Happy New Year!

 

Bellingham, Washington.

This is the view from my office when I get off of work these days -- nice and almost dark around 4 p.m.  Bellingham certainly has its charms.  Best wishes for 2022!

White Christmas!

White Christmas in Bellingham!  I don't have to drive again until Tuesday, so I'm not complaining.

Merry Christmas!

"May You Be Held"

Sumac, "May You Be Held"

Maybe heavy experimental music doesn't scream Christmas.  Maybe it does.  But I walked at least 100 miles to this over the past year and saw many deer and raptors and wore out at least two perfectly good pairs of shoes.

I braved Costo so tomorrow for Christmas lunch me and my Dad are having some smoked ham, stuffing, gravy, and salad.  My sister turned us both on to the ginormous apple pies they have too.  My Dad has sheepishly been asking me if he can have a piece for breakfast, as if I'd ever say no to pie before lunch for me or anybody else.  What am I, Hitler?

One year ago I was finishing my final teaching contract in South Korea, in lurvely Daegu, and preparing to move back here to America and sleepy Bellingham.  I had no idea what this year held in store for me, what with moving in with my Dad as his full-time caretaker.  I've been getting up at 6 a.m. every morning for almost a year now (which if you knew me in real life would probably shock you more than anything), reading a hell of a lot, writing short stories, and working part-time at the local Humane Society.

Living in the woods north of Bellingham is my life now -- for now -- for the foreseeable future.  None of this was particularly easy, but I hope the worst fights and arguments are over.  Nobody wants to get old, and nobody wants to admit they've grown old, and nobody ever gets too old to realize that they've become old.

That's all crystal clear, I'm sure.

I've got Christmas day off to enjoy the holiday with my Dad, and I'm filling in next week for my co-worker.

I'm not sure where any of this is headed, but I'm trying to make the most of it.  I hope you and your family and your friends find yourself in a good place in 2022, and if that's too much to ask well, May You Be Held.

"a biological contamination of the infinite"

"Here, human beings had to remember that the universe was far wider than their little nest of stars -- that, in the universe at large, silence was always more than the noisiest shout of life.  Humans explored and intruded against it, and built their stations and lived their lives, a biological contamination of the infinite, a local and temporary condition."

-- C. J. Cherryh, Foreigner

Hark

Bellingham, Washington.

I was out and about downtown last night for the Humane Society Christmas party.  It was fun, and rainy of course!

(The Bellingham Herald is the local newspaper, and that's their building.)

What Are You Up To, James?

I've been pretty tight-lipped about the new job, maybe erring on the side of being a bit paranoid about it all.  Not many folks read this here blog anyhow, but it is Bellingham and it is a fairly small town.

I'm a weekend dispatcher for the Animal Control branch of our county Humane Society.  Unlike a lot of American counties, we contract to do Animal Control stuff and it doesn't go through the local police department (which might be what you're used to).  Whatcom County is still highly agricultural, and in addition to cat and dog friends we deal with a lot of livestock issues.

Part of my training involved learning actual radio signals like "10-4" and "10-6" and "10-76" and "11-44."  It's kind of cool, although not nearly as fun as you might think.  The whole point of these codes is to keep talking to a minimum, and information levels high.

I also field calls -- probably the bulk of my job -- for the Animal Control phone line.  There are a lot of reports of dead deer, which we are obligated to pick up, but also welfare checks and vicious dogs and happy but stray dogs and roaming gangs of chickens pooping on their neighbor's yard and causing no end of strife.

I work with some really friendly people and if you follow my Twitter, you'll know by now that pets are allowed at work.

I'm really enjoying it, and I hope this position allows me to keep a work-life-play balance while taking care of my Dad that I haven't really had since I moved back to America.

We shall see!

Snow Day

Bellingham, Washington.

"the reality of ghosts"

     Life and Death

are attributes of the Soul

not of things.  The Ego

is costumed as the road manager

of the soul, every time

the soul plays a date in another town

I goes ahead to set up

the bleechers, or book the hall

as they now have it,

the phenomenon is reported by the phrase

I got there ahead of myself

I got there ahead of my I

is the fact

which not a few anxious mortals

misread as intuition.  The Tibetans

have a treatise on that subjection.

Yet the sad fact is I is

part of the thing

and can never leave it.

This alone constitutes

the reality of ghosts.

Therefore I is not dead.

-- Edward Dorn, Gunslinger

"you have not seen it properly"

"Galileo flew into another tilted mirror, and both shot through it and bounced off it at the same time, either reintegrating or not on the far side, breaking up as he became whole --

'Wait!' he shouted in a panic to Aurora.  'Help.  Help me!' This can't be right, it makes no sense! Help!'

Aurora's voice croaked in his ear, full of amusement.  'No one understands it in the way you mean. Please, relax. Fly on.  Be not afraid.  Bohr once said if you are not shocked by quantum mechanics, you have not seen it properly.  We have come to an aspect of the manifold of manifolds that cannot be understood by recourse to any images from the sensorium, nor by your beloved geometries.  It is contradictory, counter to the senses.  It has to remain at the level of the mathematical abstractions that we are moving among.  But remember, it has been shown that you can use these quantum equations and get physical experimental results of extraordinary accuracy -- in some cases as much as one in a trillion.  In that sense the equations are very demonstrably true.'

'But what does that mean?  I can't understand what I can't see.'

'Not so.  You have been doing that quite frequently now.  Rest easy.  Later the whole of quantum mechanics will be placed in the context of the ten-dimensional manifold of manifolds, and there reconciled to gravity and to general relativity.  Then, if you can go that far, you will feel better about how it is that these equations can work, or be descriptive of a real world.'

'But the results are impossible!'

'Not at all.  There are other dimensions folded into the ones our senses perceive, as I told you.'

-- Kim Stanley Robinson, Galileo's Dream

Cloudy New Day

 

Squalicum Harbor, Bellingham, Washington.

Writerly Stuff

I have two short stories in the new edition of a local, online literary journal (it's free!).  This quarter's theme is "Golden Age," and my two stories are: "Water Meat" about a date in South Korea, and "The Third Loneliest Woman in All of Whatcom County," about working in a kayak factory.

I've been enjoying the other stories as well.

And Happy Thanksgiving!