The local entertainment weekly is most fond of its redesigned masthead, and had no idea that the “d” and the decorative “T” combined to make a pi symbol. I wrote them, of course. Graphic designers: gotta watch ’em.

In that spirit, remember that today, March 14,2015  is Pi Day: 3/14/15, aka 3.14159…. to infinity. Pi is the most celebrated of all irrational numbers, those ratios which never resolve no matter how many decimals you divide to.

Irrationality that never ends. Does life imitate math, or what?

I worked at home yesterday; student protesters blocked the entrances to the university that employs my wife and me.

My department anticipated the troubles and sent us all home with our laptops. We VPN’d and Chatted and Shared and Emailed the day away; you really can’t escape work anymore. Not anywhere there’s broadband, which is everywhere.

The students protested ever-higher tuitions; they protested overcrowded classrooms and dorms; they protested police intimidation; they protested a lot of damned things which will not be made better by shutting down the university for a day or blocking the highway into town for a few hours — which they also did.

“Why don’t they protest peacefully? Why do they disrupt OUR lives?” Such whiny questions were heard from the university staff, the locals, even the Chancellor himself. But they should know why:

Peaceful demonstrations don’t get noticed. If you want somebody’s attention, you need to stir things up.

Today’s protests won’t change anything today; but you’ve got to start somewhere. You need to draw the crowd’s attention to the problem and to how you feel about it, whether they’re happy to be drawn, or not.

And If enough students think long enough and get mad or desperate enough about conditions at dear old University, they might come up with a real zinger of a tactic or campaign or organization that shakes the university system from the bottom to the top.

It could take years. Longer. But… you’ve gotta start somewhere.

In that spirit, I’d like to list a few things that I learned about university life this year. Many are the years I’ve worked for University, but recently I transferred to the Office of the Registrar (aka, The Rej) where students and their problems wash up against the teller windows 20 feet from my desk. The Rej hears everything.

Starving Students is Not Just a Cliche

Many students stay in university by the skin of their financial teeth; and if they lose a grant or a job or have to pay a new fee, something’s got to give. That “something” can be food.

A university social worker meets with students who struggle with university life: miss a lot of classes, fail multiple courses at one time, pile up the incompletes. “The first thing I ask them,” she told us, “is, ‘Have you eaten today?” The answer, often, is no. Funny how your academic career goes to hell when you’re too hungry to concentrate.

She hooks them up with food pantries. She helps them apply for the food stamps that they usually don’t know that they deserve. When she can, she throws supermarket gift cards at them to tide them over until the real aid arrives. Then, when they’ve eaten and can think, she wades into their academic issues. Sixteen thousand students share 1.5 social workers.

The Rej workers always pool together money for a worthy cause come Christmas. This year we gave it all to the social worker, for supermarket cards. Because, like my Oklahoma relatives used to say, it shouldn’t oughta be that way.

Tyler and Ashley Aren’t Going to Grow Up if You Don’t Let Them

At University, students register for classes through an online portal. They consult the online catalog and class schedule and maybe an adviser, if they can get an appointment; they plan what they’re going to take; they work out their schedules. They learn to log in early on the first day of registration to claim their seats in sought-after classes. Most get the hang of this e-bureaucracy; some struggle.

But some don’t have to. They give their portal passwords to their parents. Their parents interpret the schedules, read the requirements, and log in early on the big day to set things up. Tyler and Ashley just go where they’re told.

Half the benefit of university comes from learning to handle yourself. This can’t end well.

AP Classes Get Retaken at University

College counselors don’t believe that the study-and-cram AP courses in high school really teach the kids much beyond how to pass the test. For AP credit that falls within the students’ major course of study, most counselors heavily recommend taking the university course that the AP class was supposed to replace. And many students do.

My suggestion to parents: if Tyler and Ashely are up for it, skip the AP and enroll them concurrently in community college while they’re still in high school. They’ll do real college work in a real college environment and put some real transfer units under their belts by the time they hit 18. They’ll be ready.

And y’know, if at community college they discover that their passion lies in heating, ventilating and air conditioning systems, is that a bad thing at all?

The Roofs Leak

I caught up with one of the university’s two carpenters a few months back. Ten years ago, before budget cuts, there were seven. There’s an almighty backup of work orders for maintenance of all types.

He introduced me to a new concept: Leak Season. “When the rains come, you’re going to have blue tarps on half the roofs on campus. There’re leaks everywhere.”

Those roofs need replacing. They’ve passed their operational lifespans. But there’s no money. Just blue tarps. The buildings look okay from ground level, he told me, but not when you look at them from above.

I used to work in University fundraising. Oddly, all the millions we raised couldn’t buy one more carpenter. Big donors want to fund things that they can put their names on. Although I suppose that we could issue the carpenters promotional t-shirts: “Funded by the David and Lucille Packard Foundation,” or something like that.

People are going to University for the Wrong Reasons. And That’s No Accident

Parents send their children to university, increasingly, to train for a good job. To be of use to the powers that be, and thus be richly rewarded by them. In the minds of many, nothing else can justify the high cost of college.

But the original reason for college to exist — the classic liberal education — is to learn how the world works. To understand how the powers that be, came to be. To understand how they came to rule, and why. So that you can become one of them yourself, or work with them, or even say: “The powers that be should not continue to be.”

Money has drained out of public universities for 30 years. The students have to bear most of the cost themselves. And so some students think, who wants to spend $40K to study human society? I need a job!

Money did flow back to public universities through private gifts and grants from the powerful: for science, technology, engineering, math. The useful subjects that teach people how to do. Not so much to sociology, psychology, anthropology, history: the dangerous subjects that teach people how to think.

Some young people still want to understand how the world works, and thus to change it. They pursue a liberal education, though it may not lead them to prosperity or even comfort.

But you’ve got to start somewhere. And to do that, you’ve got to find somewhere to start.

We were late getting home from work this evening. My plan had been to drop Rhumba off and head out for an evening with my yoga and men’s club, the Lords of Shavasana (reputedly the most difficult of all yoga poses). I had four minutes to travel five miles through heavy traffic.

I phoned the Atomic Grandpa, tonight’s host, to say that I’d be late, and not to hold the session for me. Then I turned to go, my dinner bag of deli in in my hand. I’d bought for us both: antipasto sandwich and bean salad for me, avocado and cheese with pasta salad for her. And a piece of cheesecake, just because.

“You know, you don’t have to go,” Rhumba told me shyly. “You could stay here. We could put our dinners together and have a feast.”

The house is an utter wasteland. We’re having the first floor painted; everything’s out of place or covered with stacks of other things. Including the dining room table, the kitchen counters, and any chair that a cat wasn’t sitting on.

Rhumba never holds me back from meets with other guys; clingy, she is not. But perhaps this was a time to stay, not go; and suddenly, I wanted to. I picked up the phone again and told the AG that my wife required my presence at home.

“We Lords always blame our absence on our wives,” I explained, putting down the phone.

“Women do the same thing,” Rhumba said. We cleared off the table and made a little picnic amidst the chaos, eating our sandwiches, picking at each other’s salads, and splitting the cheesecake.

And we talked of the old days: of places we’d lived and how we got to be there. Of how we’d met and the people who’d brought us together, good and bad, intentionally and unintentionally. Of old lovers and almost-relationships, of a close webwork of mutual friends, of a decade when we were the best of friends but attached to other people and what kind of hell that put the “other people” through — because her boyfriend had cheated on her with my soon-to-be-girlfriend, and they couldn’t imagine that we weren’t talking about that, or doing what they did.

We weren’t. We didn’t. It was the most chaste, honorable waste of ten years together that you could possibly imagine, and everybody knew it except us. Except that it’s this sort of thing that makes me glad I’m an aging 16-year-old who takes life and obligations more seriously than the cool kids. They sat there and let their imaginations torture them while we ate pasta at Ernesto’s and talked business and life while the San Francisco fog blew past the open doors and the waiters handed glasses of house red to anyone who had to wait for a table.

After my relationship broke up, Rhumba even fixed me up with another woman, a presentable housemate who habitually bemoaned the lack of good men. I went with her for awhile; even tried to take her to see my folks, but she wouldn’t go. “You’re always so serious,” she scolded me. Well, yeah. She was a perpetual grad student from New England money, one of those melancholy people who pretends that life is a cabaret but doesn’t believe it. “i’ll get tired of you one of these days and dump you,” she’d say brightly, and giggle. And yet made no effort to move on. In the end, I dumped her. I had just enough self-respect not to hang around for the sex alone. Of course she never spoke a word to me again.

“She was really like that?” Rhumba asked. “I thought she was looking for a real relationship. She was always reading the personal ads.”

“She told me she thought you wanted me for yourself,” I told her. That was  true, she admitted, but if I’m a boy scout, Rhumba’s a girl scout (and she has the badges to prove it), and nothing came of it until her relationship also ended.

In the meantime there’d been a not-quite-relationship with a semi-famous novelist who Rhumba admired and had corresponded with. They discovered mutual interests in writing and gardening; she became his personal assistant for a time, and he made a serious offer of marriage. In the end Rhumba determined that he was obtaining services, not a soulmate, but couldn’t actually tell the difference. He eventually found a taker, and apparently there was one hell of a pre-nup involved.

I can’t quite remember how I came to it; but one day, with both of us free, I showed up at Rhumba’s door with a dozen red roses. I wasn’t nervous; I knew how she’d respond. The only uncertainty: were we actually insane to let it go this long?

For a veteran couple like ourselves, remembering  old times is a reaffirmation of why we got together.  Memories strengthen and renew the bonds we forged so long ago, so that we can venture on together secure in our love. The poet of the skies, Antoine de St. Euxbery, said that love does not consist in gazing at each other, but in looking outward together in the same direction.

Dinner done, I reached across the table with an extended pinky finger. Rhumba grasped it with one of hers. It’s a thing we do.

(A short story:  not a masterpiece.  But if you don’t keep writing, you don’t get better.  Enjoy.)

His seat-mate Chad (“Hi, I’m CHAD! Here’s my card!”) could talk endlessly about multi-level marketing and the success to be had therein. And did. Especially for a product called “Legal Herbs.”

But when the seatbelt light went out, Chad immediately bolted for the lavatory: a short, jittery man with a fixed smile for whoever or whatever loomed near.

Bob grabbed a drink — all right, two — and considered a seating change. The plane was half-empty; Anchorage lay four hours distant.

But he considered himself a student of people. Kept at arm’s length, Chad might prove interesting. Or at least memorable.

Bob finished his drink. The pilot spoke: altitude was 25,000 feet; all was well. Chad continued to be absent. Bob reached for a book: Zen and the Art of Technical Support.

And then Chad loomed over him, spouting gibberish and smelling like burnt oregano. There followed an interlude of multiple flight attendants, a little light scuffling, and some discussion of legal herbs and their effects. Chad, in the end, had his seat again, a warning from the co-pilot, and eyes the color of ripe tomatoes.

“How are you feeling now?” Bob asked with real concern. He’d smoked the occasional Mystery Joint himself.

“Okay, I guess,” Chad answered in a distant voice. “I feel like something sucked out my mind and put it in an android in the year 15,000.” He gripped Bob’s wrist and leaned into his face.

He hissed, “BECAUSE THAT’S WHAT REALLY HAPPENED.”

“I’ll listen to anything you want to say,” Bob said, shakily. “Just stay calm, and relax.”

“I’m calm.” Chad sank back in his seat, breathing heavily. “I’m relaxed.” His eyes scanned the cabin wildly. “Just let me tell you….”

And he did. Chad had a vision of the future, and it was a mash-up of Edgar Rice Burroughs and Blade Runner seen through a broken kaleidescope. In the year 14,500, after doing every possible thing under the sun, mankind decided to push off from Earth and start doing it under some other sun. They left behind scads of empty cities, piles of cast-off scientific marvels, a few hundred thousand die-hards who refused to leave, and several races of savage mutants that came out of hiding once the coast was clear.

The remaining humans had their hands full fighting off the mutants and figuring out how to work the left-over scientific marvels. They retreated to several walled cities which they defended with death rays and swords while wearing very little clothing.

The humans were losing until their amateur technologists figured out how to fire up an android factory, and also how to use a time machine that had been clearly labeled DO NOT TOUCH. They understood it enough to see the past, and to suck the souls of past humans forward in time and install them in the android soldiers.

“It was like the French Foreign Legion,” Chad said. “Except that everybody was seven feet tall with glowing eyes and impenetrable skin. People from all different places and times. We defended the human colonies. We fought the mutants. There was the green kind with six arms and frog faces, and the humanoid cats, and oh man, the winged monkeys. They were the worst.

“We fought with them on the city walls, we fought them over treasure and technology in the old cities. Killed a lot of things, blew up a lot of things. It’s all a blur. But I was there for 70 years and never got old. Had a lot of sex, too. It was AWESOME.”

“I thought you were an android,” Bob said.

“I was a very good android.” Chad giggled. “I had android lovers and human lovers.I was bunking with my human commander when the mutants pulled a sneak attack on City Prime. That’s all I remember. Then I was back in the lavatory.”

Bob, an amateur writer, had been typing notes into his laptop. “So why aren’t you dead?”

“I ‘m dead in the future. They told me that if my body was ever destroyed, my mind would snap back through time to the present. And it has.”

“Okay,” Bob said. “Time Travel 101: now that you have all this knowledge about the future, couldn’t you change the timeline? Didn’t they worry about that?”

“No. They only take people who are absolutely going to die in their time. I probably have two or three more minutes. ” Chad’s face went sympathetic, in a detached sort of way. “Oh, and you, too. Sorry.”

This was too good. In his mind Bob was already writing the outline for a cheap but flashy science fiction novel that might actually sell. “So what’s going to happen?” he asked, typing vigorously.

Chad looked him in the eye, and there was something new there, something that hadn’t been there a half-hour ago. “Nothing. It’s just the drugs.” He looked toward a window and fell silent.

Chad, silent? It creeped Bob out more than any raving drug dream. He looked around the cabin. There was nothing to see.

Except for the seven-foot disc of light that blocked the passage to the lavatories. Through it stepped a generously-built young woman dressed in little but weapons and equipment straps. Everybody froze.

“Your attention please,” she called redundantly. “Is there a Chad Burbage on this aircraft?”

Chad shot out of his seat. “Fleena! You got the time travel to work!”

“It took 40 years.” She gathered Chad in one arm and kissed him passionately. “My, you’re short . We can fix that. ”

“Hey, Bob, it’s my old C.O! I’m going home! Maybe you should come with!”

“Go through now,” Fleena told him, and shoved the little man into the light. She faced the frozen passengers.

“I’m done. The portal will remain for 90 seconds. At that point this aircraft will intersect a flock of tundra swans. The port engine will suck in a bird and explode. The portal will vanish when the plane loses stability. You will all spin in to the ocean below. You will all die. Your bodies will never be found.

“Or you can go through this portal, be made young and strong, and spend the rest of your life fighting mutants in the far future. And having lots of sex, I’ll bet Chad mentioned that.

“I’ve seen how you people live. Mutants and sex are nothing but a step up for you.

“See you on the other side, or not.” She threw them a salute and stepped through.

The golden disk floated at the front of the cabin. Passengers began to whisper among themselves. The airliner bored on through the sky. Seconds ticked by as everyone watched everyone else.

“What about the cats?” an older woman whispered to her grey-haired husband. “They’ll live,” he assured her. They struggled out of their seats and, hand in hand, stepped through the portal.

Nobody else moved. Bob closed his laptop. He stared at the portal. It stared at him. He knew he had to make a decision. And that making no decision, was a decision.

Chad had proved to be a very interesting person, after all.

Civil servants rubber chickens Carl Sagan NordicTrack
Surfers roofers college students Assam Breakfast iPhone app
Chilly weather sunshine darkness cat food vet bill dentist plaque
Redwood fencing health insurance decent doctor heart attack

So, what’s on your mind?

Inspiration, like water, flows downhill. Some years ago I began depicting faces in stained glass — using only the glass itself, without painted-on features. Technically I’m not great with glass, but I made some progress. Perhaps I’ll take it up again someday.

If you know anything about glass, you know that it only cuts naturally in certain directions. You can push the limits, even go beyond them with the right tech. But aping the smooth transitions of the human face with pieces of glass and copper foil? Not so easy.

Fortunately, I had a book to show me the way. Back in the ’70s, before digital photography, each summer a traveling photo studio followed the county fair circuit in the western states. The studio offered fast, cheap large-format black and white portraits of you, your family, your buds, or whoever you cared to pile into the box-like studio-on-wheels. I remember seeing it at the local fairs back when I was a teen.

This wasn’t what you’d call subtle photography; the studio crew shot, cooked, printed, dried and delivered in 15 minutes. It needed high contrast, powerful can’t-fail lighting. But the product was portraiture that working people could afford. They could dictate how they wanted to be seen, like the patrons of posh society photographers .

After a while the portrait shooter, Mikkel Aaland, realized that he had something special and began asking customers for photo releases when he got a particularly striking portrait. Eventually, he published a book called County Fair Portraits that shows off the most affecting portraits. If you follow the link, you’ll see some of them.

All those very human faces etched with lines in high relief: they showed me exactly how to cut the glass. They gave me some ideas about shadowing, too. The glass panel above was inspired by a portrait of an Apache woman taken at the Arizona state fair. Again, follow the link and you’ll see the original image.

I got three glass panels out of that book. Below find the last one I cut, a qualified success; my attempt at glass painting to indicate shadow eventually went wrong; the paint deteriorated.

The original photo was of a 80-year-old cattle rancher, a cheerful man. I gave him a backdrop of blue sky filled with spectral cows who might have nuanced feelings, if cows can, about his long career. I choose this photo in part because it much resembled my mother’s second husband — an outwardly friendly and generous man with a well-concealed dark side.

All this became possible because Aaland thought to keep his negatives.  County Fair Portraits was not a huge success — I got my copy, remaindered, 30 years ago — but I keep finding people who know it and were inspired by it. Inspiration runs downhill, brings nourishment to others’ imaginations. They, in turn, may inspire others.

The Internet is full of photos, but Aaland provides context and background — a larger portrait of a time and place and social strata, the people who lived in it, and how they chose to see themselves. You can lose yourself in it. The book sits on my shelf and inspires, to this day. I pick it up almost every time that I notice it.

Welcome to yet more police blotter haiku, true tales of crime and error in a mere 17 syllables. The pic above is from my book of such haiku, perpetually on sale at the Great Beast. The haiku below are not from the book; I’m still writing new ones.

I wouldn’t have nearly as much material to work with without all the states who pass “open carry” laws. I should be grateful — I guess.

Booze, old war stories.
A gun for sale, passed around.
And then, the flesh wound.

A naked man seen
running down the state highway
appeared to be cold.

A man dressed in plaid.
Holding a Christmas present
and talking to it.

Jumping on his van,
cursing, did not help him reach
the keys locked inside.

Locked in a hot car,
a dog hits the hazard lights.
The cops scratch their heads.

It’s never over
till your ex-wife doesn’t know
where your girlfriend lives.

Busted for fishing
right next to the gigantic
“NO TRESPASSING” sign.

A thief made good use
of the sledgehammer that he
stows on the front porch.

By law he can leave
guns in an unlocked car for
thieves to steal, and did.

The constant gunfire.
It annoys her, even though
it’s just the neighbors.

Gunshots pierce the night.
“Happy New Year!” BLAMBLAMBLAM.
“Hey, get the shotgun!”

I like neon.

You see, I’m partially color-blind; the subtler shades of red, green, pink and purple are beyond me. So I’m drawn to bold colors; and no colors shine brighter or purer than those of a neon sign. I’m fortunate to live in a town where vintage neon survives, and new neon still appears.

A lighted plastic sign merely shines. But neon burns in the air. It does somersaults. It flashes, it blinks. Glass tubes channel glowing gases into words and shapes of blue, orange, red, white, and yellow fire. They hang in the air, flaming, like the words of an impressive, if commercial, deity.

The glory days of neon are past; other technologies outcompete neon in cost and installation, ease of maintenance, power usage, even brightness. But not style. Glass is a liquid, and the glass tubes of neon, argon, and other gases paint the sky, and anything reflective, with shapes that have the fluid, organic nature of life itself.

Moreover, neon tubes glow with a depth that shames the flat light of fluorescent tubes and the eye-jarring intensity of LEDs. And so old neon is cherished, and new neon is still commissioned.

But the old neon is best; its aim is high, with impressive results. When the sun goes down, the Rio Theater’s neon draws its name on the night in elegant Moderne curves.

While the flashing, blinking, garish neon at the older Del Mar is anything but elegant. And yet the colors flare and burn gloriously. A few years ago they barely lit at all, but enthusiasts restored them.

Many venerable businesses maintain their neon well: a skating rink, a liquor store, grocery stores. We locals can’t imagine them without their trademark signs.

Some signs decline. The original patron dies or moves on, the new landlords don’t care and, tube by tube, the sign fails. A neon sign, like Blanche DuBois, survives on the kindness of strangers. Left to itself, it sinks into disgrace and decrepitude.

Little in this life is for the ages. Eventually every neon tube in existence will crack and spill its gas, every transformer will fail. Businesses move, buildings are torn down, and the glowing glass tubes will go down with them.

All the more reason to honor the folks who put their time and money into preserving these crazy, ephemeral assemblages of twisted glass tubes and wiring and glowing gas. So that for a little while, shapes of fire can be written on the night.

Although if it is true, as some physicists say, that information may never truly be destroyed, somewhere along the quantum conduits that tie together the universe there should be a cul-de-sac, an eddy, where good, dead neon signs gleam in velvety darkness for all eternity, without need of buildings for support:

A neon afterlife of glowing light and color, where the dreaming minds of the color-blind are allowed to come and visit. And smell the everlasting popcorn.

A few months ago our central heating went south, which it has done from time to time.  The repairman, who’s serviced our furnace on and off for 20 years, fixed the thing.  And then he made his pronouncement.

“This model has a rated life of 23 to 25 years, and you’re at 24.  It might make it through another winter, but if I were you I’d start saving up for a new unit.”

And then of course we forgot everything until the furnace went south again, three days before Christmas.  The HVAC company sent a different guy this time, and he made no dire prognostication; just held up a badly corroded igniter and said, “Here’s you problem.”  And he replaced it.  But if the other principal parts look even half that bad, this puppy’s on life support.  I called the HVAC people and made appointment for a nice man to come out and tell us how many thousands of dollars that this is going to cost us.  At least it’s a union shop.

It’s Christmas night, and the heater’s working away merrily; which is good, because the temperature plummeted today and tonight’s low is basically at freezing.  AI’ve spent a cozy evening at the dining room table with Rhumba, pounding out police blotter haiku while she knits sample stitch patterns for my new sweater.  My new sweater has been in the works for something approaching a decade; at this point she may be planning the Great Pullover of Ghiza.

Such is the blinding pace of life in the Boomer/Rhumba household, especially when we have the week off.  And it’s good, because frankly it’s difficult to write good haiku when your mind’s already on the affairs of the next day.  And this week, it’s not.

So I enjoyed doing this.  And I’m posting them here instead of at policeblotterhaiku.com, although they’ll end up there eventually.  Hope you enjoy them.  Merry Christmas, Happy Holidays, a Joyous Solstice.  Don’t eat or drink more than you actually enjoy.  And drop a line; getting a little echoey around here lately.

Last seen at the beach,
wearing camp colors and
hefting a chainsaw.

They’d like to break up.
But each of them holds ransom
the other’s key ring.

“Pay obeisance to
the King of Nicaragua!
And… stand me to a meal?”

Too much coke! he groaned.
Lying on the PCH,
wearing only shorts.

Was it news to him
that the cheap iPad he’d bought
from “some guy” was hot?

His whole neighborhood
can hear the porn movies that
the deaf man watches.

Others can get elbowed
shooting hoops but no, not him.
He’s calling the cops.

Two taps on the glass?
So she thought, after midnight,
alone in her bed.

He refused to leave
unless the bank gave him access
to his wife’s account.

He thought it was love.
She didn’t, and passed her card
to another man.

Hang loose in the New Year!

And thanks to the very game Santa who was happy to learn the shaka sign so that I could get this shot.