Carrots are Divine

When McVey and I first lived together, it was as freshmen in a college dorm. Other than sharing a room with a brother nine years older than me for a short time, I had not occupied a bedroom with someone else for an extended period of time.

One of the great things about our living situation was that McVey’s dad was a technophile. He had the newest of everything as soon as it rolled off the assembly line. And whenever he bought a new toy, he gave his “old” equipment to his son. As a result, we had a receiver, tape deck, and speakers that were on par with just about anyone in Jester East.

The cd player, however, was mine. For some unknown reason, my parents had given me a Pioneer 6 cd changer for a Christmas present. I was never into purchasing music. I was one of those guys that recorded songs from the radio on to cassette. At the end of college, I still did not own enough cds to fill the 6 cd changer. I ended up trading it for a Tandy 386.

Every night, we would decide which cds to load, put it on random, and retire to our single beds that were about three feet away from each other. Inevitably, we would talk about some topic until sleep overtook us. I would like to say these were noble, soul searching topics. However, one night we were talking about the misanthrope that is Scrappy Doo. At some point, McVey uttered the phrase, “Scooby Doo was the most predictable cartoon ever.”

This is how we learned that our next door dorm mates eavesdropped on us outside our door. We heard raucous laughter, followed by the sound of a door slamming, and through the wall heard someone chortle, “Mother____ers talking about Scooby Doo.”

If I get around to it, I will write more about Royce and Big Joe, including their suggestion on how to obtain fake IDs and the time one of them confronted McVey in the hallway... while naked.

In any event, I wrote that story to set up the fact that I can talk about cartoons. I watched plenty growing up. You can figure the era. Saturday mornings with the Super Friends, Laff-A-Lympics, Underdog, Quick Draw McGraw, Yogi Bear. After school watching went from Mighty Mouse, Felix the Cat, and the Banana Splits Offerings of Wacky Races and The Adventures of Gulliver to the then cutting edge animation of Battle of the Planets and Star Blazers.

But nothing topped Saturday morning and 90 minutes of Warner Brothers / Merry Melodies. By the time I got to high school, the show was an hour long. When I came home from college it was a half hour. By the mid 90s, it was gone, replaced by Mighty Morphin Power Rangers.

So, when Julie told me we were going to Pittsburg to her cousin Maggie’s wedding shower, I immediately thought, “There’s a cartoon museum in Pittsburg.” We went to the Toonseum our first day there and it was worth the trip. It is not huge, and while we were there was not exactly a huge permanent exhibit to write about. Disney drawing desk, check. Original sketches of Toucan Sam and Dennis the Menace, check. Wonderfully knowledgeable curator, double check.

But if you haven’t seen the Art of Akira exhibit, you are missing out. I don’t think that large scale cooperation and dedication to drawing can be put together again. The story of Akira’s creation as a movie, the effort put into the work, and the far reaching effects alone made the visit a delight.

But standing there, and seeing the craftsmanship of the cells, made me enjoy the movie so much more. There are layers and layers of artists’ visions that deserve appreciation. I was amazed we spent so much time in a not large space. When we started the tour, they had us watch a YouTube video about the exhibit. It was a mood setter. (http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BBAJdtPVnZc)

And there is a decent selection of books at the Toonseum. If you haven’t checked out Ho Che Anderson’s King or Blegvad’s Leviathan, they have it for you.

There Are Some Who Call Me...

So we decided to be a two pet household. I don't think that is something we put on any census form, but it was a consideration for the first pet. We have known that Annie does not play well with others. It is partly because she is a mix between the most paranoid / break glass in the event of anything that might remotely resemble an emergency dog breed and the slightly off kilter canine version of Vietnam era tunnel rats.

We decided to go with a cat. We went to adopt one from a local PetSmart. We saw a neat black and white cat named Moo-Moo, but we were told that to adopt him, we had to wait until a Saturday for the adoption team. We learned that another store could do direct adoptions, so we went there instead.
Sure enough, there were two orange cats. One of them named Max was 10 years old and declawed. We were pulled to Max because he had quite the sob story.
The other orange had white markings and was five months old.

We called Max's foster family to ask some key questions about his behavior. In a stroke of luck, the foster was a former coworker of ours. She told us that she knew Julie and me and knew enough about Annie that Max would not be a good fit. That led us to the orange and white, named Ivy.

We both knew a name change was in order. Ivy wasn't going to work. Maybe a couple of years ago, Ivy would have made me think of Posion Ivy, nemesis of Batman. Now, it makes me think of the itchy rash on my arms and the biopsy done by my dermatologist that redefined ‘spongiform.’

Julie’s first recommendation for a name was Groucho. This was a nod both to the cat’s temperament and her wild hair. But the masculine name didn’t seem quite right. Since her willingness to be held was predicated on giving her kitten treats, the next name suggested was Miss Piggy. This didn’t seem to be flattering at all, so we started thinking on a broader scale.

How could we incorporate Annie into the picture? Well, for awhile after we rescued Annie, we called her Little Orphan Annie. We thought about Daddy Warbucks. Or Mommy Warbucks. My only request was that the name be Daddy (or Mommy) War Bucks. That way, I could say the cat’s middle name was War. This would make Annie a dog of war, right?

Well, that didn’t work out.

The next two names came from our fandom of artists we see live every chance we get. Name #6 was Pearl. This was a nod to Amanda Shires, fiddle player extraordinaire. But the orange and white didn’t fit our cat. So what about Neko?

Now we were on to something. We love Neko Case. I am pretty confident that I have seen Neko every time she has been through DFW, including that appearance with A Fine Frenzy and Rufus Wainwright and her first appearance at Sons of Hermann Hall. Our friend Julian told us that Neko meant ‘cat’ in Japanese. Perfect!

But then we found out what the Japanese slang for Neko meant. Now, we don’t hang out with a hipster Japanese crowd. We have seen Lost in Translation and want to visit Shinto temples and experience the new jazz scene in Tokyo, but we don’t get to interact everyday with cool kids from Kyoto. Still the possibility of eliciting giggles at our cat’s name was enough for us to strike that choice from the list.


Choice #8 was… Groucho. I don’t think this was so much a surrender to the unexpected difficulty of naming a cat. I think this was more a reference to her interaction with Annie.

Choice #9 was also a repeat. We were back to Miss Piggy. Julie even found out that Miss Piggy’s real name is Pigathius Lee. Still, what a mark to put upon our new cat’s forehead! Piggy?
But it did fit. So maybe we needed to stick with this reference. Option #10: Olivia. A pig from children’s literature. Heck, I can’t write a children’s story, but we could name our cat after a character. How about a derivative? Option #11: Olive. This was Popeye’s love interest. We could work with this. And we thought we had it.

Until a moment of genius, that is. The Aran Islands. Just off the coast of Ireland. Inisheer. Inishmore. Inishmaan. Aran! What a great name. We tried it. It fit. We felt pretty comfortable with it.
Then our friend Jed crushed our positivity, as he is wont to do. He told us that Aran sounded too much like Aryan. Knowing that we are sensitive to avoiding any misrepresentation on this subject, he successfully needled us into abandoning name #12.

So we moved to the east a little. Back to the mainland of Ireland. The town of Doolin rests in County Clare. County Clare is a welcoming and peaceful area in a country that holds many good memories for both us and our families. Lucky #13: Clare.

Jourangadons

I am glad that McVey has been introduced so early in these blog posts. This befits someone that told me I needed to read to Catcher in the Rye. You would think that he made the suggestion during our junior year of highschool, but it didn't happen that way. I didn't read it until about two years after college. How do you get a liberal arts degree without reading Catcher in the Rye? McVey also got me into writing. My first efforts at short stories and a screenplay were all read by him first.

Also, McVey was blogging before it was cool. Unlike my current efforts at blogging many years after blogging became popular. In the days of geocities web sites, McVey introduced the net to Walton Walker's Shoebox. The idea was based upon a basement apartment he lived in around the turn of the millenium. This place was a typical apartment, except for the fact that I would not have even been able to sleep there. One of the doors in his bedroom led to nowhere.

Check that, nowhere would have been preferable. As it was, one of his doors opened to this large open area that was basically a crawlspace. Except that most crawlspaces have a clearance of about 2 and a half feet. This crawlspace was about six feet tall. So imagine a 500 square foot crawl space with mounds of dirt about five feet tall preventing you from seeing more than two or three feet ahead of you except for the ground floor window entry you could see about 75 feet away.

Somewhere in this underworld that was also his water heater closet, McVey concocted a shoebox which contained the greatest memories and stories of Walton Walker. This was not the general in the Patton's Third Army who couldn't find a way across a river and namesake of a Dallas thruway, but a slacker turned young executive that had lived there before he did. They were basically blog posts. Stories about concerts, work, and the like filled his web page.

Around this time, he wrote one of the best children's stories I have ever read. It was about a jourangadong that lived in the forest outside of a town filled with characters. I find writing for children very difficult. This does not come as a surprise to those that know me well, because I have great difficulty communicating with children on any level, much less the written word. I tried. I read all of Daniel Pinkwater's stuff I could get my hands on. It makes sense that his work I enjoyed most consisted of essays he did for Smithsonian magazine.

I have always seen this as my next challenge. Can I write a good children's story? Unfortunately, there are about a dozen other types of writing and subjects that get in the way. Someday, though, my first effort will be on these pages.

Laughter at Wilson's Creek

That last post reminds me that I have had problems keeping up with walkers before. In the late 90s, my roommate McVey and I decided to go on a one day road trip with our best friend, Gruve. This trip started at midnight after McVey closed out for the night in downtown Fort Worth. Gruve and I were waiting in my 1990 Chrysler LeBaron for a drive of almost eight hours to a national park outside of Springfield, Missouri.

See, by this time, we had watched the Ken Burns documentary on The Civil War, read Shelby Foote’s trilogy, and watched Glory and Gettysburg a few times over. Already a guy who originally intended to major in history, it didn’t take much of a suggestion from Gruve to put these wheels in motion. And our wheels were pulling up to Wilson’s Creek National Battlefield right around the time they opened the gates.

We started at the visitor’s center and decided to take the self guided tour. You know the type. You drive to a numbered station, park the car, walk down a marked path, read some signs explaining what happened, then return to the car, drive to the next station, and repeat. We did this a couple of times until we were at a station on the opposite side of the park from the visitor center. The weather was great. It was still early, and the sun was burning off the morning mist. We were the only three people out there.

We set out from the car and walked down a well worn trail. It branched off, and we stuck with the one heading into the interior of the battlefield.

It would be some time before we realized that the folks at Wilson’s Creek had a unique sense of humor.
So unique, there is an unmarked part of the trail that intersects with a horse path. As if to show the genius of their comedy styling, the designers of the park have the horse trail run asymptotically closely to the rest of the footpath. So closely, that we did not realize the numerator was getting much larger than the denominator. By the time we did realize that we were walking away from where we were supposed to be, it was because we heard cars through the trees and could tell we were approaching the road.

Performing what could best be described as very sketchy triangulation, we figured we should just get back to road and walk to the car. This was our second mistake. Apparently, like a mathematical phantom of the opera, the planners for this battlefield tour had configured a double asymptote. The more we walked, the further we moved from the road into the middle of the battlefield. By the time we realized that we had placed ourselves in the least convenient location, we were not near a road or the foot trail.

What was visible to us, though, was another set of markers at the top of a nearby hill. Now we had a plan. We would take this hill, follow the footpath back to the road, and walk back to the car. No paths were necessary, we could at least tell which way was up. That was the direction we would go. Now walking through brush, I noticed that I was moving with more difficulty than McVey or Gruve. Gruve, being an unstoppable machine, was moving up the hill like a Roomba vacuum cleaner, kind of meandering, but moving forward, making odd sounds, and leaving a clean path in his wake.

McVey and I were on a different path. When I brought up the amount of exertion I was facing on this hill, he was very dismissive. “We’re both going the same distance.”

I pointed out that he was over six feet, two inches tall. He covered more ground than I did. He was even more dismissive. “Yeah, but they’ve done studies that shorter people just take two shorter steps twice as fast to keep pace.”

This was the story I recounted for Julie on our 5K a couple of weekends ago. And just so we don’t pin this on McVey, she had heard the same studies. The studies that basically say, “Short people perform twice the locomotive processes as tall people to cover the same distance. So what’s the big deal?

Back on our hill, I was riled enough by this to double my efforts. After all, I was training for the fireman exam and could run a mile and a half in under 12 minutes. Even though we had already walked for almost 45 minutes, this would be no big deal.

If you ever want proof that some people are just genetically predisposed to some things, I offer this as my shining example. As we approached the battlefield markers, I was redefining perspiration and sucking wind. Meanwhile, my roommate, who was almost smoking a pack a day, jogged backwards up the hill faster than I could double time forwards.

The good news is that the path from these markers eventually connected to the road. The bad news was that we were two stops away from where we parked. None of us had slept on the drive up, and we were approaching exhaustion after almost an hour and a half of hiking with no water. As a result, the walk on the road seemed interminable. What happened next is the one thing my friends remember from this day.

As delirium was setting in, we were laughing at everything that was said, seen, or heard. For one of only two times in my life, someone said something so funny, it caused me to laugh hard enough that the neural communicators emitting from the brain telling your legs to hold you upright just stopped.

I will credit McVey for saying, “We have walked so far, we are going to run into ourselves walking the opposite direction.” (Actually, my memory recalls that it might have been Gruve. Unfortunately, my judgment might be influenced by Dave, who once claimed that Gruve took all of his stories and just added sound effects.)

There was a split second between the time I heard these words and I was on my side in a quasi fetal position doing something between guffawing and chortling. To this day, that has only occurred one other time. Those words were also delivered by McVey in the city of Verona. I’m pretty sure that is an entire blog entry unto itself.

The Coldness of the Short Distance Runner

Last weekend, my wife and I completed a marathon event. Not an actual 26.2 mile marathon, but for us 3.1 miles counts as a marathon-type event. We were part of a group ramping up to a participate in a 10K with Team in Training, a fund raising group with the cause of finding a cure for Leukemia / Lymphoma / other blood disorders. The other members of our group are all former Olympians, members of school cross country teams, and lifelong joggers. At least that is what seems to be the case.

On an average Saturday morning over the last month, we meet with anywhere from fifteen to twenty other teammates along the Trinity trail. When we complete walking our two or three miles, most of our team is already back in their homes or eating breakfast. This is because they sprint with a speed that makes me think they are the infected from 28 Days Later. This is quite the humbling experience because our path takes us to a turnaround point and return to the start. The entire team passes us on their way to completion, usually within site of the table where we drop off our car keys when we begin.

As one of our tests, we have to take part in a 5K close to Benbrook Lake. I don’t think we foresaw what weather in early February would be like, but 28 degrees was a bit much. We had never participated in an organized run like this. There were not a lot of people there, but those that were seemed to be way too enthusiastic. While we were glad that it was socially acceptable for us to hug each other for conserving heat, there were some around us running practice 5Ks to stay warm.

As the time approached, we gathered near the starting line and a voice instructed runners to follow one of two paths, 5K to the left, half marathon to the right. There was also a warning that to the left, near the turnaround point, there was ice on the trail. There would be boy scouts warning as you approached the area. At the start, there was a quick separation between walkers and runners. There was also a quick separation between walkers and us. Before turning the first curve, we were walking dead last behind a family that we swore was just out for a daily walk and not part of the 5K at all.

We thought we had walked a decent distance before arriving at the split for the 5K and half marathon. Keeping to the left, there was a slight rise until a table manned by boy scouts passing out water. We were the last ones to the water station and finally saw Benbrook Lake. We were just at this point when the first runners were already coming back, including our coach. As we continued walking we saw more of the team, but also became aware of the sound of someone behind us. Apparently, someone that started the race late was also walking, and gaining ground quickly. We attempted to increase our pace when we got to the ice patch. Here, your options were to either walk on ice or step off the trail into a deep drop off of slush hidden by trampled down grass. We made the wrong choice. Just beyond it was our turnaround.

At this point, we were feeling ok. Ok enough that we decided to jog after we crossed the ice on the path. After all, we were halfway done, right? We jogged until we passed the walker ahead of us. We then resumed walking, then jogged again, and walked until we got back to the water station. This made sense. We weren’t last. We were close, but not last. Surely that was a testament to our walking two miles every other day. As we approached the split where we moved away from the half marathoners, we could hear the announcements from the starting / finish line. Except we weren’t being guided towards the finish line.

The walkers ahead of us were heading towards where the half marathoners had gone. The arrows for the 5K also pointed that way. It turns out that the reason they did not warn that there was ice near the halfway point was because the turnaround was at the one-third point. This had a serious effect on our mood. Instead of being almost finished and jogging a bit, we were one-half done, just about spent, freezing, with wet feet. It didn’t get any better. It turns out that the water station at the one-sixth point was the only one available. The rest of the walk was spent commenting on the fact that the woman ahead of us didn’t walk all the way to the second turnaround.

Thanks to the kids that thought they would rather see how much ice they could break by one of the pavilions, their parents that waited for them, the pregnant woman we passed by jogging, and the woman that started about ten minutes later than we did, we did not finish last. The only members of our team still around were waiting for the half marathoner still on the course. We stopped by the snack stand that was passing out cookies, pretzels, and hot chocolate to participants. Know the last thing I want after doing a 5K? Cheese nachos covered in chili. Instead, we grabbed some snickerdoodles and headed for the car.