Buddha:


Betty Ford:


Barbara Kingsolver:


Ole Kirk Christiansen, inventor of Legos:


"Bo Duke" (John Schnieder):


Mary Pickford:


Mrs. Ditchman:



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Things that are new around the house:

BABY TEETH. The Little Digger's got two little whitecaps poking through, ready for steak. All theories about whether or not he's been teething are now dismissed. Sleep, anyone?

SECURITY SYSTEM. We've had the thing installed for a few years but a nice young man came by the other day and told us we could get the same service with an upgrade for $5.00 less a month. We will save every $5.00 that is being spent needlessly, so we signed up. Now, with the upgrade, every time someone opens a door or window a female robot voice upstairs announces it. Also, we're currently getting billed from both security agencies.

COUPON FILE. My sister uses a handy little file folder that she puts all her coupons from her world into. When she pulls up to a store, say, Target, she flips to "T" and peruses the Target coupons. We've tried it for a month now, and it seems to work. We keep it in the coupon drawer under piles of coupons.

BOB DOUBLE-JOGGER STROLLER. It's the Cadillac of double strollers, with it's cushy shock absorbers and a little digital speedometer/odometer/thermometer attached to the handlebar. We got it with our sizable REI rebate this year, which we usually use for a vacation, so, no vacations. Just marathon training. The odometer has never really worked and the kids just scream and cry when you put them in it. Just like a vacation.

NEW BACK GARDEN PATH. I finally got around to staining it a reddish terracotta color and it looks swell, though it was a lot more work than may have been worth it. I'm still going to have to tear out a bunch of the rocks to retrofit the irrigation for the grass that's supposed to grow between them. Not really looking forward to it, but then again I am. The Tax Commissioner recently reappraised our house at being worth a hundred grand less. I'm hoping the two aren't connected.

LIGHTBULBS. I went to stock up on light bulbs the other day. We typically use 60 watt incandescents around here but they now only sell 57 watt bulbs to save the environment. This is good news because those compact fluorescents are environmentally unsafe -break one and a puff of mercury dust fills your living room and you have to call in a hazardous materials team to clear a perimeter around your house. The future is looking dim.

BUTTERFLY GARDEN. Plants are popping up! The butterflies have yet to arrive, but we await their glorious homecoming with baited breath and uncontained anticipation. Hoping the flowers come out before the summer water rationing kicks in.

2008 TOYOTA SEQUOIA. Just kidding. (I can dream can't I?)


~

Got every Ditchman out on the course of the Carlsbad 5000 this weekend! Even the Little Digger, who courageously Bjorned his way to the Junior Carlsbad finish line with Mommy on his back. The big race boasts itself as the premiere 5K event in the world, with its 16 world records. (Yes, there is a 5K world record. It happens locally.) There are over 12,000 runners, most of whom crowd the beer garden in the end. Please note that children and babies are not allowed in the beer garden. So what does everyone do? Park the stroller with the kids on one side of the plastic barrier and stand and drink beer on the other side. It's the Carlsbad way.

The weather was perfect and the teeming throng cheerful. Parking was no serious problem in that so many races are staggered, and if you made it out of there without your car battery going dead and your gas tank accidentally depleted then you probably had a slightly better day than us, though only slightly -we used the wait time to order a tasty Port pizza.

Most impressive was my friend Steve who ran his first official 5K in thirty years. He'd always been a cross-country enthusiast until he endured open-heart surgery years ago, more or less ending his daily runs. The doctors proclaimed his heart "good to go!" eventually, but like so many of us he found himself too busy, too tired, too preoccupied with everything else in life to get back into it.

So he was prodded, and fell headlong into a certain commitment of running a 5K "without stopping" at age 56. I had him on a rigorous training program with hills, distance, and the all-important walk breaks. He took to it good-humored and willingly, though it was clearly a challenge. Sunday morning he completed the Men's Masters event, running all the way to the finish, somewhere in the back of the pack. He was stoked, and the beer tent welcomed him.

It was a big stoke for me to be a part of it, actually, seeing someone fight it out to the finish. The body tries to trick the mind forevermore, and the wisdom of the runner is to figure out when to take the body seriously. I imagine if someone cut open my chest and replaced a few parts on my heart, I might be taking every small pain thereafter as an indicator of imminent, all-out, corporal failure. Steve was an inspiration.

And now the hard part for the guy: going goal-less into that dull, hopeless limbo between events... Do you keep up the training? Do you go farther, faster, higher in spite of it all? You deserve the break, no doubt, but with the glorious respite comes the nagging temptation to preoccupy yourself with being too busy, too tired, too whatever -again- however legitimate. Of course, I was pushing him to go full marathon.

People think that marathons are hard. They are, but that 26.2 miles isn't nearly as hard as the thousand miles you run when training for the thing. And it's not just a thousand miles of running, but a hundred times of begging off other things on the schedule when no one else understands, a hundred times of convincing your spouse how important it is, a hundred times of this-is-more-important-than-that-even-though-I'd-rather-do-that-which-doesn't-involve-pain-and-exhaustion. And then there's the long, hard lesson of learning when your body is telling you the truth, and when it's lying to you to get out of it. No one understands but you, as you battle that infinite derision from everyone at rest, including yourself.

I used to think anyone could do a marathon, but I was wrong: running is not for the proud. It is for the humble. There were over 12,000 runners in the race yesterday. How many losers does that make?

Got a busy week. Making shade.


~

Saturday mess:



It's an animal meeting. The lion sleeping under the tree has not been invited because "he's too scary."


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There are people who want to be my friend on Facebook, and I have no idea who they are. DENIED. No, wait... maybe they're all kids from camp or something? Or something. I know one person who uses their husband's account and then asked to be my friend, but I've never heard of the guy. Since I knew her years ago, before she got married, it took me a long time to figure this out. Look, if you can't be bothered to have your own Facebook account, I can't be bothered to be friends with a friend of yours so that we can "connect". Aren't we all just barely, loosely, connected by Facebook anyway? It's all one big computerized relational tangent.

And, no, I didn't really DENY them, nor did I IGNORE them. I just let the friend request hang there. If there was a PROVE YOURSELF option, I might be clicking on that repeatedly. There are a few folks who actually changed their first name somewhere in the past twenty years and then asked to be my friend, which was confusing, but I recognized the profile photos. Still, I required them to PROVE THEMSELVES through email and Facebook messaging and such. What else am I gonna do? Just be friends with everyone?

People do. Actually, I enjoy Facebook. It's pretty commitment-free and stress-free and I'm having fun with it, though I admit the novelty is wearing off. Yesterday, Mrs. Ditchman asked me if I got her "poke" and I said no, I haven't been on Facebook in a few days. I asked why she didn't just poke me here, in person, in the living room? So she did. It was nice. She did it lovingly, and with a smile. No Facebook necessary.

Waiting for Facebook: The Movie. I suppose it would be a charming, offbeat romance.

Yesterday, nearly everything went wrong. The first seven things go wrong and you get mad. The second seven things go wrong and you just shake your head and laugh. Seven more and you're questioning God's existence and indulging in nihilism, at which point there is no "wrong" and everything just happens in random sequence, if there is such a thing. Then you get sad and lonely and afraid of death. Then you go back to work.

But I had forgotten my tape measure yesterday, making work a bit frustrating. Back to Square One.

I'm looking forward to my weekend, though! (Hope you are, too).


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Working up the street from this today:



In beautiful Point Loma, home to the western terminus of Interstate 8. The eastern terminus of Interstate 8 is a middle-of-nowhere crossroads just south of Casa Grande, Arizona. There's a Texaco station with a mini-mart there, where I stopped once and bought an audio cassette labeled simply: "Banjo Music". It had a maroon cover, and no musicians were mentioned in the liner notes. I used to play that tape constantly, on the road in my beat-up '81 Honda Civic hatchback, which I drove across the country twice, in both directions. It made for a fitting, upbeat soundtrack. Pieces of the car dangled in the wind, broke off, and tumbled to the shoulder when I played that tape. The angels would laugh, smack their heads.

I lent the tape to my college roommate, or gave it to him, and then I never saw it again. All of life becomes so suddenly crestfallen when the banjo music is turned off, you know? For years afterward I looked through those spinning racks of old audio tapes in every roadside gas station I ever went to and never saw it again. Eventually the audio tapes in all those dusty racks were replaced with CDs, and now everyone has an iPod, and you can find any music in the world in just a few seconds by going online. Some fun is gone, as in, the fun of finding that one album of music that you've been searching everywhere for.

I admit that even today when I see an old rack of audio tapes in a mini-mart, I peruse it for "Banjo Music" -that timeless, classic album, but those racks of cassette tapes are becoming even harder to find now. Funny how they all quietly disappeared, and no one seemed to notice.

The car is long gone, too. Sold it to the Smog Authority, which was paying people to get old polluting cars off the highway. I got $500 for it, and had paid $250 for the car orginally, so I doubled my money. The thing was priceless, however, having showed me my nation.


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UNBELIEVABLE. I am a fantastic horse's ass for being such a doubter. I was all set to do the whole I-told-you-so write-up today when the Woz pulls out the most stunning upset in primetime television since... well... pick anything.

I guess he does have it in him after all. (Must be all that deft Segway training he does on the side.) But to think that he has had the most consistently low scores of any dancer in any season, and then to come out last night and blow everyone away. It was, man... it was nothing but a testament to the comeback human spirit that lies in wait within all of us.

The best part was when he was asked about his successful performance and he whipped out his iPhone to show off the new DWTS app he downloaded, which had every move of every dance in that little quickstepping series of graphics. That was hilarious. "Seriously, I couldn't have done it without the iPhone," he proclaimed, in a masterful bit of blatant unashamed marketing.

The most surprised was Woz's partner, Karina Smirnoff, who had a stunned look on her face during most of the dance, amazed that the computer geek was pulling it off. “I’ve never had so much chemistry with somebody dancing on the floor,” Karina said after the dance. Right. And then, intent on overstating what was already overstated, she added, “I didn’t even see anybody else in the ballroom but you. You’re amazing.”

So, clearly, I am no clairvoyant when it comes to reality-based tv shows disguised as dance competitions. Unfortunately for everyone involved, I'm going to have to keep covering these events until all the Mac addicts in the world stop voting for the guy. Please. I implore thee. Spare us. Spare us all.

Tom Conroy, still reporting from his torture chamber in Gitmo, does the real brave reporting here.


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