(warning, long)
The war has gone on for so long that we almost cannot remember a time in which we were at peace. We start awake at night at the slightest noise, ready to charge outside shouting with guns drawn, only to find we are hurling our fury at shadows, and there is nothing there. Sometimes we awaken in the morning to find they have silently raided us in the night and left nothing but rubble and torn ground in their wake.
We have greater resources, but they have more numbers, and they are relentless. They have worn us down over the years, our rampaging enemy with the floppy ears and the big, round, soft eyes.
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I will be back and posting again soon. Thanks to everyone who has sent me email wondering where the hell I am.
This morning I gave blood. I am ridiculously conscientious about my blood donation; I am there like clockwork every 56 days. I figure my blood is more useful to other people than it is to me: I have a lot of it and I can make more. Plus: free cookies and juice and funny retired people to talk to.
But the last bunch of times I’ve given blood I’ve had problems with sludginess. Poor plasmatic viscosity. My blood loves me so much it doesn’t want to come out. I’ve made sure I’m well-hydrated; I’ve given blood under the influence of aspirin and not; my iron is good; I wear warm clothes. I’m not quite sure what the problem is.
What usually happens is that they stick me, I start to bleed into the bag, and then a little later the blood people come over and say “Hmmmm.” Sometimes the machines will be blinking little red lights that tell them that I am a Bad Bleeder; other times they can just tell. They scold me for not squeezing. I am squeezing, I insist. They arrange the tubing. The blinky lights continue red. And then they decide that something is wrong with the needle.
I should point out here that I have HUGE VEINS. I’ve talked about it before. I have veins that make the blood people go “wow, that’s a really big vein.” The problem is not the vein nor the needle. The problem is that I apparently have cherry jello for blood. I am actually stretch armstrong. (note: this is a joke only about four of you in the entire world will get).
But no, the blood people have to play with the needle. At first its just a little wiggle; maybe the needle is pressed up against the side of the vein. They just have to move it a little. But that doesn’t work. Maybe its in a bad spot. Wiggle wiggle. Maybe its not in far enough. No, that’s not it. Wiggle wiggle jiggle ream ream jab jab, oops sorry did that hurt?
Eventually after many painful needle manipulations they find some position in which they can get blood out of me in less than an hour, which usually involves propping the needle up at a right angle to my arm with a lot of rolled up gauze. Meanwhile my arm is going numb and four or five speed donators have come through the room and had their cookies and juice and moved on with their lives.
Maybe I just have extra-concentrated blood and they can add water and get twice as much normal blood out of it. Dilute! Dilute! OK!
Today, thanks to my frozen orange juice blood and the exertions of the sadistic whiteshirt who was convinced that surely the needle must be in there wrong, here let me try THIS position, I have the most enormous purple bruise on my arm yet. It looks like I’ve been chewed on from the inside. Altruism looks kind of like a big purple whale.
(here is an an explanation of the stretch armstrong joke)
A couple of years ago I was ego surfing on google and I stumbled across this Goth FAQ on the web. And I thought: huh. (see #4.)
I assume it originally appeared on Usenet. It has that hallmark. I have no idea who wrote it or when it was originally posted. The claim that I’m telling people how to be goth comes from a “how to be goth” page I wrote and actually took down off the web in…1997? The page was a joke. It was funny (OK, not that funny). I took it down because, as the sledgehammer goth FAQ abundantly indicates, goths have no sense of humor. (and I’ll probably get still more angry teenage hate mail from that comment right there.)
The sledgehammer thing reappears over and over again, reposted on blogs and on various Goth-related sites. I run across it once in a while (the above link appeared on MSN Spaces yesterday). And every time I marvel at it: this person was so very pissed off at me that they had to enshrine insults to me in an FAQ.
Wow. Now that’s fame. A gazillion books sold? Feh! Nothing! I’ve been insulted in a how to be goth FAQ.
And I have to wonder: is there even a single net.goth out there these days who doesn’t think: Who the hell is Laura Lemay?
The tree people are here. They come with big cars and fear and poor load securing skills. Every year we hope for early winter storms to keep them from coming or to drive them away. Every year the weather is nice and they come up from the flatlands in droves. We stay at home and we seethe. Or we get stuck behind them and we seethe. It is a month-long seethe. We are the seethers.
In New England they call them “tree peepers,” the tourists who flock up to the country to see the leaves turning colors in the fall. They come out from the cities and they drive badly on the country highways. They stop randomly in the middle of the road to admire the views (“look! trees!”) and are generally a nuisance to the people who actually live there and have places to be.
We don’t have tree peepers; our trees are California trees and the colors are kind of boring (yellow, brown). What we do have in abundance is choose-and-cut-your-own Christmas tree farms. It is a similar phenomenon.
The mountains are kind of known for Christmas tree farms, and our road, being the first exit out of town, is tree farm central. It seems that anyone who ever grew up in the valley within driving distance of my road has harvested a tree here. I have been in the eastern sierra, in Arizona, and in New Hampshire, and I have met people who know the Christmas tree farms on my road. It is kind of like living in Disneyland.
Starting the day after Thanksgiving and sometimes even before then the people from the Valley get into big cars or trucks and drive up the hill to our road. But these are flatlanders who are used to 6-lane freeways and big wide straight suburban streets. They don’t see a lot of narrow twisty roads with a sheer dropoff on one side. It scares them. So they drive in the middle of the road, at about 10 miles per hour. Woe betide you if you are used to driving the road and you get stuck behind a convoy of white-knuckled minivans. You’ll be there all day. And on the way back down again: tree people do not understand that you should not lean on your brakes for the better part of three miles down the hill. Christmas in the mountains smells a lot like a brake pad crying out in pain.
Then there’s the indecision. Admittedly, there are a lot of tree farms on the road, and its hard to get an idea of what a good farm is from one small sign on a gate by the road. But a lot of tree people will drive up the main road, stop in front of a farm, and then have a family discussion whether or not to go into that farm. This can take the better part of two or three minutes. If you are behind the discussion, you might as well put it in park and have a sandwich. But I also suggest leaving a fair amount of room between you and any vehicle that comes to a sudden stop in the middle of the road, because there is about a 50/50 chance that the driver will decide, no, let’s go to that farm we just passed, and abruptly put the car into reverse and back up into you. Yes, this has happened. Yes, more than once.
Once the tree people have actually found a farm and found a tree there is the securing the tree to the car problem. The tree farms charge $30-$40 for a tree regardless of size, which is a great deal if you’re looking for a Rockefeller Center-style tree to put in your three-story foyer, but they charge extra for something to actually tie it to your car. You can tell that a lot of people get really stingy on this. I usually see one of a number of tree securing methods:
- The Gravity Method: You have purchased a tree that is bigger than your car. In fact you no longer actually own a car; you are now driving a 4WD douglas fir. That tree will probably permanently remain on top of your car, because it took a team of ten to put it there. Good luck getting into the car. Note that the gravity method usually only works while driving down the hill; once you reach the bottom of the hill and merge onto the freeway the increased speed and wind pressure usually sucks the tree right off the roof. There’s no team of ten to help you reload your firmobile down there.
- The Thousand Hands Method: If you roll down all the windows and you and all your children reach out of the car and just HOLD ON REAL TIGHT, then the tree will remain on top of the car. If you are really fortunate when you reach the bottom of the road and merge onto the freeway and the tree gets sucked off the roof and into the fast lane, it will not suck your children out of the windows with it. Buckle up.
- The Hope For the Best Method: The tree farm only charges $1 for a little bit of twine. How secure is a tree going to be attached to the top of the roof if its tied with a little bit a twine? Not very. But maybe if we hope for the best it’ll be OK. Until you get to the bottom of the road and merge onto the freeway and then the twine will probably snap immediately when the tree gets sucked off the roof.
- The Its a Truck Method: Its a truck! Just put the tree into the bed! This is what pickups are for! No need to invest in anything to tie down the tree! This method works spectacularly until your reach the bottom of the road and merge onto the freeway, at which point the wind pressure sucks the tree right up out of the bed and flings it into oncoming traffic.
- The Enormous Pupae Method: Some sensible people believe that something horrible is going to happen to their chosen tree on the way home, and so they invest in the complete tree securage package. The tree is wrapped completely in some sort of white plastic netting from head to foot so that not even a single needle will escape the trip, and then the bundle is tied tightly to the roof of the vehicle. The car is no longer merely transporting a christmas tree back home, but now looks more as if a giant insect were gestating on top of it. This tree is going nowhere. Not even in the merge onto the freeway, as trees are getting sucked off cars all around. This is absolutely a reliable tree securage method, it just looks really funny and is thus still worthy of mock.
So from this description you may be thinking that the onramp to the freeway at the bottom of my road is just littered with devehicled christmas trees. I perhaps exaggerate a tad. But it is definitely not unusual to listen to the traffic report around this time of year and hear that “there is a backup on Highway 17 because of a christmas tree in the road.”
The best part of christmas tree season, however, is that it ends. After Christmas the roads return to quiet and the flatlanders remain on the flats. At least until wine tasting and wedding season starts. Then we get the drunk flatlanders, but that is another essay for another time.