on the grassy slopes at the side of the road.

My cell phone of course had no bars on it. I had to hike up a hill a mile or so to catch a signal. Then a steadfast AAA member, I got hold of a towing company, and the driver--eventually--found me and transported me back to Lampasas for an overnight motel near enough to a garage open the next morning. Turns out one of the bolts holding my alternator had sheared off somewhere, somehow, some when. The garage wasn't able to drill the sheared bolt out but was able to lock down the other bolt and adjust things enough.

OK, now let's fast forward back to a few days ago. Thursday. Thor's day.

I'd been playing a Spirit CD (Twelve Dreams of Dr. Sardonicus), and it kept on turning on and off.

No we got nothing to hide
We're married to the same bride

I jiggled around with the player, took off the face plate, tried cleaning the contacts. Pressed the on button. Nothing. then it turned on by itself.

We're married to the same bride
She eats away from inside

Turn on, turn off. My CD player was acting like the Karate Kid. But still I only almost knew. There was more tickling at the back of my grey, but it hadn't lased over yet into the population inversion of my conscious comprehension.

I was headed down to south Austin to meet a friend for food and a movie when comprehension dawned, slowly, evilly. I was about a block and a half away from my destination when I realized that the ol' Suzukirino was sputtering. As in about to gasp its last internal combustion and die. Finally, I put all the pieces together: dead or dying battery, squeaking fan belt, memory of my night and morning in Lampasas...

BINGO! The one tightened bolt holding the alternator in place must have loosened over the last coupla of years. The fan belt sound was an alert (WARNING WILL ROBINSON!) that the battery wasn't getting charged very well. The CD player that wouldn't play (it's nature's way of telling you something's wrong) was a further missive from the ol' inner/outer being.

As the light dawned through the cloudy lens of my egoic focus, I kept revving the engine, knowing no sparks were probably coming from the battery or alternator to combust that gas, waiting at a long-ass, delay-me-now-long-enough-to-attempt-to-get-me-nervous stop light. Come on, Lordy! I know this is rush-hour in Austin, but I'll listen to you next time! Whether the clues are inside or out. I swear on my evaporating facilities!

The light changed. The prudent driver in front of me finally began moving, inch by inch. Propagation delay through the light was slow-motion city. Every thought and feeling stretched O-O-O-U-U-U-T-T-T... Finally I was able to get a move on and pull--as if in a dream--into the parking lot and roll the car into an empty space almost right in front of where I wanted to be. And the car died. With a cough, not a roar.

But it was...strangely fine. I had almost no anxiety, or even care. I knew the car wouldn't start, even before I turned the key to check.

I met my friend, we had a good meal, and we saw what turned out to be a shitty movie (Jumper, even though the book is great). Then my friend drove us to the beautiful house on the lake I am house sitting.

The next day, I signed up for Tejas AAA, found a garage 1.15 miles away from where my valiant steed was parked, and reserved a tow truck on line.

The only minor hassle--which was rather a miracle, really--was that the tow truck ended up getting to where my car was well before I could drive back in my friend's car. A 10 minute response time? Unheard of! INCONCEIVABLE!

Anyway, I got the car transported to the garage and got back to the lake house within 2 hours. No fuss, no muss. The repair will cost me $300 or so. No biggie.

I'm only just a little surprised the incident didn't cause more anguish. I guess I'm either learning to relax and roll with what happens, or else relaxing and rolling with what happens is really the only option maturity offers.

You Have the World at Your Fingertips...

Hydrated Protons Pair Off

That's right
just remember you heard it here first:
Hydrated protons pair off...

en.wikinews.org/wiki/Hydra...ns_pair_off

wtf?

Voth, Izvekov, and Wang
walk into a bar--
the Amphiphilic, in Boston.

in the bar, it's all Cations vs. Anions
you know, Jets vs. Sharks, Crips vs. Bloods

turns out the Cation dudes
unexpectedly associate into pairs

"stabilized by a nonclassical charge delocalization" says Voth

"of the excess proton charge defects" continues Izvekov

"over multiple water molecules" finishes Wang

who knew?

Marco? Polo!

Here I sit, sipping from a cool pint bottle of Mint & Honey Sweet Leaf™ Green Tea--made right dang here in Austin, Texas; although I was turned on to the amazingly refreshing stuff by a good friend in Boulder, Colorado.

The day has been another warm one, perhaps another record-busting high temp (like the one a few days ago that supposedly tied a record high of over 80 degrees from 1911).

It feels like spring already. Don’t know if that’s a good thing overall. I’m still trying to make sense of all the current theories on climate change and how to evaluate all the data that’s been recorded since the 1880’s.

It certainly feels like something’s afoot. Reports of record highs or lows or wet or dry or fire or storms or floods or quakes or volcanoes seem to come in almost every day for many different places. I don’t remember such reports happening as often as little as 10 or more years ago. And it does seem like a lot of people globally are being displaced or dying as a result of severe weather.

Speaking of dying, the Maharishi Mahesh Yogi just died yesterday. I never had the honor of meeting him in person, but I know many people who have been deeply influenced by his teachings. He gave a lot to the world. May his Mahasamadhi (read: conscious exit from the body at the time of death) serve all beings.

That’s about it for now. I’m about to go off to my monthly book club meeting, where we’ll be discussing the book Marco Polo: From Venice to Xanadu, by Laurence Bergreen. Our club has already discussed Bergeen’s great book, Over the Edge of the World: Magellan's Terrifying Circumnavigation of the Globe.

In my opinion, the Magellan book was much better than the Marco Polo one, mainly because Magellan’s story was very focused on the journey around the globe and was almost cinematic in its delivery; whereas Marco Polo’s journey was more rambling, with imaginative and fantastic tales and cultural commentary melded in with seemingly accurate reporting of his travels along the Silk Road and reminiscences of Kublai Khan and life among the Mongols.

While reading the Marco Polo book, I did get a strong craving for Koumiss, the fermented mare’s milk beverage that the Mongols relied upon.

And I also couldn’t get a dim memory out of my head of a Beavis and Butthead cartoon with an allusion to the lame, swimming-pool Marco Polo! game. At least I *think* there was such a scene (with Stewart Stevenson wearing his Winger shirt in the pool enthusiastically playing the game?).

That’s all for now. Just wanted to start back up writing after a week or so’s absence...

Sponge Farming in Central America

Been having some weird-ass dreams lately.It may be because I'm drinking a shot of that Flor-Essence stuff (see previous "Brewing Up A Batch" blog) every evening before I go to futon. Probably my body is trying its best to avoid barfing up the foul stuff by spinning wild yarns in dreamtime.

The night before last, I dreamt I was driving--with my brother in the car--along this long, winding suspended road-like thing that swayed to and fro in the air. It kind of felt like a bizarro-world San Francisco.

A white SUV immediately in front of us was driving so slow that it couldn't keep up with the swaying of the road. I almost couldn't either. Something about the physics of the interaction between the swaying road in the air and the vehicles required a certain speed and momentum to stay on the dang thing.

After slowing down more and more, the SUV finally vaulted from the road altogether in a horrific uncontrolled accident, falling almost lackadaisically over the side, dropping a long, long way down in gradual slow motion to crash into the bay below.

It was all I could do to stay on the swaying road myself, since I couldn't go any faster until the SUV's unfortunate crash.

And there was a black SUV behind me, going as fast as it could trying to keep up with the physics of the road so it wouldn't fall off, and this was of course an added pressure on me to keep everything together driving-wise.

After we finished our road trip and were about to fugue into some other attention-grabber, my brother and I saw a report of the accident in a newspaper, and I remember feeling very, very sad.

Cut to dream two just last night. It was an adventure sort of dream, having to do with political conspiracies down in Panama. A friend and I were on a rickety bus, whispering our plans.

Militia goons in camo uniforms with oily rifles and gleaming teeth crowded in at the next stop. We hightailed it out of there, finally hiding in a village by the water. We realized that the village was actually IN the water, so we dove down deep, trying to hide from the feds who were UP TO SOMETHING NO GOOD and who knew that we knew about it and were hellbent on stopping us at all costs.

That's were the dream twsited aphasiatically into an underwater sponge farm. My friend and I worked the farm, carefully tending the rows upon rows of sponges. There was no need for breathing apparatus. We just could somehow breathe underwater.

There was a young, beautiful Panamanian girl who worked alongside us, and both my friend and I were smitten with her. One thing led to another, I remember seeing the girl's wide, surprised eyes, and both me and my friend yanked out large stalks of sponge and began fencing, challenging each other in underwater quasi-Spanish.

The next thing I knew, I was awake.

Now, this next bit isn't a dream, but it might as well be.

What's the deal with calabashes?

I had never heard of a frelling calalabash before yesterday, when a friend told me of a Feng Shui recommendation involving placing several modified calabashes (is that how you say it in plural?) around her house to suck out the demons.

Suck out the demons? I'm never opposed to having demons be sucked out, by any means available, but I'd never considered such a thing being done by a vegetable. Get thee behind me, gourdo!

Researching further, I found that a calabash (hulu in Chinese) is indeed purported to absorb negative energy.

And there's LOTS of strange and interesting stories about calabashes in China. There's the ancient tale about a man who could float across a river in a giant calabash. Who knows why he would want to do such a thing. Why was Jack in a giant beanstalk? It's a STORY, for YHVH's sake, and it's a CALABASH!

Calabash have their own mythos, it seems. Perhaps not as Cthulhu as something H. P. Lovecraft might have come up with, but still.

A calabash hanging from a gnarled staff of an immortal is the icon for the receptacle of the elixir of long life. Sounds good to me. They kind of look like double-helix thingamabobbers (if crossed with fat slags).

Drying one and opening a hole in the top apparently helps its ability to absorb bad mojo. Not only that, but each calabash has its own personality. They've got copper calabashes and golden calabashes and just plain ol' calabash calabashes.

He's a calabash, and he's okay.
He sleeps all night and he works all day...

I know now that I just have to get me a calabash, folks. Just to try it out. I'll report back cyberLater...

A Call

(Once again, I've also posted this to another site of that allows better blogging linkage: outshining.blogspot.com/ )

OK. How to start this one out? How about the way it happened, bloggerHead?

That works for me. (You'll have to excuse me, if you dare. I've been at this computer for about 9 hours already today, and the--as they say--night has just begun. Miles to go before I sleep...)

[Warning: Ye' 1st Paragrapherino contains GEEKY TECH wording. But it doesn't last long--honest!--and it ceases after the next two line feeds following it. You have been forewarned.]

I was sitting atop my large, green plastic yoga ball at my fake nice-wood ikea desk/table with my head screwed deep into the chapter-one assignment of a Flash programing class I just started a coupla weeks ago, trying to figure out what the different little iddy biddy symbols on the timeline meant--just what the heck IS that annoying blank white rectangle for anyway, Adobe?--so I could correct some errors in the simple (ha!) moon-rising-over-lake animation we were all doing (online) as our first class project.

I was about to make some sort of stupid error that would later on teach me something, compounding whatever other mistakes I would eventually learn from that I'd already made, when my cell phone rang.

(This link: gallery.mobile9.com/f/14375/ is a sound byte of what my cell phone ring sort of sounds like--for callers whose numbers are already known to my phone, that is. It is a few seconds from Ennio Morricone's remarkable theme from Sergio Leone's remarkable film, The Good, Bad and the Ugly.

For callers who are NOT known to my phone, I have another ring: a few seconds of bootlegged Pink Floyd from their Wish You Were Here album that I originally downloaded years ago (well before bittorrent was a gleam in Bram Cohen's eye) as part of a Windoze PF sound scheme. I believe the sound byte in question was called PF-Restore Down.wav, for those of you interested.)

Suffice to say--no matter how clever and appreciatively attention getting my carefully chosen cool ring is--I was at the point in the space/time crosshairs called now where I was in no mood to speak with anyone. I was too involved in my project. I had to GET THINGS DONE, if you know what I mean. I was in major DO mode, with a DEADline.

("Major DoMode reporting for duty, suh!")

A futonful of ripe, young houris and a hookahfull of lebanese hash and garlands of delectable white grapes would not have distracted me from my task. Well, maybe not the hash and the houris or--strike that--not the grapes. Definitely not the grapes. Grapes wouldn't have distracted me nohow, nowhere!

Yet, indistractible (undistractible?) as I may have been in my one-pointed pursuit of my assignment, I also trust this thing seemingly located in the center of my chest (maybe a bit to the left and downward a tad, closer to my gut) called my "feeling sense". And, instead of ignoring my ignobly bleating telephonic device and silencing its blasted Ennio Morriconing, my dang feeling sense told me to look at the dang phone to see who in the dang hell was calling me at such a gawdawful dang normal time of day.

And I spied, with my little too-pointed-on-schoolwork eye, the name of a ripe, young friend of mine who I've always had a thing for. Hmmmm, you might have heard if you were listening in to my thoughts. Hmmm, on the one hand there's this difficult seeming assignment that's been giving me a headache that is due in a few days. On the other hand, a ripe young friend of mine who I've always had a thing for is now calling me...Hmmmm

"Yello?" I said, after pressing the answer button.

Turns out my ripe young friend was in a car in Colorado driving with another ripe, young friend of mine--who happened at one previous but now completed stretch of the space/time crosshairs to be my own lovely wife--and they had a question for me.

And, no, their question had nothing to do with how many houris I could fit (or currently had) on my futon, nor with the prices of garlands of white grapes or truckloads of blonde lebanese hash in Texas. Their question had to do with the navigatibility of certain highways in wintery Colorado, where they were currently driving and prognosticating what lay ahead for them, praytell.

It turned out to be a good thing that they'd called me.

I don't know exactly why I get contacted all the time for such random and varied information. Well, I do know why: because I can deliver. I just don't know why so many other people cannot do the same. I mean, nowadaze it seems to me that anyone can be a pretty good real-time reference librarian by just having a decent broadband connection and a basic understanding of how to search the web. Like those mysterious and troubling they say, it ain't rocket science nor brain surgery.

(I know, I know; I'm having a love affair here with the word nor. I just like it. I'm not even sure I'm using it all that correctly. But it has thing nice ring to it, kinda like a cross between some Edgar Rice Burroughs monster on Mars and a candy bar made of coconut and chocolate. Mmmm.)

My two ripe young acquaintances were wondering about US 6 Loveland Pass, to be precise. So, I went to the handy dandy cotrip.org site and clicked on the Road Conditions link (at the time) and found:

* Existing Conditions: (blo sno)(icy)(snpk)
* Restrictions in Place: CLOSED. Adverse conditions. Hazmat vehicles use the Eisenhower Tunnel at top of each hour.
* Comments: CLOSED. Adverse conditions. Hazmat vehicles use the Eisenhower Tunnel at top of each hour.

Which led to a humorous and open-ended discussion with the two radiant Coloradans about why hazmat vehicles were mentioned in a real-time road closure report.

I still have no the fuck idea as to why. Hazmat vehicles? It's my understanding that hazmat vehicles are used to respond to HAZardous MATerials incidents.

It may have been a while since I've been in Colorado, but since when does snow qualify as a hazardous material. Does it snow in plutonium now in Denver? Or unsafe chemicals?

In any case, the condition of the road was what the call had been about. So, after jokingly flirting (or flirtingly joking?) with the young ladies, I signed off knowing that I would later write this missive.

That's about all she (he?) wrote, Neither you nor I ain't got nothing nor anything more to say on that...