This isn’t my official Thursday post. That’ll show up later.

But I wanted to do a little something extra for the holiday. So here’s a link to my story “Timmy and Tommy’s Thanksgiving Secret.”

Now pass the stuffing.

…the world would be a lot better off without us. It’s the day before Thanksgiving so I have been contemplating what there is to give thanks for. I hate to admit I am a nihilist, but I really do feel it would an overall benefit to the world if human beings were, I dunno, raptured to some other alternate reality. It wouldn’t be an unqualified good. Dogs, for instance, would dramatically reduce in numbers. About 100,000 years ago, dogs bet the farm, evolutionarily speaking, on us. It’s been one hell of a successful gamble for the species, although not necessarily a good thing for a lot of particular dogs. The overall number of cows and chickens would also be drastically reduced. Wild cattle and wild chickens are far less successful than their domesticated cousins.

It’s too late for a lot of things, too. The Passenger Pigeon is still toast, even if we stop having children today. The McMurdo Ice Shelf is still pretty much reduced. I don’t know what happens to the atmosphere. We’ve dumped a lot of carbon dioxide into it and it could be that it’s already oscillating towards some other equilibrium. I read P.D. James’ The Children of Men and I don’t know that I like the idea of a society without children. I think it would be a very strange thing indeed. I don’t believe in the Singularity. But if we all disappeared tomorrow, in 100 years, it seems to me that for most life on the planet–marine, insect, plant–life would be different in a way that pleases me. No one would be killing off species while understanding the consequences of their actions but being unable to bring themselves (as a species) to stop doing it.

That’s the thing. I hate that we know we’re doing it. And that we are having such difficulty stopping. I live in a nice big house that eats up large quantities of resources and is part of a city complex that has vastly change the ecosystem where I live. (And that’s without even talking about fire ants. Lets not get into fire ants.)

I don’t even think we’re unnatural. I think we’re just as much a part of evolution as everything else. I just think we’re the equivalent of the Permian-Triassic transition/extinction event. And aesthetically and morally I dislike being part of it. The only thing I can say that I’ve done that in any way shows any commitment to improving the planet is to not have children. I went out and got one anyway, by marrying his father, but I didn’t actually add one to the existing pool. This seems a paltry gesture. I didn’t actually want to do the whole childbearing thing, so that made it an easy sacrifice.

So today I went out and bought food for Thanksgiving. Most of it trucked long distances and involving, I am sure, vast water and fuel resources. And tomorrow we’ll cook it and eat it. I won’t think about this much. I love Thanksgiving, it’s my favorite holiday. I wish that everybody would be sitting down to a good meal tomorrow without fear or suffering. I don’t hate people. I don’t want bad things to happen to people. Some of my best friends are people. I’m just not sure I approve of our existence.

Have I mentioned that Rachael is living in one of those goddam hippie communes in Austin?

You can imagine how horrified I am at that.

Every year, they have a birthday party to celebrate the founding of the goddam hippie commune about thirty years ago.

The latest one was last weekend. A few people showed up.

They sat around and quietly reminisced.

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Pic Credit to: Anna Raab, from FaceBook.

Bob Guz was in Los Blues Guys toward the end. He was in the Terraplanes for much of its too-brief existence. Bob is an amazing rhythm guitarist. He has a singing voice that I’d kill to have, and is an all-around helluva guy. His wife Lyda is warm, bright, and gorgeous.

What in the hell, you may perhaps be asking, does this have to do with ukuleles?

It so happens that Bob is also in the world’s greatest ukulele band:

Shorty Long

Brad and I went out and saw them at a neat, funky, Austin bar (is there any other kind?) last year.

They were a revelation.

Believe it or not, I wasn’t always a big ukulele music fan. But I am after that night. They seriously rocked. All of them are excellent musicians, and their singer, Mysterious John, is the distillation of all cabaret singers who ever lived.

I bought their album, ‘Taters’, and adore it. Bob is the spiffy-looking third guy from the left in the pic above, incidentally.

You can stream two of their songs for free at SoundClick.

Yeah, I know, you think I’m being hyperbolic. Listen to ‘Nancy From Nancy’, and you’ll be a convert, too.

They’re scheduled to play at the Hole in the Wall three times next month. If you live within flying distance of Austin, I heartily recommend that you make the effort to catch one of their gigs.

Pic credit: www.shortylong.com

Walter Jon Williams pointed out this amazing video over on Glumbert. Link. (with subtitles!)

Nearly as amazing is this rendition of Nirvana’s “Smells Like Teen Spirit” by the Ukelele Ochrestra of Great Britain.

The only thing it needs is more cowbell.

The Good: Rupert Murdoch has pulled the egregious book-n’-TV-show “If I Did It”, featuring O.J. Simpson thumbing his nose at the world. Not, mind you, because it was in mind-numbingly bad taste, but because advertisers and TV stations were refusing to support it, and the backlash against the Murdoch organization threatened to cost money. So, no, this doesn’t argue a sudden up-welling of good taste on Murdoch’s part, but it does suggest that there are places the rest of the world just won’t go. No, I don’t think this constitutes censorship: if Murdoch (or Simpson, for that matter) are dead set on airing this important set of documents they can do so–but they’ve been warned that they’re unlikely to see a penny for it.

The Bad: my younger daughter hurt her knee at a synchronized skating try-out and is on crutches; I haven’t done any shopping for Thanksgiving (or Christmas!) yet; and there are tears in both the cushions of our livingroom couch, just in time for the Season of Guests. All of these things are amenable to improvement, but it’s first thing in the morning, the aforementioned YG has a middle-school tour today, and I’d really like to go back to bed rather than dealing. Oh, and I’m trying to sell my father’s house, a converted barn in the Berkshires, from 2,000+ miles away.

The Odd: from this morning’s paper, and Reuters news service, I learn that Yael Nezri, the current Miss Israel, has asked for, and recieved, permission not to carry her assault rifle during her military service; the rifle was bruising her legs, making it difficult for her to do photo shoots. Doubtless if confronted with the Enemy she will dazzle them into submission with her smile and her leggy goodness.

Among the many other things I am thankful for this week is the oddness of stories like that, and the humanity of my fellow beings. May you all have a perfectly serene and delicious Thursday.

When Rachael turned 18 in August, a lot of friends asked me how I felt about it.

“You have no idea how relieved I am,” I said. “I can no longer be prosecuted for anything she does.”

The truth was a bit more complex, of course.

I’ve begun to realize that I can’t just think my way through the changes that I have to go through now. I have to feel my way through them, too.

I feel a pervasive sense of loss at no longer being the parent of a child. She’s still the most important person in my life, but I’m not responsible for guiding the life that she’s so quickly and ferociously creating for herself. She’s grown and she’s not anyone’s baby any more.

And that means I can lighten up a lot. I don’t have to be totally responsible for two people now, just one.

There are a lot of implications attached to that. It’s not an accident that I don’t have a car anymore, as of this summer, and that I’m in the market for a motorcycle. That’s not mid-life crisis, incidentally. I had that one about thirteen years ago, and I filed for divorce a bit later.

I found that, if I was going to be her Papa, rather than this guy she used to know, in the face of Texas’s monstrous divorce/custody laws and a relentlessly hostile ex-wife, I had to become more of a grown-up than I’d ever been before. It wasn’t easy. Grown-ups have security and stability in their lives. They don’t take unecessary risks. They can’t skimp or do without important things, like medical insurance, as they could when it was just them alone.

They accumulate stuff.

There are a lot of other issues, too, but I’d like to talk about the stuff right now.

I have way too much stuff.

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Seriously.

We’re in a new golden age of television. I’m not kidding. So stop your sniggering, you over there.

Why am I making such a bold statement? ‘Cause it’s true.

Right now on almost every night of the week there is at least one outstanding program that you should be watching. Since I’m going to be going on a bit, I should give my background on my love of the idiot box.

You see, nobody knew I was fantastically nearsighted until I was eight. My mother used to say things when we were driving like, “Oooo, look at the cow in the field.” And my answer would be, “What cow?” With brilliant insight, instead of wondering if I could see the cow, she thought I was a moron. (This was a remarkable assumption on her part in light of the fact that I started reading when I was three.)

I am going somewhere with this . . . oh yeah, aside from books, the only thing I could see that wasn’t a blurry, blobby mass was the screen of our 12” portable black and white television.

Books and TV became my buddies. Both allowed me to escape from a world I couldn’t see clearly. And that leads me back to why you should be watching more TV.

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In honor of our zombie-themed blog, for your amusement, I offer this entertaining little undead nugget.

(From Mediocre Films)

(I wonder if buzzards would go after zombies…? Seems like they should.)

Steve and I went to Jack Williamson’s memorial in Portales yesterday. There are supposed to be two Locus issues coming that will be devoted to remembrances of him, and there have been tributes in the NY Times, LA Times, the Chicago Tribune, and elsewhere. Letters have flooded in from all over the world. In addition to his influence and vision, which molded the field of SF, he was just an amazingly kind, decent, modest, and loving man. He touched so many lives, including mine.

I’ve always thought it was so cool that he was a native New Mexican, too (Well, he moved here when he was eight or so, but given that he’s still got almost twice as many years here as I do, I figure he more than qualifies…) In the booklet prepared for his memorial, they printed some words of his, including what it felt like to grow up in a small New Mexican town. I could see my own childhood in his words, and in the slide show they gave, of him and his family and friends, who stood on front porches a lot like my own.

He grew up in Portales. I spent the first couple years of my life only a stone’s throw away in Roswell, and the rest in Albuquerque, a few hours to the west. Like me, he ran barefoot in summer among honeysuckle blossoms, goatheads, ants, and desert brush. At night, he too watched the meteors (and in more recent years, the satellites) track across the huge starry sky. Like me, he could always look across the hilly desert plains at the mountains on the horizon, with their thunderstorms and their verga, or he could lie back in the grass and stare up into that startling indigo-blue sky. Like me, he lived near space and military research centers and ancient Indian villages, with green chili stew and Hispanic music and churches — amid teachers and shop owners and artists and ranchers and other people eeking out a living in a poor state.

Our childhoods were separated in time, but not so very far in space, and he fell in love with the vast array of possibilities that science and technology promised, too. Not a blind love — he was concerned about its abuses — but he also saw its potential.

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Barb and I go for a walk with our three dogs every morning before sunrise. As we leave our driveway in the gray light and head toward the end of our street, our view is dominated by an enormous cell-phone tower.

I hated the thing when it was erected a few years ago, because it destroyed my illusion of rural seclusion. It’s at least three hundred feet high. I mean, it must be. It’s huge. It could be the base of a space elevator. It’s as stark and metallic as Gort the Robot in The Day the Earth Stood Still. Only a lot bigger. It wounds my blue sky and casts a shadow over my green yard.

Yet it serves a purpose, and I know it has to be somewhere. We postmodern humans, we gots to have us our cell phones.

Soon after the tower’s appearance, however, I was reminded that other residents of the world will find their own uses for man’s devices.

You see, our cell-phone tower is now the permanent nighttime home of over a hundred black-headed buzzards. Big, ugly buzzards. The kind you see playing tug-of-war with whole deer carcasses.

Every morning when Barb and I begin our walk, there they are . . . just waking up, clacking their talons on the reverberant steel and stretching their great dark wings as they prepare to leap away and soar in search of the dead.

Once, I counted a hundred and twenty of them before I decided I didn’t want to know how many there were. Sometimes the tower is black-feathered from top to bottom. Other days, there aren’t so many. But I can’t recall a morning when there were none. And those who are there always watch us as we walk by.

This must be a metaphor for something.

Barb and I always glance at each other and say the same thing:

“Look alive,” we say.

Thirty minutes later, when we return, the buzzards are leaving for their daily rounds.

They’re beautiful when they fly.

Mea culpa. The Dog ate my Homework. I will be right on time next Tuesday, scout’s honor.

Despite my children’s opinions, I am not a neurotic neat freak. Any normal person coming to my house would realize this. I was brought up in a house that was, essentially, my parents’ shared artistic project, and when I left anything lying around the family rooms, I heard about it. Thus, my room–up a ladder from the other living areas, and rarely visited by my parents–was messy. My first college room-mate found me annoyingly untidy. It really wasn’t until I got my own room at college that I started practicing a certain amount of order, because I had no other space that represented me.

As I got older and the jobs I did became more complex, I found that I needed to keep my environment at least minimally tidy, not so much because it was easier to find things, but because I found it easier to focus in an environment that was not too chaotic. I’m fine with a fair amount of disorder, but go over the line and I start to feel oppressed by it. I know where the line between acceptable and oppressive lies–but I don’t live alone. I live with three people (and a dog) who have different setpoints than mine for organizational squalor.

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