The Pelagic Nature of Long Drives

Sometimes, as the mind wanders during hour two of a five hour stint along Interstate 40, I start to imagine the highway like the open ocean's water column, its verticality mapped onto the horizontal axis.

Tiny drifts of plankton, moving up the column to eat even tinier oceanic rotifers, and, as the sun descends behind, and the hours pile up and we start driving towards night, it's almost like we're heading higher and higher into the safe darkness.

The tiny animals that drift up in the night and then back down as the sun brightens the sky constitute the biggest mass migration on earth, and it happens daily. Trillions upon trillions of organisms feel a margin of safety once it gets dark, and then stuff happens. They move up and feed on smaller things, and larger animals eat them.

And larger animals eat them. And tiny fish eat them and become plentiful. Eventually they school in enormous numbers, and away the food chain goes.

The life cycle in the open ocean, the pelagic life cycle, and my brain spends half its energy on surrounding traffic, and the other half imagining that we're just a marine mote riding up and down the column.

Interstate 40, from Barstow to Amarillo, is long, straight, and far more mellow than the similarly long and straight I-5, or even I-10. I-40 is quiet, populated by few trucks---slow moving larvae in the column---and virtually no jerks that feel they must be in the fast lane going the speed limit. 

I thought that I wrote this piece before, and when I couldn't find it under my searches, I thought I should type it up. Why now? I have no idea. I've been hammering away at a large project and needed to decompress, and haven't been sleeping well, and maybe that's been bringing me back to these weird metaphors for the slow 1800-mile boogie.

Also, I like the idea that something could be titled "The Pelagic Nature of Long Distance Interstate Driving," and that then the title could seem too verbose for a blog post, and that it could be edited down to what we see here.

Maybe that's what this is about. Maybe its about Artemis II hurtling back to Earth today. About solitude, about making slow progress, about placement in the vast sea on earth...also, about the funny looks people give you when you use a word like 'pelagic' in normal conversations.

Me: Can I get the receipt on 8? (Corrie tracks the cost for work.)

Attendant: 'Course. (Bzzt-bzzt-bzzt) Long drive, huh? Where y'all coming from?

Me: Ooph...southern California. On the road to past Amarillo...

Attendant: Wow! Howzit going so far?

Me: (Still in a daze) Well...you know, just contemplating the pelagic nature of the drive...

Attendant: ..........

I think I have something here to explore more later. Always procuring projects, like Sick-Boy and his "contacts." (Also, random Trainspotting reference!)

Springtime in Solvang

We took a nice weekend trip to Auntie Anne's, and both my dad and brother made it for the weekend too! This was the first time we'd seen my brother in the flesh since 2020, and it was the first time we saw my dad since the reunion trip in 2024.

The kids get to play with the dogs, get to play with the Playstation 5, get to play in a backyard and front yard, and this time, got to play with grandpa and Uncle Dan.

One thing we got to do was an Easter Egg Hunt outside of the Solvang hamlet...or maybe it was inside, but it was at one of the historic Wells Fargo stagecoach stops:

Here you can see Cass (and a few other boys) ready to jump the line to head out looking for eggs:

We're not really Easter people, or people who celebrate Easter, and this kind of social activity is a remnant of family activities. It was fun, but I can go either way. I wouldn't have pursued it, but I'm also not ready to refuse to attend once invited.

All in all, it was a very nice trip getting out of LA metro for a weekend. Thanks to Auntie Anne and Uncle Val for hosting, and thanks to my dad and brother for making the trip, which for them was certainly more challenging and longer to accomplish.

St Paddy's 2026

I got home quick and Corrie and I went to a local bar. It was a Tuesday, March 17th this year. That's Green Pasta night at our house. We did our corned beef, potatoes, and Lacinato kale (snobs are we) the previous Sunday, so dinner was going to be fast.

After a beer and a shot of whiskey, and another beer, we were sixty-bucks lighter (WTF?). I was having a conversation with a random drunk older lady, the kind of conversations that are had often, especially with me and/or Corrie and the random stranger.

The conversation was going well, and this lady was fiery. We were having a good ol' time, and eventually I showed her pictures of the kids. What followed was her freaking the hell out that I "allowed" Cass to have his long hair. "Aren't you his dad? Don't you have any pride in being a dad? How can you let him do that to himself?"

What the fucking fuck are you talking about, was mostly my response. But I didn't bother to listen. He's a compassionate, intelligent, funny, athletic, and daring little iconoclast, and anybody who questions his future or intentions or place on Earth because of his hair can rightly go fuck off.

We had our pesto and broccoli, watched our Simpsons episode, and took care of bath night. Besides an annoying drunken boomer casting aspersions at me and my son, it was a pretty cool day. 

It was like most days really, but it did have us---me and Corrie---sneaking off to a bar for a quick taste. That kind if thing may happen more often if it weren't so dang expensive. Plus the bartender lived in Bed-Stuy a few years before us, so we got along pretty well.

Anyway, Happy St. Paddy's!

Banana Ball!

Our former roommate, groomsman, and good buddy Ryan contacted us weeks ago with an offer: he'd won a chance to purchase Savanah Banana tickets. Would we like ot join him on a particular day? Why, yes, we said. And that day was this past Friday night.

The game was at the Big A, the home of the Angels down in Anaheim, and it was a full house. That picture above doesn't capture how full the place was. Seems like it's not that full that often. 

Anyway: Banana Ball, baby!

If you're unfamiliar with the Savanah Banana brand of baseball, you just need to think of the Harlem Globetrotters for baseball. They put on a show, they play some ball, and everyone has a good time.

There are some rule differences that had me thinking of Futurama's Blernsball game. 

In the barnstorming league there are six teams, and they travel around and play each other in similar circumstances and under the same rules. According to their website, it looks like every game is sold out, which shows that there is an appetite for this kind of game, this Banana Ball.

The teams that play in the Banana Ball Champions League are the titular Savanah Bananas, the Party Animals, the Firefighters, the Texas Tailgaters, the Loco Beach Coconuts, and being resurrected in both name and spirit, the Indianapolis Clowns.

When Corrie was checking the Banana's opponent for our game, she said, "Um...looks like the Bananas are playing...the Red Shoes?" And when we tried to look closer at the image, it seemed like they were clown shoes, maybe?

But I was very excited when it became clear the matchup we got to see was the Bananas versus the Clowns. The OG Clowns were the progenitor to today's Savanah Bananas, played on the Negro League circuit, and employed a teenage Hank Aaron.

The warm-up routines were very exciting and silly, and nearly each half-inning there were competitions and/or dance numbers. And when the baseball game was being played, it was fast-paced. The reason for that is built into the rules.

Baseball is a game, a sport, a 'National Pastime.'

Banana Ball looks like baseball, but it has some major rule changes, some of which make for a more interesting product. To wit...

1. The final score is based on how many innings you win, and to win an inning, you need to score more runs than the opponent.
2. Every infielder must touch the ball on a strikeout before the batter is out, meaning that if they run fast enough, they'll almost surely reach base on a strikeout.
3. THERE IS A TIMER. Once the kid-guest announces, "Start the clock!" in unison with fans who know, a big 2-hour countdown timer starts on the scoreboard and does not stop until the 9th inning. They game will be called over if it's not the 9th by two hours. This wrinkle is better than any pitch-clock. These pitchers get after it.

The inning-winning wrinkle causes some weird moments that halp speed the game. Above, if you look closely, you'll see the first run scored in the game was by the home-tram, the Bananas, in inning 5. Because thge Clowns didn't score in the top half, once that guy came across the plate, that half-inning was over and the top of the 6th started. If all you're trying to do is win innings, it all moves so much faster. 

It was the same thing for the 6th inning above, and for the 7th, when the Clowns scored 4 runs, they were still losing 2-1, because they'd only won the one inning. 

Any bottom-half on an inning can be a walk-off. Pretty cool.

This was a great time, and so much fun, and shows that America and its kids really do have quite an appetite for baseball games. And I could support a Banana Ball extension. Corrie joked that they should shift the narrative to Banana Ball as the thing with the Savanah Banana phenomenon, and maybe she's right.

I mean, they eventually let the guy on stilts pitch, and is anything on a baseball diamond more exciting than that?

WTF History

This started as a conversation...as most of my eventual journeys down various rabbit holes do.

Blond haired, blue eyed kids at our kids' school are few and far between, but some of them are from the Ukrainian diaspora. So when Putin invaded and started the first land war in Europe since WWII (besides the breakup of Yugoslavia and ensuing ethnic cleansing? Civil wars don't count?), we had a few conversations about some of the historical background.

Much later---as in quite recently---in the wee hours of the night, before bed, Corrie and I put eyes on one of the Youtube programs we like: an episode of SciShow about a Persian silver horde found buried in England. 

In the episode, if you don't feel like watching it, it turns out that the Vikings buried treasure hordes all over their conquered or occupied lands. Historians aren't sure why, but one suggestion was that the treasure would be used to purchase favor when needed in their political shenanigans. One of the Vikings main bits of treasure was silver. They loved silver. One of the hordes recently dug up in England turned out to be from Persia. The science behind the isotopes in the impurities being a fingerprint from where it was smelt and cast was fascinating, and the Persian foundry was unmistakable.

And it turned out that the Vikings got around. Like, all over. 

Today the Scandinavians we tend to lump together and call "Vikings" never would have called themselves that, and that the term "viking" may have really been a term that meant "to arrive and murder." But one of these tribes that got far, like to the Volga far, called themselves the Rus. The Volga is the river that runs from Kyiv down to the Black Sea (and has headwaters even beyond Pripyat, if you're a fan of HBO's "Chernobyl"), and it seems like it was this group, the Rus, that traded with Persian traders north of the Black Sea for their silver during their travels and trade route developments.

This is where my ears perked up. The Rus?

I have a very cool history book, an Atlas of the Medieval World, that's very small and very dense, as it tracks Europe and the near East (today's Middle East) from the fall of the Western Roman Empire to the Renaissance. Each page is a crisp outline of language family incursions, invasions by all types (Magyar, Mongol, Turkic, etc), and one thing it said I always pondered in my own time. 

It mentioned that at one point the Western Slavic language branch (the closely related Russian, Ukrainian, and Belarusian) broke away from the other Slavic languages and became distinctly different. And I generally mulled that over in my head through the years...about how Russians, Belarusians, and Ukrainians were just that different from the other Slavs found in Europe proper...that seemed, I dunno, proper in some kind of way?

But seeing this show about a Viking silver horde in England, likely from the Rus, brought me back to the conversation I had with Cass a few years back.

See, as I told the Boy, the trio of Russia, their close allies in Belarus, and the Ukrainians all claim the Kievan Rus as their origin story. The Kievan Rus was the name of the original kingdom and lands held in the Volga valley around present day Kyiv, before the term Muscovite was coined around their newer homeland, Moscow (handwaving the details, certainly). They all felt like Kyiv was their origin spot, and felt like it was theirs to take back or defend with their lives.

These people were called Muscovites for a time, but the less formal general Rus was also used, and eventually that became the basis for "Russia" and "Belarus" that we've anglicized today.

But, it wasn't until just the other day that I understood that the Kievan Rus was just a gang of Vikings, and that they founded an empire and had their own familial lineage (the Rurikid) as the monarch from the year 862 until 1598, when Ivan the Terrible's feeble son died of dropsy and scurvy. For fifteen years that are called in Russian history courses "the Troubles" took place: after the last of the House of Rurik (Feodor, Ivan's youngest boy) fell, the Polish-Lithuanian empire invaded and occupied Moscow. 

In 1613, after driving out the occupiers, the council elected the next tsar, and it was Michael I, and thus started the House of Romanov, the family that was Tsar until the Bolshevik revolution in 1917. From 862 until 1917, with basically two family lines running all caps-RUSSIA, and the first was a freaking Viking.

And now the reason the Western Slavic branch being so different makes sense: it assimilated with a Northern Germanic/Scandinavian language.

Anyway, as I checked some of this stuff out, I learned that the Rus were also called, historically, the Varangians, which essentially meant "I agree to work for you." One group worked as the personal bodyguard to the Byzantine emperor, hence the records of their name. One of their bosses: Rurik...the same as the guy asked to settle disputes and run the show in Novgorod, founding Russia.

Most historians think this is apocryphal, or legend, but his brother Oleg could have been the true founder. Anyway...holy hell!

Vikings attacked France, and their king ceded beachfront land to them, these Norseman. They assimilated, became Normans after a French name change, and after a hundred and fifty years, invaded and conquered England.

They got around! But I didn't need to tell anyone that...

Camping at Pinnacles 2

Last year on the same weekend we went camping at Pinnacles National Park. That had been our second tent camping trip with the kids, and this was our third. Our spot was different, but we did, again, have to set up the tent in the dark.

But it was fine.

Last year, because of the drive and the sleeping in, we missed the long-ish hike at Bear Gulch Caves. This year, we made it. Last year I thought the area was pretty, but, like, sure. Condors...it's nice. Fine. National Park level, though?

But after doing the Bear Gulch Cave hike? NOW I get it.

One issue is that you need to take a shuttle up to the parking area, since it fills by 8:10 am, and maybe earlier. The road is tight and has just a single loop at the end, of a quaint parking area.

But the environs, as we went along the hike, were beautiful:

You start out along a wooded canyon walk, with striking red-rock walls:

But the walk is so nice, and the temperature was so pleasant, and the breeze was easygoing, and the elevation was minimal...so wonderful...

Then we got to the caves proper (after a quick fakeout), and the kids demanded to be in front. 

Flashlights or headlamps were necessary to navigate this cave, so I, with only my phone, followed close behind the kids, who each were given flashlights.

Certain spots you had to get down an your haunches or hands and knees to pass through, and our kids were fine with it, because, you know, small and bendy are kids.

After a while there was a nifty stairwell to mark the start to the way out of the cave:

And if you ever have questions about which way to go...there are handy directions:

After the stairs in the murky darkness, and the spray painted directions, you get outside proper, and a new stairwell shows up and slinks on up beyond a nerve-racking suspended boulder:

Up top there was a no-swim reservoir with nice reflections, and we got a chance to snack.

But the walk out was also very pretty:

After the reservoir and hiking back down, we returned to the campgrounds and relaxed. It was a fast, lightning trip, as we left the next morning.

One issue is that Pinnacles, along CA 25, is annoying for us to get to. We discovered it one day as we drove with a baby Cass from the Bay Area back to LA, and traffic along US 101 sucked, we jumped off at Hollister and leisurely headed south along CA 25. 

Nested between 101 and I-5, the area is neither the desolate base of the coastal range coupled with the Great Valley (I-5), nor is it the outer edge of the coastal range and seaside proper in places (US 101). It's firmly in between. It's scenic, rolling hills and oak trees, and this past weekend it was very green.

When we first saw a National Park along the drive, and it had a cool name---Pinnacles---we thought about making a trip there, and when we finally made plans with other people to make the drive, the idea was that it was halfway between our people living in the East Bay and us living in LA metro.

Our East Bay people have since moved to SLO-environs, so this drive---north to King City and then northeast for forty minutes to the spot, isn't such a challenge. For us, it's a bit further. The trip either has us going up and down the Grapevine, then to Coalinga, and then up from there; or, heading to King City up the 101, and over and up. Both have advantages and disadvantages.

Anyway, it was worth it! Getting to see friends, getting to meet new people, and they had a kid so all the kids got to play together, and sleeping in a tent makes for an interesting weekend.

I'll just leave this, the shot of Spring springing, lush greenery with ferns and all:

Genetics and the Basque

I was always fascinated by the language and ethnic group isolates in Europe, the Basque.

Living in the Pyrenees straddling the borders of Spain and France, the Basque people boast an insular cultural identity, as well as a language that is neither Indo-European (like Germanic, Romance, Celtic, Slavic, or Baltic) nor Finno-Urgic (like Finn, Estonian, or Magyar). It has no known larger family or connection anywhere in the world.

Mysteries abounded about the people, and they had their own stories about where they came from, about how they were the original people in Europe, how they took over the caves from the Neanderthal. Maybe I made that last part up.

But a recent genomic study showed that a modern Basque person's genome, once sequenced, was indistinguishable from Iron Age remains from a nearby necropolis. Multiple thousands of years later, at least a hundred generations, and the genomes were the same. This was from before the Celtic, from before the Roman and Greek, and, apparently from before the Proto-Indo-Europeans arrived.

It looks like they were from the first Europeans...at least remnants from one of the earliest waves of human arrivals, which is pretty cool.

And then there's the language. So different than any Indo-European language, so different from Finno-Urgic...I'm not a linguist, but maybe I would have been if things broke differently (at least that's what I've been told), and how languages work in their own context I've always found interesting.

I snatched this visual for how the Euskara (the Basque language) works, and while it's different, it seems logical:

Now, like other languages that are tenseless (and I'm not sure Euskara is tenseless), they use verb aspect to delineate whether or not an action has completed (essentially past tense), as well as the regular use of the ergative case, one of the more confusing grammar-related concepts around (that a deep-dive doesn't clear up as much as show how many grammar rules one has forgotten in thirty years).

Nowadays, my interest in the mystery of where the Basque came from has fallen off in favor of a different mystery: how, over the course of five- to six-thousand years, were they able to keep to themselves so diligently?  Historically, mountains slow armies, not keep them out forever. The Celts, the Romans, the Germanic-tribes, the Moors, even Franco's bullying and murder only led to losing some of their language heritage, which they've since gained some of it back. It has to have been a conscious effort. 

Today, the people and language have given us names like the Bay of Biscay, as well as the city name of Bilbao.

Kinda makes me want to see what other languages trace back so far in specific places...I'm thinking the Amazon basin, Papua/New Guinea, or maybe even the aboriginal languages of the Americas or Australia...