Here's the first paragraph:

Call me Ishmael. Some years ago - never mind how long precisely - having little or no money in my purse, and nothing particular to interest me on shore, I thought I would sail about a little and see the watery part of the world. It is a way I have of driving off the spleen, and regulating the circulation. Whenever I find myself growing grim about the mouth; whenever it is a damp, drizzly November in my soul; whenever I find myself involuntarily pausing before coffin warehouses, and bringing up the rear of every funeral I meet; and especially whenever my hypos get such an upper hand of me, that it requires a strong moral principle to prevent me from deliberately stepping into the street, and methodically knocking people's hats off - then, I account it high time to get to sea as soon as I can. This is my substitute for pistol and ball. With a philosophical flourish Cato throws himself upon his sword; I quietly take to the ship. There is nothing surprising in this. If they but knew it, almost all men in their degree, some time or other, cherish very nearly the same feelings towards the ocean with me.

I just love that opening from Moby Dick. I know those feelings, and believe that most men do. I had the excerpt posted up above the other day, and re-reading it reminded me how I've never actually read the whole thing. I have it saved for retirement, when I have the patient time to savor and fully digest every literary morsel, instead of glossing over it, tossing it aside, and claiming it as conquered like I would if I read it today -forgetting the page previous as I read on, and discarding any lasting memory of it as I closed the cover.

I know Moby Dick to be the only great work of American literature that will stand the test of time and last as only Shakespeare does (though some suggest that Huckleberry Finn comes pretty close.) The thing wasn't covered in any of my lit classes in college because the professors claimed it demanded 4 units all its own, as Shakespeare, Chaucer, and the Bible do. I also heard of the ongoing argument that the book falls flat with its seemingly endless descriptions of the minutiae of whaling, where some claimed that those passages are precisely what makes the book a great one. The thought of passing my time inhaling long-winded descriptions of sophisticated 19th century sailing techniques turned me off to ever reading it. I saw the movie in high school. I got the point. The white whale is God. Whatever.

When I lived at Dantean Point, Carey and I had a goldfish in a bowl. I forget the goldfish's name, but he was a reader. He read Moby Dick most of the time he was there, with the book propped up behind the bowl. (It took him a while to read it, as we would often forget to turn the page for him.) We read a lot, then, and Carey picked up the book a couple times and commented to me how great it was. "The white whale is God," I would mutter, which is like saying The Origin of the Species is about apes. Anyway, I picked up the book one day and decided to read the first and last pages, just for the helluvit, and I never forgot them.

Here's the end (spoiler alert):

It so chanced, that after the Parsee's disappearance, I was he whom the Fates ordained to take the place of Ahab's bowsman, when that bowsman assumed the vacant post; the same, who, when on the last day the three men were tossed from out the rocking boat, was dropped astern. So. floating on the margin of the ensuing scene, and in full sight of it, when the half-spent suction of the sunk ship reached me, I was then, but slowly, drawn towards the closing vortex. When I reached it, it had subsided to a creamy pool. Round and round, then, and ever contracting towards the button-like black bubble at the axis of that slowly wheeling circle, like another ixion I did revolve. till gaining that vital centre, the black bubble upward burst; and now, liberated by reason of its cunning spring, and owing to its great buoyancy, rising with great force, the coffin like-buoy shot lengthwise from the sea, fell over, and floated by my side. Buoyed up by that coffin, for almost one whole day and night, I floated on a soft and dirge-like main. The unharming sharks, they glided by as if with padlocks on their mouths; the savage sea-hawks sailed with sheathed beaks. On the second day, a sail drew near, nearer, and picked me up at last. It was the devious-cruising Rachel, that in her retracing search after her missing children, only found another orphan.

The ship sinks, and Ahab goes down with the white whale. Ishmael is saved afloat by the coffin that his friend Queequeg was building for himself. Round and round he floats in that vortex... What's the book about again? Man, I could analyze those two paragraphs all night, but there's not enough beer.

So, one day I'll get around to reading it. If my kids are forced to read it in high school, I'll read it with them. It's an important book, however long and hard. Sometimes you've gotta stick with something if you want to get the full benefit, which is what I remind myself as I scan old photographs into the computer or turn the soil in my garden boxes. I suspect Melville himself knew this, and thought long and hard about it when he famously deserted the whaling ship Acushnet in the Marquesas in July of 1842, and lived with cannibals for a month. Ten years later Moby Dick would be published. It would be considered a failure and Melville would die forty years after that, almost completely forgotten.

Many editions of the book were printed without that last page, incidentally, when the publisher botched it big time. That couldn't have helped.

I think I remember reading that Melville said we should, or do, all have some undying passion that we live to the end of our days for, as Ahab did, and it's something that one should both nurture and guard against. One might say that Moby Dick itself was Melville's Moby Dick, and that we all have a big Moby Dick that we might want to be wary of. Heh. But, like I said, not enough beer.

Have a fine weekend! (Don't rush it!)


~

Banged out the job in "The Coffin" yesterday in record time so that Mrs. Ditchman could hand me the children and get to her appointments today. Not sure what I would have done if I didn't finish. Strap one kid on the tool belt and tether the other to the ladder and go at it today, I guess. That's a family business.

We've had several customers who've chosen to go with our company precisely because we are a family business, and we appreciate their support! Lots of folks do this, I imagine, in an effort to keep corporate America at bay and enrich the livelihood of the real folk. Unfortunately most people don't get that they run the risk of the family business contractor showing up late because of a sick kid, leaving early to get to the sitter on time, or charging a bit more because they have to provide their own health insurance. In many ways the government is less friendly to small business than it is to big corporations, I believe, but it doesn't bother me -they have more employees, with families of their own, to tend to. And I can't afford all those fancy Washington lobbiests!

So we juggle. And juggle. And juggle again. Spin the plates today, add a few beanbags tomorrow. I used to be able to get a few things done around here when we just had the one little Ditchman. Now, I'm full. More than full. I know people who have "Family Day", but in our house just about every day is "Family Day" -which is thoroughly awesome.

Except for the part where Mrs. Ditchman rushes off to work in the car with both car seats. And we're all out of diapers. And worse: no wipes.


~

It's back to El Cajon today. I did a Google Spanish-to-English translation to see if El Cajon actually meant "the canyon". It doesn't. It means "the coffin". Suddenly, I'm not that inclined to rush off to work today.

The City of El Cajon web page has a historical write-up on the place that reads as dry and hollow as the general landscape of the city. I learned nothing. But it does claim that El Cajon actually means "The Big Box Valley" yet of course we all know how public relations work, and we all know which big box they're referring to. Also, horseracing on Main Street was outlawed in 1912, so I won't be doing that on my lunch break.

The Wikipedia entry on El Cajon has the translation as "The Drawer", so it could be anything. Also, Greg Louganis is from El Cajon. Fascinating. It's fascinating, because in the sidebar it lists total water area for the city as 0 square miles. Greg started with nothing!

So, it's off to El Cajon for the day, and then the long sweet ride home to Oceanside, birthplace of Barbara Mandrell. Oceanside, California: no translation necessary.


~

I'm done with the border crossings! Glad to have that job beyond the Orange Curtain behind me. Driving the 405 was grinding down the bits of my soul I have tenderly nourished and regrown over the past 5 years, and I was beginning to feel less self-actualized and more like my old self, which I generally evade. Today I drive to El Cajon, and it's about the same distance in exactly the opposite direction, but I'm not so disturbed by it, despite the fact that I have to go by way of Murietta first, which is like going to Tijuana by way of Las Vegas. Oh well.

But I did get to go to my favorite LFS (live fish store), Tong's Tropical, which happened to be just around the corner from that last job. I didn't buy anything, though I could have spent $500 in 5 minutes -like Imelda Marcos in a shoe outlet. The place has more than doubled in size since I started going there in 2003, and I swear there is no place like it on all the west coast. I generally don't shop at Tong's, unless there's something I just can't find anywhere else, because the place is so far away and everything is overpriced... but it's a wonder to visit.

There are fish tanks, hundreds of them, arranged in a floor to ceiling labyrinth, and they are every size, shape and color, with many uniquely crafted and labeled for a specific animal or purpose like "shark" or "seahorse" or "jellyfish" or "clownfish breeder". The entire place is loudly abuzz with fans and lights and an array of plumbing that rivals hydroelectric dams and aircraft carriers. With all that water and electricity in one place, when you look up to find yourself at the back of the hall you wonder if you're going to make it to the exit without electrocuting yourself. It's an assault on the senses to go in there, with all its exotic curiosities, but the customers keep coming; hobbyists and professionals, children and old people, lots of restaurant owners, and more than a few bespectacled Asian men in expensive suits, muttering calculations to themselves as they pore over every display.

The coral sales tanks are more stunning than any displays I've seen in any of the major California aquariums, and it's unexpected in this non-descript mini-mall in the heart of Orange County. My only guess is that it's just too expensive for the museums to run all those metal halide lights and high-volume water pumps. I tried to take a few pictures, but those lights emphasize the blue spectrum (it penetrates water better and reaches the animals at a greater depth) and my camera wasn't set up for it. Trust me: when you get up close to the glass, you are blown away by the animated iridescent rainbow of other-wordly life before you.


How does the place stay in business with those utility and insurance bills? Not sure, but I think it has something to do with the fact that they've mastered the art of aquaculturing stoney corals. I know of nowhere else where they can get these things to grow so fast, so naturally. Tong's lab assistants break off a tiny branch the size of your fingernail, epoxy it to a little ceramic stand, stick it in a tank under super-bright lights and clean, turbulent seawater, and months later there's a branch of coral for $40. They grow them by the hundreds.


(I had my eye on that green doggie in the window, there, but resisted.)

Some Internet forums are very critical of Tong's Tropical, claiming the store has an inordinate amount of die-off and a high rate of incurable marine diseases and parasites. Perhaps they're right, but perhaps Tong's failure rate is so high because his success rate is so high. Perhaps Tong is a risk-taker, tireless in his pursuits. Perhaps his critics are jealous.

Tong himself is a tall, slightly chubby Asian kid who stands out front by the truck sucking down Rock Stars and smoking cigarettes in the shade. (It's pretty hot and humid in the store.) He needs a haircut. I don't really know Tong, but a lot of customers come in and pretend to. He seems like a rough, bookish, know-it-all who refuses to work for the Establishment, when he could be making big bucks out in the civilian market -which he does. I envision him using unorthdox procedures to procure rare specimens, and angrily answering late-night calls from museum "specialists" in a tight spot with their bleached acroporas and confounding phosphate levels. He's like the House of tropical fish, I suspect, and one day a backwater aquarium with low attendance and diminished public funding will hire Tong in a dimly lit bar somewhere, sending him on a low profile to isolated waters in the South Pacific to illegally acquire an endangered species using the recently banned turkey-baster-and-cyanide method that has the hobbiests up in arms. "I'm promoting awareness," he tells himself, like all zookeepers tell themselves, while the animals they love live out sad lives of confinement, misery, and affliction in their cages.

Some scientists claim that the coral reefs are rapidly becoming extinct, and that people like Tong are a threat to their survival, but others say Tong is a rogue of invertebrate husbandry. An unsung genius of aquaculture. A hero. A saviour.

Me, I just wish he was cheaper.



~

Back to the Great Archival Project! The supercomputer is online again, so I've gotten it together and waded into the morasse of stuff that needs to be digitized before file formats change and the home computer is abandoned altogether for the GDrive, wave of the future. I've been burning discs of 2008, (as I've been burned before by corrupt hard drives) and have gone back to scanning old pics. Currently, I'm diving into the old wedding day pics, which were all shot on ACTUAL KODAK FILM! (Yes, we are that old.) So it's a chore sliding those negatives into the machine, but kinda nice to see the things on the computer. I can get one roll of film digitized and photoshopped a day -and I have about thirty rolls. The goal is to get it all done and booted up to the AppleTV by March 29th and surprise Mrs. Ditchman, so I've got two months. I think I can do it. Don't tell her.

I also have a bit of video. I will never forget standing there at the reception, taking direction from the Best Man, when out of nowhere a video camera came flying through the air and landing with a crunch on the grass, right there in front of everyone. "That's Dain, our videographer for the weekend," was announced. How the camera leapt out of his hands at just that moment has never been answered, but it was a good laugh. (Dain is my little brother.) Anyway, he got it all on video -everyone laughing, upside down, POV of the lawn. Dain went on to happily sample all the wine on my wedding day. I think he was at the bar when my bride came down the aisle, as he seemed to have missed that shot. He had a fantastic time!

There were a couple guests who had video rolling, actually, so I was able to track down one of them for the footage. While I was scanning negatives the other day I noticed my mother-in-law with an old video camera that appears in a couple pics. I never got that footage! So I play the intrepid documentarian now, tracking down the "lost wedding footage" from 2003. Please Email me your leads, or whatever old pics you may have of the fabled day.

There are also a lot of prints, which takes TIME -and, man, does it ever. Over the years, a lot of people have sent us scattered remnants and I've been collecting the mess in a box. The wedding was kind of a funny, shoot-from-the-hip-in-the-middle-of-the-forest-a-few-hundred-miles-from-home sort of party, and we bolted for Hawaii immediately following and then did the big move-in together right after that. The wedding was all planned and executed in our short 4 month engagement during the Christmas holiday, and as a result, planning for the archiving of all this stuff never became much of a priority. It all sits in a couple boxes at the foot of our marital bed, and it has sat there for nearly six years -various photos, mementos, guest book, receipts from the day, invitations, Big Sur matchbooks, etc. We don't really even have a "wedding album", which is kind of odd to consider. But we do have two kids to show for it, so all the mess is justified. Anyway, I'm sick of these boxes sitting at the foot of the bed.

And we both had a lot of wine that day! I know because half a bottle was spilled down the bride's pricey, worn-once gown. (We recently picked up the dress from the Restorer. They seemed to have miraculously repaired it, though erasing the stain did make me a tad nostalgic.) I could blame the wine instead of my age, but it's getting harder to remember it all, so getting these pics and video together has become important, before it's gone forever.


By the way, can anyone tell what kind of wine this is? I was able to enlarge another shot of it. It's a '96 Napa Valley Cab with the letters "...refethen" in the name. Just thought I'd ask. Funny... I remember it not being nearly as good as the Monticelli Bros.

P.S. Found it.


(In the case that the Ditchman kids will want our story's details.)


~

It's Home Show weekend! Here's the link, in case you're wondering what all the hullabaloo is about. I set up our wares yesterday in such spectacular fashion, that all comers will surely find the stuff utterly irresistible! That is, if there are any comers. As well, there are only half has many exhibitors, in what is usually the best show of the year, so I guess it's a sign of the times. Also noticed that there are significantly fewer patio cover companies, for whatever reason. "Only the strong survive!" exclaimed Mrs. Ditchman. (Yay, capitalism.) Man, if we're 'the strong' then this country is in real trouble. The real question is, will the customers show? We'll see.

"This, too, shall pass," goes the age-old saying that makes the happy sad, and the sad happy. You don't hear that saying much in this country, and I imagine in the destitute Third World it would be every third billboard. It's a profound thought, and one best pondered in the garden, where one can see it actualized month after month, season after season. I pulled nearly everything out of the garden boxes last weekend, and it was a sad affair that went arm-in-arm with anticipatory hope. Last year's Tomatoes of Wonder are gone and now I'll turn the soil again, rotate in a new vegetable, and see what happens. It's Man's work, with God's help. Always exciting, always a chore, always in question, and never a bore.


This year I think I will educate myself a bit more on soil qualities. (Okay, I admit it can be a bore sometimes.) I used some new amendments last season to great affect, and it's high time I figured out why it happened that way. I was in Home Depot yesterday and the vendor from the veggie supplier was actually there stocking the racks. I stopped to gaze in awe at the vast potential and I think he saw the lusty gardener's glimmer in my eye and so he approached me. "Have any questions?" he asked politely. I just shook my head. Questions? Man, where do I start? "No thanks," I said. "Just checking it all out." I was planning on going with seeds this year, to save money.

So we've got a little rain here, just a mild-mannered shower that prompts the local authority to send out the We're-Still-In-A-Drought press releases. I'd like to see more rain, of course, but only when I'm not working. It's starting to warm a little, and the ground knows it. My asparagus is popping through and there are buds on the maple out back. And my daily morning exploration unveiled this:


A perfect little blue hyacinth. Planted those bulbs years ago and roundly forgot about them -as is the nature of bulb planting. Seems something is rousing down there, beneath the surface. It's a bright spot of color in the otherwise brownish yard. A tiny thing of beauty with a scent detectable at six paces, and one that sends your shovel ever forward, at that. But by the time those surrounding boxes are filled with flower and frenzy, this little hyacinth will be gone, brown and wilted, having fed its bulb for a time and then shrunk back into its floral hibernation until who-knows-when.

Have a great weekend. It's not as long as last week's and filled with work for some, but guess what? This too shall pass.


~

Woe to the Obama administration Mac users! Cracks me up that they're all on Gmail right now. (And hey presidential team: if you're using the 23" screen and have a power surge and then the screen won't come back on, switch the power adaptor up to the one for the 30" model. Just trying to help.)

I was snickering at how the president messed up the oath the other day. I thought it funny, given all the build-up about how "articulate" he is. Turns out Chief Justice Roberts screwed it up, too. The biggest guys in the room were performing a transfer of power, and here it was like strangers meeting on the sidewalk and trying to pass on the same side. So they did a presidential do-over back at the office, which is hilarious. I mean, who knew that the official oath, which is written out in the constitution, had to be administered word-for-word? See folks? Our leaders are not gods, but mere men with that same capacity for dopiness that we all carry. I, for one, find the whole scene oddly reassuring. (And don't worry, Obama: you're in league with those other great presidents, Calvin Coolidge and Chester Arthur, who had to do the same thing.)

So after that Great Day for America (shame on me, I forgot to put my flag out) we can get back to the hard work of criticizing the government. First up: the closing of Guantanamo Bay. Well, hooray for that. Seriously, there are some excellent arguments for shutting down the place, and I could be convinced, I suspect. But that's not what bothers me. This is. Now, President Obama, it's getting personal. This is the ultimate NIMBY. Take 245 of the most vicious death-loving mass-murderers on the planet, move them from the deserted island they're on (which is more than they deserve) and house them ten miles from my house?! Not the hope and change I was hoping for. Taking them back to the battlefield and giving them a minute to run for it before the soldiers start firing wasn't an option, I guess. Personally, I'd rather have the home-grown nuclear waste problem in my backyard, but no one is asking me. Oh well, what're you going to do? Vote Republican?

In other news, Lost had a rousing season premiere last night! It looks like they're finally getting around to answering more questions than they ask (like, when is Sawyer going to put a shirt on?) making the show eminently more watchable. It was the best part of yesterday.

Actually, no. The best part of yesterday was when I got home and the Little Ditchman screamed "DADDY!" when she heard me come in. Nothing beats that! Makes one feel supremely loved, adored, feared, respected, etc. Like Obama on the Capitol steps.


~