Year in Review: 2021

Last year, I think I took a pass on this. Well, at least on the reminiscing, because...duh, right?

This year I'm gonna take a HARD pass. Last year (2020) my daughter was born. This year? More calamities than I care to remember, on top of the ongoing and seemingly never-ending global health crisis.

In any case, I thought I'd put together some links to things I wrote this year that represents some of the better content I came up with, or trips that defined the year.

Also, Betty White died. I read that if you add up all the leap years she lived through, she makes it to 100 years on the planet.

Anyway, Caliboy in Brooklyn in 2021 (in reverse chronology):

1. Tubing Attempt with Cass
   
2. Thanksgiving drive to Austin, TX
   
3. I just can't get Anna Burns' Milkman out of my head
   
4. Wedding on the Yucatan
   
5. Random Thing about Irish Authors, et. al.
   
6. Cabin Trip, 2021: Fire Season
   
7. Ants, Baby! I forgot about this one...
   
8. RIP Hank Aaron, GOAT
   
9. "Problematic Reverence," shortlisted for "Most Important Post from Caliboy in Brooklyn"
   

I didn't feel like I wrote so much this year, and I have some drafts waiting to be finished, but they won't be before the end of 2021.

Happy New Year everyone! Take care and hug your loved ones!

Winter Adventures

Today I had reserved a tubing ride on the slopes of Mt. Baldy for Cass and myself. Mt. Baldy is wonderfully named mountain town, wilderness area, and winter sport resort location about 60 miles from us. 

When I awoke this morning, I noticed an email that came in before 5 am. It was a refund from the Mt. Baldy tube rental folks: weather was going to be too inclement. Rain.

After dropping off Camille at daycare, we went up to Mt. Baldy anyway, hoping to find some snow to play in. It was drizzly and the road up to the summit was pocked with rockslide rocks, and eventually I turned back and parked at the Ice House Canyon lot.

Years back Corrie and I hiked the Ice House Saddle, the longest hike originating at this particular parking lot. Today Cass and I started off on the hike as the drizzle started to gain some volume:

I hadn't made sure that Cass had his skullcap, or his jacket, so I gave him my scarf and my Jameson (Whiskey) cap, and off we went.

The trail had tree coverage, as they nearly always do, but here instead of offering protection from rain, the coverage amplified the rain by dropping big-ol' droplets of water.

Some spots looked more picturesque in person than they appear in the pictures. The one below of Cassius and the the creek had much more vivid oranges in person, as the autumn foliage had yet yielded to the newly minted winter:

Eventually having gone for about an hour up the path, and with the weather worsening, we stopped again, discussed returning, and headed back to the car.

After lunch in Claremont we headed home and finally got into some warm, DRY clothes.

Someday soon we'll hit up some snow.

Antidote to Car Days? Beach Bike Ride!

After returning from days in the car---at 1 am---I knew just what would set the tone for our first Sunday at home since before Thanksgiving: get out on the beach path on the bikes in the morning:

Cass is getting so good on his bike sans training wheels that it's even more fun now to get out and ride. We went the whole way to the pier, went down to the end of the pier and walked around.

In the water was a loose school of bait-fish, not yet being pushed into a ball by predators. Also, a nifty view of our fair skyline:

The crane left of center is essentially at our place, to give reference.

Camille almost got her head stuck! That would've been terrible:

\

Sometimes the best thing is to just get out and let the air hit your face, stretch out your limbs, and forget about the automobile.

Cass may have also worn out the usefulness of that blue bike, and a newby may be in the Decemberween offering...

Thanksgiving in Texas

Holy hell! 

We drove all the way to Austin to meet our newest nephew, Miles, who was not yet two weeks old when we celebrated Thanksgiving and new life. We had plenty of stuff to hand over, for both Miles and the (as of now) un-born kiddo of family friends in OKC, so flying was off the table.

Driving, though, is hard when you have two kids 5 and under, and the destination is 20+ hours away. The kids did great, with limited screentime or tears. Making us parents feel like winners.

First stop was Phoenix (six hours away), where the kids got to see both Grandma Kate and Grandma Lorraine, one's my mom and the other's my step-grandma, so my kids' only living great-grandparent.

With Grandma Kate

After spending an entire day in Phoenix, we drove on to Fort Stockton, TX, a drive that took about 12 hours of real time, even if we lost an hour and it looked like 13 hours of clock time.

We stayed at a place calling itself the Atrium. The outside was pretty normal, as far as cross-country freeway-traversing goes:

And the stairwells looked like what you may see on our salt-aired neck of the woods:

And I couldn't understand why the place was called the Atrium. Inside the room, there was a balcony door at the back of the room, away from the parking lot door. That's weird, I remember thinking.

Then I went to check it out, and everything started to click:

That balcony looked out onto an enclosed hangar-like place, a weather controlled space with a pool and a work-out cabin (for some reason). It was very surreal.

We finished the drive the next morning, making the six hour drive from Fort Stockton to the north-east satellite of Austin named Pflugerville, betraying the area's rich German settler heritage.

A brand-spanking new subdivision carved out of the formerly remote tall grasslands, our friend and Thanksgiving host Joey's house can be found. Joey was at the Mexico wedding for Mary we attended this past October, so Cass remembered him well. Camille also seemed to remember, and she was mostly enthralled to be there.

Cass too, since there were so many dogs to love on. Here he is with one of them:

Camille wanted to just climb and explore:

Cass got to meet Aunt Stephanie's boy, ten-day old Miles:

It was family, it was wonderful. It was fleeting. I made turkey, but there was so much going on and I didn't really need to do anything besides make turkey, which was easy.

We left Friday afternoon and stopped in Fort Stockton again, after a very relaxing drive along an in-the-cut series of roads that avoided the crowded US HWY 290, which was to be our regularly scheduled return route.

Saturday in the car was brutal, but made sense, seeing as how trying to drive I-10 back to the Southland on this particular Sunday would have fully sucked. We made it over 1000 miles in under 16 hours (but clockwise was more like under 14). I wouldn't recommend it otherwise.

These family visits are always so refreshing, even as they last a total of 50 hours in Austin and 15 in Phoenix, and we're ground down to nubs by the end of he drive.

To family!

In the Neighborhood

Across the street (basically), what used to be a parking lot and a decrepit yet historical former bookstore (affectionately named Acres of Books) have been a construction site for at least the past year, and it looks like likely another year.

Do you have something like this going up across the street from your place?

Sometimes it sounds like work is happening at all hours.

Once it was determined that the Acres of Books was a landmark, it was quickly decided that just the facade was important, and they went to work with that in mind. Below, the facade is along the blocked sidewalk, and the hole of the site drops behind as they work the corner's commercial space:

It may be an energy dump, because even in the darkness, the site is well lit:

Because of its height, it can be seen from all over, like the walk home from the grocery store:

Lots of construction projects in our neck of the woods...

Something Quick About Perspective

I heard a fact the other day, but it was hard to really grasp the reality of it. The sharer of the fact seemed to understand that, so they tried to put it in terms better understood. I'm not sure it was that helpful. Check it out.

First it was: beside your cells, inside your body are forty-trillion microorganisms.

I mean...trillions? How easy is that to wrap your head around?

The "help" statement was: if each one of those microorganisms was as big as an adult, you'd be as tall as 8 billion Mt. Everests.

Oh sure, that's helpful.

Halloween Action Will Need to Improve

As my kids get older, our plans for Halloween will surely need to improve. Costume execution and trick or treat opportunities will need to improve as well. But that will wait until at least next year.

Costumes this year weren't so bad, and the candy collection was passable, but...pandemic, maybe...?

Cass wanted to be Jack Skellington, but by the time I got to a costume dispensary, he had to settle for:

Wakanda Forever!

Camille wore Cass's friend Vera's ladybug outfit:

It was a good time, for sure, and I'm enjoying the last few years while I can get away with only putting half a brain on this holiday (is that right?) shenanigans.

Finished Milkman

I finally finished Anna Burns' Man-Booker Prize-winning novel Milkman.

It's a masterpiece; it's fun and dense and challenging, and it captures the sense of violence hanging over every interaction. It takes place in 1980 Belfast, but never really tells the specifics. Conformity was out of mortal necessity in most cases, and for the random people who fail to conform, as long as they weren't outright killed, they'd be labeled "beyond the pale," which was a fate nearly equal to death.

The book has been called "experimental" by some critics. Paragraphs can run multiple pages, dialogue between characters doesn't break up those paragraphs, and characters don't have names as such. The main character and narrator is eighteen year-old middle sister. Other characters who populate the story are maybe boyfriend, a mechanic and possible hoarder; wee sisters, middle sister's three youngest sisters; second brother-in-law, a gross side character and small antagonist; and the forty-something paramilitary who's taken a shine in middle sister, the eponymous milkman. In this zone of this segregated community, the paramilitary fighters are folk heroes, and rumors can lead to death quite easily. 

Rumors about the relationship between middle-sister and milkman start to overtake her world, no matter how false they are or how impossible it is for her to stop them.

Ms. Burns writes in the past tense and makes clear early, as in the first sentence of the book, what the ultimate fate of the milkman is, but middle sister's ability to have the perspective of a character at least thirty years older adds to a sense of peace at the end of the maelstrom. 

I marveled at the sentence structure, and the ways some of the narrative was presented. I grabbed two sentences to give a sense of that structure and what some critics complained about. Other critics mentioned that if the author was male, whatever difficulties, perceived or otherwise, would have been called signs of genius.

The first sentence is from early in the book, and is a microcosm for the whole concept. Just to dispel ignorance, a balaclava is basically a ski-mask.

"It was that people were quick to point fingers, to judge, to add on even in peaceful times, so it would be hard to fathom fingers not getting pointed and words not being added, also being judged in these turbulent times, resulting too, not in having your feelings hurt upon discovering others talking about you, as in having individuals in balaclavas and Halloween masks, guns at the ready, turning up in the middle of the night at your door." (page 28)

The second sentence here is from far later, and sums up much of the conflict between middle sister and maybe boyfriend, and about how being unable or unwilling to fully disclose as much info as possible can have dire consequences.

"And it now seemed these rumours were converging, with his viewpoint shifting from 'my not wanting him to call because I was ashamed of him' to 'not wanting him to call because I was in a relationship with Milkman', and my viewpoint shifting from 'not wanting him to call because of ma demanding marriage and babies' to 'not wanting him to call in case Milkman took his life'." (Page 282)

There's just so much good here. The realities of teenagers and rumors and death all around; the way the neighborhood gets spooked out by a "regular" murder, since political murders happen with alarming frequency; how a part of the city is just known as "the ten-minute area," as in it takes ten minutes to cross and no one likes to spend any time there and just hurry through, and people call it such when estimating arrival times, as in "I'll be there in fifteen and ten minutes."

The reward is real. The book is a classic.

Albatross Anecdote from Mexico

I keep remembering stories from Mary and Eddie's wedding in Mexico, stories that I would probably tell old friends and family in face-to-face meetings, if they were around in the moment I remember these specific stories. Bringing them here is pretty much exactly what this site started as: my anecdotes with the ether.

Anyway, one day we were down in the big pool. I was there, so it must have been past the main part of the day, since it would have been shady. I never ventured down to that huge main pool in full sun. Cass did, and spent so much time there he got his first really bad sunburn.

So on this particular day, something caught my eye up in the sky. It was a bird, and it was fairly high up, certainly soaring significantly higher than our five-story resort building. Big deal...so what?

Well, this freaking bird was enormous. This prehistoric beast with the outline of an ocean-going frigatebird looked like its body was a big as my large five-year-old son. Chances are low it was that big in reality, but, holy cripes, it was a giant.

It soared out of sight before I could get anyone else to see it, and I shook my head. No one would either believe me about how big I thought it was, or care that much anyway. 

The next day around the same time, late afternoon, it came around again. I think both Joey and Ron saw it and said, oh, yeah, that's that type of albatross they have around here. They said a worker at the resort or boating captain had mentioned it.

Moments ago I typed "Mexican albatross" into Google just to get an idea of what version of birdie it may have been, and the first picture that showed up was the exact outline I remember seeing:

It looks like this is a "magnificent frigatebird," which, while quite large and sharing with the albatross  the pelagic nature of its food source collection and general soaring technique, this bird is actually unrelated. Thinking that the outline was originally frigatebird-like gives me confidence in my growing sea-bird knowledge.

I also remember thinking that albatrosses don't share this wing silhouette. In any case: what a rad critter to see out its natural environs! 

Cartoon Connections to the Past

This past Sunday when the watching-witching hour descended upon our place, Cass asked to watch a Disney Special Spooktacular, starring Mickey and the gang. This iteration is from the Paul Rudish redesign, a redesign I'm fond of. Cass had already seen it at some point, but was excited to watch it again. When it started, what struck me immediately were the costumes of Huey, Dewey, and Louie:

Also visible in the picture is Horace Horsecollar, another of the Rudish callbacks to the history of Disney animation.

The reason Donald's nephews costumes caught my attention was because of another regular Donald Duck cartoon we have on the rotation, "Trick or Treat" from 1952:

The collection of Rudish shorts are peppered with little tidbits like this, sometimes momentary animated blips that show how much homework the animation team did, and make the shorts both rewarding and rewatchable.

Even in this Spooktacular there's a tiny joke that Mickey makes about captaining a boat (or something), where he glances at a picture on his wall of the steamboat from "Steamboat Willie" and says, "Isn't that right, Willie?" In response, the boat toots its smokestacks just as in the original from 1928.

It's good to see that sometimes people still care about their work, still want to push forward while being able to revere the past.

Sticker Anecdote from Mexico

Where we stayed in between Cancun and Playa del Carmen was billed as a "family friendly" resort, but it was still "Cancun: Party Mecca", and the Generations Maya had plenty of party-people: college-aged co-eds looking to have some fun.

Once upon a time I was definitely a party-person type, and now some folks might say I "drink too much" (even though circumstances have squashed that habit), which is just the remnants of the party-people youth. I get it, and I don't discriminate.

But I have kids, one of which is a daughter under two years old. She is rather sophisticated for being less than two, and she likes stickers. And she likes decorating me with her stickers. Like she did one morning before we left for the breakfast smorgasbord.

As I waited for the waffle lady to get me some waffle pieces for my two kids, a party-person girl, masked up and wearing the requisite bikini-and-shall covering get-up that helps them blend into the masses of similarly aged and dispossessed young ladies, approached me and mentioned how much she loved my stickers.

I had about six Paw Patrol stickers between my wrist and elbow on my left arm. I knew they were there even if I wasn't self-conscious about them. I thanked her and said that my daughter, too, loved them. She responded that, Yes, I'm sure she does.

The entire exchange took only seconds, and was easy to forget. I only really remembered because this past few days Camille found other stickers and got busy with them:

In the moment, in that breakfast space, for about thirty seconds I tried to make sense of the manner of the compliment. 

It reminded me of something else. But time goes on, kids grow, work never really stops, and Halloween approaches.

Wedding on the Yucatan

A Mexican wedding! Another Mexican wedding, I mean!

Corrie's sister, Mary, and her new hubby Eddie, pulled off their Mexican wedding caper. It all occurred at the Generations Maya Resort, outside of Cancun, on the eastern shore of the Yucatan peninsula. And by "all," I mean "we never left the confines of the resort hotel."

It had pools off the rooms, and we have little kids and specific health concerns, so the difficulties in exploring the area weren't as upsetting as they otherwise may have been. 

I mean, check out the place:

And here are the kids in that space between "shock" and "demanding":

The "water water everywhere" was quickly appreciated once the realization of the true weather conditions became apparent.

And that took about a tenth of a second upon walking outside of the airport at the Cancun Airport and feeling the reality of what the steward announced as we landed: "It's currently 93 degrees and has just stopped raining."

Yikes.

The heat and humidity were an oppressive fog, invisible except for the condensation left on every surface, the streaky dampness causing my kids to slip and fall. It never relented.

The transition from room to the out-of-doors was like going from meat locker to sauna. It's been too long since I've been in the chewy air.

Cancun is named for the Mayan phrase "ka'an kun", which is loosely translated as writhing pile of snakes, which is about as bad-ass as anything I've heard in a while. Jules Siegel, the former roommate to our man Pynchon moved his family out to Cancun back in the early '80s, long before it was a popular Spring Break resort mecca.

Of course, we never really saw any of Cancun. The resort was far enough south of the metropolitan area that when we did our COVID testing to be able to return to the States, we had to put "Playa del Carmen" as the location. This is the next town down by Mexican standards. And we never saw any of it, either.

The path in the shade of the resort buildings, on the backside, opposite the pool and beach and Caribbean, had a chain-link fence separating what I imagined was the original habitat and the resort: mangrove swamp. That is standing water, in case you can't tell. As I remember, mosquitoes weren't terrible.

Below is a view from the roof terrace party floor, where the reception for Mary and Eddie's wedding was to take place, a view looking south, with the Caribbean to the left and the OG swamp forest to the right:

I did eventually go swimming in the sea, but when I went down there to take some pictures I made it quick:

The beach was made of fine powdery pulverized coral, and behaved differently enough from sand to be...eh, noticeable...? 

The clouds in this place were always quite dynamic"

The great big pool in the first picture was never deeper than fifty inches, and the majority of it was less than forty inches deep. The most shallow parts, apart from the ten inch spots where the lounge chairs were, had windows that looked down at the passers-by who would have been walking through a passageway. I arranged, with a little effort, to get a picture of Cass---he underwater and me under the glass:

Corrie finally got to be a bridesmaid, and I was able to get a picture before Camille figured she needed to be held, ceremony or no.

A light drizzle had started falling when we absconded to the sand for pictures, and if you look close amidst the poor lighting and non-zoom-in I achieved, you can see Corrie planted in the sand holding Camille in her poofy flower-girls dress:

Cass, as ring-bearer, looked sharp as well, just like his older cousin Colton:

Corrie was able to get a good selfie of us all, along with Eddie's daughter Harper, another cousin that Cass adores:

I'm sporting the turquoise guayabera shirt I wore to our Mexican wedding back in 2008. I thought it made sense and had a nice symmetry.

The wedding ceremony was fast, and the drizzle kept us off of that roof deck party zone, and we had a more intimate time down at one of the sand-adjacent restaurants. The party/celebration of it all was very nice, and our love goes out to the newlyweds.

The last full day for most of us was Monday, as the wedding itself was n Sunday. This was the time we did more swimming, both in the pool and in the Caribbean. My time in the water almost exclusively looked like this:

Or this:

Camille had a great time in the water, even as she got ever more demanding about it. Maybe especially as she got more demanding. "DADDY! WATER!DAAAA-DEEEEEEE!" was how she'd approach the closed sliding glass door to our patio and pool.

Cass figured out the joys of being underwater, and going underwater with goggles on, which are invariably awesome.

As the porter was driving us back towards the main lobby of the main building complex as we prepared to fly home to Southern California, he asked if we wanted to see Maria, the crocodile that appears and begs for food.

Um...hell YES we want to see a croc! Or caiman or whatever. He pulled off at the Spot and his excitement was palpable. She was there just for us, and I got a picture:

Looking at the picture now is funny because it's not exactly obvious what we're trying to see. I didn't zoom in or take thirty pictures. I tapped the little button on my phone just the one time. If I didn't know that just above center nearly framed in the diamond from the fencing is a crocodile, I may never know what the deal with this photo is.

So...Cass's third international trip, Camille's first but third and fourth flights, and our first four-top airplane caper is in the books. Thursday to Tuesday, to the Caribbean and back, already shelved in the dream-like section of the memory banks.

But I will always remember this conversation Cass and I had:

During the reception I asked Cass if he had enjoyed being a ring bearer. "Yeah...I guess," he said with a grumpy edge. I mentioned he looked like he was having a good time. "Yeah, but I wanted to wear a suit, dad."

"A suit? You're looking fly boy; you got a vest, a jacket and even a bowtie! You're rocking that suit."

"No, dad, a bear suit, with the mask and the teeth, " and here he held up his hands, "and claws to carry the rings in with...a bear..." 

He'd wanted to be a ring-BEAR. I grabbed him and hugged him and kissed his mohawked head and told him that may have been the best thing I ever heard, that ideas don't really get better than that, than a ring-BEAR, and that hopefully next time we can make something like that happen.

Searching for the King of the Sea Monsters

Kids are great. Mostly. Well...mine are great.

I've found that since I stopped being a dick, my relationship with my boy has blossomed. He's no longer a dick; he's nicer to his sister; I don't have to yell at him anymore...it's amazing how powerful adjusting my own attitude has been.

Maybe I'm being too hard on myself.

In any case, the other day we were checking out a cool dinosaur-and-other-prehistoric-beast book (that uses a spindly sans-serif fonts for blocks of text they occasionally print over photos of OCEAN SURFACE) and we came across a picture of dunkleosteus:

Coming into its position as apex predator nearly 350 million years ago during the Devonian Period, this placoderm---er, armored fish and an early jawed critter---swam around taking bites out of whatever it felt like, even fellow dunkleosteus. It didn't have teeth, rather that bony-jaw-armor was actually sharp bitey-bone, and its jaw would snap shut like a paper cutter so fast the biteforce was nearly the same the T-rex. At 30 feet long (!!), this thing only feared other specimens of it's own species, and a proliferation of harmful algal blooms that would eventually choke off its oxygen supply and hasten its extinction.

In an odd twist, as a lobe-finned fish, the descendants of its tetrapod cousins would become us, and not the ray-finned fish that are the vast majority of fish in today's oceans.

My son was immediately obsessed with this sea monster. It had to be the coolest, toughest, and BEST sea monster ever. NOTHING could ever challenge its primacy as far as sea monsters are concerned.

Well, I challenged him, what about the mosasaur we watched the program about a while back? That was a pretty badass sea monster, too, right? A glint in his eye: recognition. The mosasaur...he said, his voice trailing as he tried to imagine the two meeting.

A few pages later in the very same book we found the spread about the mosasaur. It grew to it's status as apex predator and all-around badasss sea monster about 300 million years later, around 50 million years ago, after the non-avian dinosaurs had all vanished. The largest of which ticked the measuring stick around 50 feet (!!), meaning it was even bigger than dunkleosteus.

This bothered my son, as he clung to his feelings that dunkleosteus had to be the best. I mean, he doesn't even have teeth, rather sharp bone-blades that she snaps down as hard as T-rex, man! Also, I think he loved saying dunkleosteus, which is amusing, because he liked saying mosasaur also.

We concluded the mosasaur portion of the search with, "Well, it may have come down to whomever got the first bite it, because ol' dunkster could probably do plenty of damage with that chomper." 

This was satisfying until I reminded him an even older obsession of his in these matters: megalodon:

No glint in his eye this time, rather a full-on sparkle. Megalodon! That would show that mosasaur! A proper fish and all, megalodon roamed the seas around 25 million years ago, after the mosasaurs disappeared, and long after the end of the Devonian.

Clocking in at 65 feet long it was truly enormous. Would dunkleosteus just be a meal for this giant predator?

I tried to explain that this wasn't really a competition, since the disparate eras in which these beasts existed, and that it was okay to revere all of them. And that we should be excited that such cool monsters ever existed at all, and that we know about them.

AND, oddly enough, with dunkleosteus and mosasaur being nearly certain and mostly guessed for megalodon: it looks like all three gave live birth.

After this talk and realization, the day's activities went to his Hot Wheels experiments and which cars went however far through his rubber band-powered loop-de-loop.

I'll save xiphactinus and liopleurodon for next time. Turns out we watch our share (and many others, it sounds like) of ancient oceans and ancient earth science shows on Curiosity Stream.

That I can name five ancient sea monsters off the top of my head, along with basic facts like size and appearance (dunkleosteus, xiphactinus, mosasaur, liopleurodon, and megalodon) but couldn't tell you all of the Kardashian siblings names probably tells you how my screen time is spent...

Kindergarten Comes Once for us All

My son had his first day of kindergarten a few weeks ago, and while I saw many people posting pictures of their kids' first days of school, I refrained. Social media was flooded with those kinds of pics, and I felt like I needed to zig while everyone else zagged. Or some other cliché...

But, here I am, on my own thing, celebrating my awesome little dude, on his first day of kinder:

He had his hair shaved into the Travis Bickle for the mohawk effect, and does well by his masks. He's so big and tall, but you only really notice when he's around his friends, being nearly a head taller than most everyone at school.

His compassion is strong, and the violence against sister is mostly incidental and not by design. He's awesome and I love him more than just about every single thing in this universe. He's my favorite dude, and I hope that he starts to understand that we need him to infiltrate the patriarchy from the inside, as that's the only way we're going to bring it down.

We tell it to him all the time, so time will tell whether he's buying the message.

Keep loving books, Boy!

Random Writing Nonense

I was reading my Sunday paper this past Sunday and when I opened up to the book review section, a face was staring back at me:

The review was for Sally Rooney's newest book, but I am/was mostly unfamiliar with her work. The article writer mentioned that the galleys of Ms. Rooney's breakout work, Conversations with Friends, was well-worn when given to her, and it was suggested that as another young-millennial-lady, she'd likely enjoy it.

She did not at the time do so, and I was reminded of a Matt Groening "Life in Hell" comic strip about modern artistic types, with a category titled "How to Annoy Them" that I loved:

The one I usually think about is the Poet, and how to annoy a poet? Well:

Anyway, while reading this article, the idea of a 24 year old writer shooting to stardom caused mixed feelings in me: part envy, obviously, but then again I'd have to finish something worthy of attention, so...; and excitement, since non-genre writing can be a viable art-form for making a living (and maybe because it means people still read..?).

But I was looking at the picture of Ms. Sally Rooney, and I aid to myself: This girl isn't an American. I had a feeling, based on how she looked in the article's portrait, that I knew from which country she came. I made a guess, and then I looked it up.

And I was correct. She's from Ireland. Once that info hit me, whatever envy I had went away (for some reason) because to me that just made sense. I'm reading a novel right now written by an Irish lady, and Irish writers have figured prominently in English language literature for, eh, ever?

But I started to think back to this meme I sent my dad, in reference to a conversation we had once:

My dad and I talk about many things, but a few themes will usually emerge: the Simpsons; the Yankees; and literature. He had a contention one (and still may hold it) that if you were to rank countries or nationalities by how much they loved---or felt like they defined themselves through---their literature, that Russia would be in first place, while America would be whatever place last was.

The accuracy of that statement isn't the focus here, because, well, my dad is usually right about these kinds of thing and I haven't read enough Russian or French lit to make a sound judgement.

What I want to say is: where's the Irish literature joke in that meme? I mean, those aren't really jokes as much as generalizations, albeit silly ones. But like, it would be hard to discuss the Western canon of literature without the Irish contingent mentioned. (Also, is Russian really "Western canon" and not somehow an amalgam of Western and Eastern? Is that something inherently different about the content?) 

I even started to think about a bracket-type setup, but I didn't want to go into too many details.

But just going off the top of my head:

Irish:

• Joyce, Oscar Wilde, Bram Stoker, Beckett, Yeats, Flann O'Brian, Anna Burns

English:

• Shakespeare, Wordsworth, Dickens, Orwell, Woolf, Jane freaking Austen, Shelley

French:

• Voltaire, Baudelaire, Hugo, Flaubert, Dumas, Sartre, Camus (he counts, right?)

American:

• Melville, Twain, Whitman, Hemingway, Fitzgerald, Steinbeck, Pynchon

Russian:

• Gogol, Dostoyevsky, Tolstoy, Nabokov, Solzhenitsyn

One major problem here is that the list above is almost entirely cis-gendered white men. Yikes. Literature must do better. That's another reason I didn't want to dive too deep here: it shows off some flaws in the historical record of an artform I feel I'm umbrellaed under.

Now that I've typed this nonsense up, maybe I can go back to going about my day, able to see different writers names up under national identities, all the while asking myself, where do the Bronte sisters go? They're Irish by birth, but grew up in and wrote mainly about, England...

Some Books from the Trip

As things get hectic with everything, I wanted to mention a few books I either were given, picked up, or were refocused upon during our northern excursion of (check notes) only a few weeks ago.

Firstly was a handover from Norm:

I read over the first page or so and got very excited to check it out. Norm and I joked about the current discourse surrounding Murakami and the women in his stories, and the back cover synopsis looks like it wouldn't do much to, or even attempt to, stifle that conversation, but...if Murakami is up to his usual tricks otherwise, that seems to paper over some of the complaints.

At the Cabin itself were a few copies of Cliff's Notes, the high school aid that helps students try to warp their head's around various works of literature. One was for Gatsby. I thumbed through it, and was intrigued by the four page summary of Fitzgerald's life. There was plenty of information I'd never known. I didn't bother with the summary, but thought about finding an old copy ad checking it out, to see if all the fuss is warranted.

Another edition of Cliff's Notes was for Wuthering Heights. Again I read the author bio, but was struck by something in the intro: on occasion Wuthering Heights has been considered ne of the greatest works in English.

Say WHAT? I mentioned that to Corrie, and said, "Yeah, I think I remember hearing that in high school somewhere."

I made sure to dust off my copy once I got home:

As a birthday gift one year my Uncle Mark got me a copies of Jane Eyre and Wuthering Heights, written by Charlotte and Emily Bronte, with matchy-matchy dust covers. I thought they were cooler without the covers, so I removed them, and they're long gone, lost to time. I'm looking forward to getting into it.

On the walk down Solano Ave in Berkeley with Sam we visited Pegasus Books, a wonderful independent bookstore, and like usual, I found something to buy:

My only other copy was on my Kindle, but I could never really get into it, and now that my daughter buys books against my will on it, I've had to shelve it up real high. I've wanted the physical copy for a while, and not I'm getting deep into it, starting over from the beginning. It's SO good.

Cass joined Sam and I inside the bookstore and settled on the following Lego Yoda+book combo:

I thought, eh, whatever, when I agreed to get it for him. But goddamn if it isn't one of the cooler, most basic and yet deep collection of Star Wars information out there.

Okay, I'm sure there is plenty of Star Wars detritus floating in the ether. But this little Galaxy Atlas explains the orientations of the planets named in Episodes I through IX, Rogue One, Solo, and the Mandalorian, has inside jokes for most, and shows Lego examples of nearly every character throughout all 11 films and 2 seasons of the Mandalorian. It's shockingly thorough.

Sometimes you never know. But, as a rule: Always by something from independent bookstores.