The Three Wise Truisms

I call him Commie Santa, the Hero of Industrial Plenitude the Soviets
were getting ready to honor with a statue before their collapse.

Wait, did I miss them, the true harbingers of the Christmas season?!!

You know them, those black-and-white cologne commercials in which gaunt models, starved for love and food, suggest their desire for both with mouths agape and eyes distant and flashing. The angry sea crashes dangerously close.

Those commercials, of course, signal Christmas is coming: Put eau de toilette at the top of your list, and prepare for the onslaught of wanton consumerism disguised as warm televised (also, computerized) nourishment for the soul.

But I missed these warnings and got swept out to the sea of Ad Nauseam.

In the early going, the commercials follow three basic truisms:

[1] For God so loved the world that he gave you this smartphone. It is the greatest gift to humankind, dispensing world peace and, judging by some commercials, dispatching alien invaders.

[2] No greater love hath any mother than to make sure her children get only the coolest gifts and shame every other mother for falling short. The spirit of Christmas manifest.

[3] It is nothing to give your loved one a new car for Christmas. A trifle. So obvious, the Acura and Mercedes Benz and Lexus and Audi makers seem practically embarrassed to suggest such a thing. We have celebrated that holiday tradition so many times — walking our loved one, hands over his/her eyes, out to our brick-paved driveways, swept clean but banked on its edges with storybook sugar-crystal snowdrifts, to the gleaming new automobile — that we risk driving into a rut. But we buy a new car for Christmas each year because of course it transcends joblessness and economic disaster. In fact, it solves both, especially the tenuous production of gigantic bows to place atop the sedans.

It's time to surrender to the Ad Nauseam. No better way than to sing the carols twisted into sales pitches ("Talking in a Winter Wonderland!" or the flash mob, "We wish you a Merry Christmas, but at the mall you're spending too much!") or camp out in front of the Hallmark Channel, which will roll out nine 14 (!) original Christmas-themed movies to go with its collection of umpteen, and has already been showing Christmas movies since before Halloween! Halleluia!

Veterans deserve more from me

A letter to myself; you can read over my shoulder if you want:

Despite my objections to the wars the United States have fought the last
20+ years (which these 'toons elucidate), I support the warriors who
have gone in my stead. I just haven't done nearly enough to show for it.

Really, what the hell is the matter with us?

If we are truly a county worthy of our many and sundry ideals, we'd focus our collective will on two matters:

[1] The education of our children, who would advance those ideals and solve dire world problems that grow only more dire daily— as long as we see to the children's preparation.  But we risk leaving our children lacking for those tasks, or at least much less prepared than the generation sending them to school.

Seniors at a retirement development near my home made news last month by adopting a public school, harnessing their wisdom and patience to help students. It's a tremendously generous effort, and absolutely perfect, because what students need above all is mentors to accompany them on the journey of mastering concepts. It's one thing for a teacher to control the learning environment for 32-plus children, and keep them on task for most of the school day; it's something more entirely for a teacher to make sure each of those students actually learns.

The best of the best teachers master it after years of practice, and master it by overcoming students' various learning disabilities or their initial inability to speak and read English. Even the master teachers, though, welcome the help of the community to leverage the results of their enormous task.


Those seniors shouldn't be newsworthy, because their endeavor should not be rare. Every community should join them. Every business whose growth and vision depends on these children, as intelligent producers and consumers and stewards, should be in the classrooms, modeling citizenship, making sure students succeed.

But that's not what I wanted to write about, even though I know a little bit. On the eve of Veterans Day, I meant to write about something about which I know nothing:

[2] The support of our veterans.

Their sacrifice should be uppermost in our minds and in our actions every day, not just Veterans and Memorial days, not just in the wake of news of the full "battle rattle" of war.

They should go to the front of every line, get free meals at every restaurant, the best tickets to the best events, not just tomorrow but every day. They should have jobs. They should have our jobs.

Can you imagine, veterans having to struggle just to find jobs?! Veterans who have done our bidding, to have faced unimaginable, indescribable, soul-shredding horrors, and then to see our backs turned on them when they come back in the world. President Obama last week proposed credits to employers for hiring veterans with disabilities, though in fairness to employers, the credits wouldn't pay the necessary resources to hire and train new employees. Why couldn't we/shouldn't we commit so much more?

Or imagine having to fight to get fixed for what war has broken. Veterans who went in our place, so badly broken physically and psychologically, and then being put in the position of having to advocate for their care and their families' welfare. Imagine families of warriors killed in action, having to fight for benefits.

Their care should be a given, and it should be given freely and immediately and generously, with all the resources we have at hand.

Even veterans who managed by good fortune or the nature of their missions not to suffer wounds of war nonetheless have given up their civilian lives for us, and deserve our thanks and generosity for their sacrifice.

Though I hate the wars in my lifetime fought on behalf of my country, I love the warriors. Not that they would know, because as one who made the choice not to serve, not to fight, I'm a hollow fake who doesn't really know what to do or how to give thanks.

Without a wink of effort, I can rattle off at least a dozen high school classmates, including my neighbor Buddy, who joined the armed services; I know at least five officers among them. One was a college roommate. One became a school teacher and was recalled to active duty in the Marines in Iraq; he got the call-up on a Friday and was gone from the classroom by Monday, without a moment to tell his students goodbye.

In time I have come to know veterans who served in Iraq and Afghanistan under presidents George Herbert Walker Bush and George W. Bush. I met one family whose last four generations have sent soldiers to war, and who might see the current generation go. My dad was a veteran who joined the Air Force under age to get out from under his stepfather's grip; he credits his time with getting him "squared away," being accountable to his family and community.

They went in my stead, all of them, because our volunteer armed services represents such a small portion — not even 1 percent — of our population.

We are a different 99 percent; don't you think we could use our leverage to help the few who served in our armed forces?

Veterans account for only 13 percent of the total population. Factor in veterans' immediate families, that probably leaves 60 percent of Americans who have not been touched directly by sacrifice in the armed services — a silent majority who can do more for those who served.

"Thanks" seems so small and ineffectual. A friend frequently posts tributes to veterans on facebook; though I appreciate the posts and the compassion behind them, I don't acknowledge them because I don't feel I'm the right person to respond. In a stupid and weird way, I rarely give to care packages because it feels like I'm endorsing the reason warriors are there, and helping prolong their presence; in my misguided way, I think I'll hasten their return this way.

Dumb. I can do more, and should.

Parade Magazine last weekend published tips for honoring veterans — concrete, local ideas that I can do year-round. I can do more for those who went in my place.

The Mark Trail grows cold

Five things you can count on with the Mark Trail comic strip: (1) Boring stories that take weeks and weeks [and weeks]
to resolve; (2) Comparatively more interesting stories that wrap up suddenly using plot holes and great leaps of logic;
(3) faithfully rendered wildlife; (4) ham-handedly rendered humans, with the same shaped heads, eyes crossed or big as tea saucers, and interchangeable snap-on facial features; and (5) at least once a week, as in this example, a strip composed in such a way that it appears — inadvertently, I gotta believe — the animals or inanimate objects are talking.

Comics are the first order of every day for me, and have been since I could read, which makes me sad when people tell me they don't even subscribe to a newspaper, much less read comics.

I love comics so much, I even read the bad ones, including Mark Trail, which The Sacramento Bee carries.

Mark Trail is one of those serial comics, like Mary Worth, Rex Morgan M.D., Apartment 3-G et al. They're the comics equivalent of TV soap operas. Thankfully, the Bee spares readers this parade, leaving Mark Trail alone to carry the banner of anachronism.

Serial comics had their day, and it was June 18, 1963. Since then the world of multimedia has swept past, and we get all the stories we need from TV, iPhones and every other communications device except newspapers.

Only in the mid-20th Century, without benefit of so many media tools to sate our entertainment demand, would readers have put up with the glacial pace of Mark Trail stories. Yet this comic plods on, as if nothing has changed and time stands still. Which is appropriate, because that's what usually takes place — or doesn't — in this strip.

This story arc in this particular strip, from Oct. 24, 2011, has been going on, honest to God, since at least JULY 28! Three months!! My thanks to Josh Fruhlinger, the Comics Curmudgeon, who produces a hilarious blog I just stumbled upon, offering daily biting commentary on today's comic strips — "Making the Funnies Funnier since 2004" — for tracking this for me.

The current episode shows no sign of ending.

It began, as almost all Mark Trail stories do, with intrepid Woods and Wildlife Magazine writer Mark getting tipped off to a great story, mere moments after he has finished his last great adventure, which often requires Mark to punch someone and to call others "fellows," single-handedly sustaining that usage of the word in the English language. (Even after 41 years of writing essays, I haven't lost the gift for run-on sentences.)

Mark is forever (and I mean forever) stumbling upon poachers, moonshiners, rum runners, drug runners, mad trophy hunters — bad people doing environmental harm, usually to where he lives, Lost Forest National Forest. This is not meant to be funny, like Phil Frank's Asphalt State Park, but it's no less hilarious.

Mark usually gets help from his faithful Lassie-like St. Bernard, Andy, and no help from the meddling reporter named Kelly Welly (weally?), who desires Mark even though he finally married Cherry after a 47-year courtship. Also, their adopted son Rusty often gets kidnapped or roughed up mid-adventure, which slows the already lethargic story pace.

In the current arc, Mark discovers a wounded Canada goose wearing solid-gold tracking band, inscribed with a Bible verse, and decides its source will make a good story. Okaaaaaayyyyy, not the most riveting start. The adventure takes him to the Canadian border, where a Mounted Police officer attempts to throw Mark off the trail (no pun intended, but since I've written it, nice touch from yours truly) by detaining Andy the dog from helping uncover the mystery. What mystery? What does it matter?

The band and a plaque on the Mountie's wall contain the same verse, Genesis 1:20, King James version: “And God said, let the waters bring forth abundantly the moving creature that hath life, and fowl that may fly above the earth in the open firmament of heaven." The Mountie's in deep!

One Mark Trail "fan" on the Internet points out why this story has taken so long to tell. Week after week, it's been like this:

Mark: I can't figure out why this bird had a Bible verse on its band
Let me ask [ __ ]

Mark: I found a bird with a Bible verse on its band. Know anything?

[ __ ] : Nope.

Mark: I sure wonder why this bird had a Bible verse on its band.
Maybe I'll ask [ ... ]

Mark: I found this bird. It had this Bible verse on its band. Any ideas?

[ ... ] : Nope.

(seemingly infinite loop) …

Having finally wrested themselves from this loop, Mark, Kelly Welly, and Johnny Malotte, a French-Canadian friend who looks a lot like the Golden Age B-list movie star Gilbert Roland, have entered a valley that appears to teem with wildlife that don't usually coexist: A biblical paradise, one might say. An Eden. The Mountie sneaks up on the trio and arrests them, even though they are his good friends.

This week, readers are treated to a looooooong conversation with Mother McQueen, the Mountie's mom, who lords it over this strange valley, her fringed buckskin coat serving as her cape and crown. (Did she dispatch the buck, or talk him out of his skin?) The Comics Curmudgeon publicly doubts whether Mother McQueen and the Mountie are really related, but they bear a close resemblance; then again, everyone in a Mark Trail strip looks alike.

Kelly Welly's first question to Mother McQueen: "Where did you get the gold to make the bands?" That's the first question?! Not, "What have we done wrong to be stuck in this strip?"

Who knows where this is going? Granted, it's different from the usual Mark Trail fare, which would pique my interest were it not for the fear I'll have grandchildren, or artist Jack Elrod — heir to Ed Dodd — will expire before this episode plays out.

For a fundraiser, by the way, Fruhlinger mailed to fans bird bands stamped with "Genesis 1:20" and "Lost Forest;" blog fans responded with photos of the bands on birds real and imaginary, as well as on a cat and a robot.

Writing this has also alerted me to a myriad Websites devoted to the silliness of serial comic strips. I may never resurface.

Metablogging

It's all your fault I can't count.

I know you're there. I can't see you and I don't know you by name, but numbers don't lie. You're there. And while you're there, you could have pointed out that I had not, in fact, used my 100th post last month to commemorate the death of Steve Jobs.

It was merely my 93rd. But you let me go on like a fool, making a big deal out of it.

Maybe you were sparing my feelings and couldn't figure out a way to keep my dignity intact and explain that if I just bothered to add up all my blogs from 2010 and 2011 (they're tallied on the right column of the page, for pete's sake!), I could have discovered that on my own. In which case, thank you for your kind ways.

This is my 100th blog (I have numerous posts in draft form, and some so lame they wouldn't even make this blog). I know that, and I know you're there, because blogger.com, the Google online service through which I publish these semipublic rants, tells me so, in more detail than it used to.

(Don't worry: No private information, not even names, just different ways to count how many people read each of my posts.)

Now it's got me all cattywhampus.

For one thing, change: Why?

So much change in my life, most of it for no reason that I can fathom. So often and so fervent, as if change itself is an industry; which is probably true, now that I think of it: People must have figured out a way to monetize change; it's true every time I have to upgrade graphics software, certainly.

But I digress. Someone at blogger.com got bored, I think, told somebody down the line to tinker with the service, and it was so. Multiple bored people got to do something different for a while, and we have to relearn the ropes. Cha-ching.

It goes on all over the place. facebook is the most infamous. Blowback has died, but when facebook began rolling out changes a month or so ago, a lot of people expressed their hate immediately. The howls will rise again soon, because the rollouts have only just begun. My trouble is, I'm not sure how those changes changed my facebook; it seems like I'm missing stuff, but I don't know what. As a part-time facebook user anyway (for linking to this blog, making the random snarky comment and being a voyeur), I'm not the best person to talk about facebook's changes.

My local Target changed. Since last shopping there about two months ago, everything in it had been moved to the wall opposite where it was, as if a giant had spun the big box overnight. Everything but watches; somehow everything revolved around the watches, which were right where I last shopped for them.

My church has changed. Not a big change — hardly a riffle, really — but considering the years I've heard the change was in the works, you'd think it would be stunning, world changing. When the priest says, "Peace be with you," for one thing, instead of saying, "And also with you," we'll soon say, "And with your spirit also." It's supposed to be more authentic to the original texts — we're going old school!— and it's supposed to cinch the worldwide church together; I'm not sure how awkward semantics will accomplish this, but on we go, with the flow.

Yeah, yeah, I know, change is good for the soul. Change is the only constant in life. Geez, just give me a chance to use something up first, huh?

The other problem with blogger.com's new metrics: What am I supposed to do with them?

Ignore them, of course. But it's like being told not to think about elephants. Exactly.

Now I'm thinking about who reads this. Time was, this was just a lazy way of writing a journal. I didn't have to buy yet another notebook, didn't have to find it each time I wanted to write in it, didn't have to write it by hand. I just open up a Web tab and start typing. I never really thought anyone would read it.

Just in case, though, I've made it an excuse to attach stuff I drew, for the fun of it. Once in a while, I write about open-water swimming. Rarely, I write about something about which I know nothing.

Those posts get the most readers. If I pay attention to statistics, the message seems to be: Don't write what you know, because no one cares.

A couple of weeks ago, for example, I weighed in on Occupy Wall Street and why I think it's going on. Thousands of pundits, many of them paid for it, have provided their view, and mine has to be the least informed.

But compared to other posts, that one was by far the most popular, getting 50,000 views, compared to my rant on financial planning, which got only 13,000. (Embarrassing, I thought blogger.com tallied readership in the thousands. So that really is just 50 readers to 13 readers … well, that's a lot, too.)

So do I keep writing stuff where I'm faking my way to the end of sentences, or continue to drone about doodling, or splashing about in inky green lakes — unimportant, intimate stuff?

Should I cater to the 102 people in the United States who have viewed my page, or should I try to figure out what interests the 29 page viewers in Russia, my second highest readership, and skew new posts toward them? Would their interests conflict with the five viewers in Lebanon? Or should I just consider them all cosmopolitan in their tastes, and just resolve that I can't possibly satisfy the readers there and still entertain and enlighten the three each in Brazil, Canada, France and Malaysia? Not to mention two each in Israel and Singapore, and the lone faithful in Australia? Oy! Oy! Oy!

Their passive participation in my posts are highlighted on a world map blogger.com has provided. The greener the country, the more views emanated from there.

I know from blogger.com that most by far get my enlightenment via Internet Explorer on Windows Operating Systems, far above Firefox and Mac, the latter of which is how the enlightenment goes out into the world to begin with. Don't know what to do with that information. I'm not impressing the iPad, Blackberry or Android crowd at all, maybe because I'm supposed to format the blog for their viewing pleasure. Not this guy, who yesterday finally figured out where this symbol is: |. So now I can do the cool shawn turner | illustrator | phone number thing on all emails and typed matter. If I just figured that one out, smart phone formatting ain't never gonna happen.

Pie charts help me see this tremendous volume of data at a glance. A graph even shows me the approximate level of traffic per day for my posts, which show up twice a week usually. How to harness that information? It looks like mini-spikes occur at the beginning of most days; do I tweak my posts with some tagline ("What's up, Occupiers? Fight the Power!"), to get people to visit more often?

I don't know. Maybe next post, I'll write about elephants. They've been on my mind lately.

I'm No. 11! I'm No. 11!

You read right: Out of 80 male swimmers ages 45-49 without wetsuits, I finished 11th in total points for the 2011 Northern California open water race season.

(This was going to be a mercifully brief update on my obsession over open water swimming, but now it's become a whole big thing. As with most matters involving me, it is awash in controversy.*)

As a matter of fact, my feet do look like
Don Martin drew them …

Eleventh place, all to myself! I didn't have to share it like so many others. Five people have to share 27th place, for example. Nope, I stand alone.

My wife says I shouldn't even tell people that the first place swimmer in my age group earned 118 points to my 32 points, and that the next three swimmers earned 88, 88 and 80 points respectively before the points total drops precipitously into the 30s. So I won't mention it.

The Pacific Masters Swimming organization, which sanctions these open-water races (making sure they're run right, with paramedics and lifeguards and regulation distances, etc.) just posted the season's results online.

But right away, I'm confused. So, there are two at second place in points, but no one is listed in third place. The next guy is fourth, instead, and two guys after him are fifth in points. No one gets sixth place. The one after that is listed as seventh, then three in eighth before the list gets to me at eleventh. Huh, no ninth or tenth place?

If we're sharing rank by points, I should be seventh, shouldn't I? I guess the three dudes at eighth area really eighth, ninth and tenth, and by happenstance of heritage or fate, sub-ranking goes to whoever's last name comes first in the alphabet. Pacific Masters directs me to the email of someone to contact in case of disputes.

Eh, forget it. I never thought I'd be on any such list at the end of the season, let alone be that high on it.

Now I know a few things that'll help me next year. One is that I don't have to find the race results after every event, don't have to politely fight a crowd joined in reading tiny type in long columns as the results are stapled on a wall or tacked to a bulletin board; usually, the data alongside my name usually disappoints me anyway ("How could I swim that slow? How did that guy swim so fast?")

Now I can be disappointed all at once in the privacy of my office, because the Pacific Masters breaks it all down for you! I can tell at a glance that I swam four of the 14 sanctioned events this season (that comprises multiple races at eight different venues; some places allowed you to swim a half-mile, mile and two-mile race consecutively, if you are lunatic enough). I swam a few other unsanctioned races as well during the summer.

* I can also establish the benchmarks on which to improve my times, and use strength exercises, drills, running, maybe even learn the backstroke to strengthen my upper body. But here's where the  numbers cause me real problems:

All told, according to the season's results, I swam 6.7 miles (can't dispute that) for an average of 24 minutes and 37 seconds per mile. Impressive (for me anyway: At least I'm faster than seven-year-old Elsa Woodhead, the Marin County girl who last month was the youngest to swim the 1.5-mile Golden Gate span; neener neener!), but troubling:

I never swam faster than 27 minutes and change per mile in any of the four races, so how could I have averaged faster than that for all the races combined? Even my math-benumbed mind could sense a discrepancy. What's going on?

Careful sleuthing that could otherwise have been productive worktime finally revealed the hard truth: Results from the last race of the season indicate I swam two miles of Keller Cove at Point Richmond in four minutes, 51 and five-tenths seconds. I think that would have made international news and put me under intense scrutiny about performance-enhancing drugs, cleverly disguised jet propulsion or mysterious mastery of time travel. Since it didn't, and I wasn't, I have to conclude the results lopped an hour off my total time. Which is what happened.

Over the season, I really averaged a bit over 33 minutes per mile. Which is slower than the Elsa Woodhead, who swam the storied Tiburon Mile — actually a nautical mile, longer than a landlubber mile — in 30 minutes. My apologies for any needless aspersions I may have cast her way.

But now what do I do? This is junior high all over again, when I told the PE teacher my fitness test results did not earn me the coveted red gym shorts, contrary to his interpretation of the data. Must I revisit that trauma, and alert the Masters Swimming organization to this discrepancy? My PE teacher berated me. Will Pacific Masters Swimming discredit me, make me admit my slothful shame and obsessiveness over my race times? After I sent out all the invitations to my Eleventh Place Extravaganza: Take That, Haters! party?

This asterisk is going to hang around my neck for a long time. I hope it floats.

I don't not hate Halloween

El Dia de Los Muertos, anyone?

OK, I began badly:

I don't not hate Halloween for me alone, an empty-nester approaching geezerhood. I love it for anyone else, most of all children, to whom the holiday should be returned. We adults have co-opted it, making it into other things for ourselves — things hyper- horrific or alcoholic — and some kind of blanched community benignancy for kids.

All you have to do is get stuck watching one of those tony Giada de Laurentiis/Martha Stewart/Today Show Umpteenth Hour TV cooking-and-craft programs this time of year to see that. What these latter-day homemakers do with dried apricots, black licorice whip and bittersweet chocolate chips should convince you how Halloween has become an adult product which we reconstituted and forced upon our spawn as safe and, therefore, uninteresting. The spawn on these particular shows didn't look like they were enjoying themselves.

{As for holidays in general, to quote my son —  in turn quoting from some pop-culture phenomenon to which I'm not privy — meh! Holidays just wash over me, I'm not sure why. Maybe it's their frequency. They seem to occur every year. I could throw my limited resources behind a moratorium on holidays. Give us a chance, perhaps, to appreciate them by their absence.

My sister said Halloween is her favorite because it's the only "free" holiday — free of conflict; free of a myriad conflicting shining expectations, and the realities that inevitably desecrate them all; free from guilt; free from the tension of having and not having, and not having enough; free from the press of religion.

All you have to do on Halloween, my sister said, is be someone else for a day, get goofy, party and eat candy.
 
Ironically, I think religion is what I'm missing from Halloween, the suggestion of the supernatural and other-worldliness; not the horror of zombies or monsters or even ghosts, but spiritual forces making overtures to us on the periphery of our consciousness. I think I'd enjoy being part of El Día de Los Muertos, the Day of the Dead, that mixture of Catholic and Aztec ritualistic tribute to dead ancestors. Its art certainly draws me … and check this out about La Catrina.}

I wouldn't get in the way of anyone's Halloween celebration, because I loved, loved, loved Halloween as a kid, my memories still so sharp:

• How my dad once made me a costume by painting my old toy football helmet green and turning it into a space alien's head, including scavenged tin electrical pipe through two of the vents at the top for antennae, each antenna topped with a tiny flashlight bulb that lit when I pressed a button on a battery pack hidden somewhere in the otherwise store-bought costume. Lights may also have shown through holes in the mask. That's where my memory dims, for I don't recall exactly how I turned on the lights, nor do I want to remember that I may not have asked for the costume, or appreciated all my dad's work creating it, or that he may have cussed a black cloud putting it together …

• How my next-door neighbor, Buddy, and I decided one year to keep our costumes a secret until the moment we met up for trick-or-treating, and how he showed up at my house to reveal that we were each dressed in drag. Now that I've finished writing that sentence, I realize it takes on a diametrically opposed and unintentioned nuance than it had 39 years ago. Back then it was just hilarious to us that by coincidence we had decided to dress as women. Photos are probably extant, and will begin showing up on the Internet, scuttling my political aspirations …

• How Halloween afternoon always felt so different than the afternoon before or after. Sometimes in Lompoc, that afternoon came dead calm on the heels of a hot Santa Ana wind, which always stirred people to restlessness. Sometimes that day instead signaled the first crispness of fall; October on the Central Coast is usually the clearest, most comfortable month.
  
  The evening sky, burning orange to red and purple, more intensely than other skies on other nights, held weight and foreboding. The forest of scrub oak across from my house grew blacker against the scorched sky, hinting at the sinister somethings and the finality of matters, earthquakes and tidal waves and brushfires, all my dread obsessions.

• How I tried frightening my sister with drawings of bats and Grim Reapers and headless horsemen, until my mom caught me …

• How each Halloween brought closer to mind Agnes. Every town, I've come to realize, has an Agnes, though she goes by different names. Commonly she's Bloody Mary, so invoked in the latest of the Paranormal Activity movie franchise.
  
  (A facebook fan page dedicated to the collective childhood memories of people from my hometown includes several references to Agnes. It amazes me how we share such stories, and how, without the benefit of documentation, we all know our story.)
  
  Our Agnes haunts Harris Grade, a pass in the range of hills between Lompoc and a "shortcut" into Santa Maria inland, serpentined with a narrow deadly road (where several high school students died in separate accidents my junior year). Long, long ago — some say nearly a century ago — as we in Lompoc know, Agnes' car (or wagon?) overshot one of the hairpin turns, and she and her baby fell to their deaths over the steep dusty white embankment and into the chaparral below. (I've always imagined it took place in the 1940s or '50s, and it was a fiery death.) Now Agnes roams the grade, keening for her baby and grasping at cars, trying to push them over the side in her vain search.
  
  Or maybe the baby lived and Agnes can't find her, damned to eternal vigil? I don't know if an Agnes authority exists who can settle such details.
  
  Like Bloody Mary, Agnes will also appear if you call her name three times aloud in front of the mirror of a pitch-black bathroom. Always a dark bathroom. Why?
  
  I was never to find out if it was true, for I never dared say Agnes' name aloud even once in stark daylight, let alone three times in the dark.

In plain terms, I was a wuss. Still am. The only reason I know Paranormal Activity conjures Bloody Mary is because I saw it in the trailer on TV. I scare easily enough without going to the movies and having to pay for it. A lot of people love being scared, or seeing others scared, thus the plethora of Halloween horror movies. They're welcome to it, even the torture-porn of the Saw movie empire. Just don't invite me.

You can leave a little candy, though. Or a coupla sugar skulls. The fading relic of the kid still inside me needs nourishment.

Financial planning for dummy

These are the notes I took during a recent biennial meeting with our financial planner.

The horizontal figure at the top is an idea for yet another plan to brand the group of misfits who endeavor to swim cold Lake Natoma year 'round: I had been trying to get the feet right, and had panicked a bit that I forgot how to draw feet. No better moment than a financial planning meeting to solve such an urgent problem.

The leaf is from the giant plant in the corner of the financial planner's office, just behind the planner's left ear. You can also see the vestige of an airplane window that relates to a blog post from earlier this month, and a figure struggling out of the muck, which was just another unfinished idea for that same post. The hand with a raised finger is just that — I made a squiggle and wondered what it could become, which is the evolution of most of my doodles, beginning from somewhere in the bogs of my brain, advancing likewise.

Interspersed are actual words about the actual meeting for which I was sometimes present.

(By stark contrast that should surprise no one who knows us, my wife's notes are detailed, copious, lifesaving. They are checklisted throughout with action items, soon steadfastly acted upon because my wife makes sure it is so. 

Here I publicly acknowledge how amazing my wife is: Besides working so hard at her day job, a constantly demanding position at which she excels, she then comes home and works even harder to make sense of all we face. The difference between us is that she does not let life's complexities vex her. She stands with a sword in the face of the tsunami. Add to all that, she chooses to stay married to me.

Equally yoked, we are not.)

I'm a big fan of financial planning in principle. One shouldn't waste one's money, but think of his/her future and the future of his/her progeny. Spending bad! Saving good!!

But these meetings resemble something I call, "This is Your Inadequate Life! Featuring a Parade of Poorly-informed Decisions that Will Light You Down in Dishonor to the Latest Generation!"  Each such spectacle is sponsored by all the people who now possess our money.

These events don't look anything like the television commercials for financial planning firms, the tone of which is that clients state their wishes and dreams regarding the rest of their lives, and the financial planners harness their clients' money to turn dreams into reality. All smile.

Though I admire the restraint in most of these commercials (they don't so much portray clients  eventually sailing the seven seas in their retirement, or golfing 24/7 any more — those hoary chestnuts — as  show clients living their later years in dignity and some comfort, just not looking so worried), our meetings are still exceeding strange by comparison.

The running theme of our meetings is, "If only you made more money, I could do such great things for you with it. Darn!"

(Which is the same illogic that bankers lend you money only if you can show you don't need it, and the employers now only give jobs to people who already have them, because jobless people must just not be able to keep steady work.)

The secondary theme is, "Oh, but you make a little too much to take advantage of this particular strategy. Double darn! We'll just muddle through somehow."

The whole process began badly many years ago, when we sought the planner's consultation just as I had decided to go into business for myself as a freelancer. The TV commercials all seem to lionize financial planning clients who know what they want and blaze their own trails. They celebrate the independent spirit.

Not so here. The financial planner told me, "That's a bad idea. These are your prime money-making years, and you're not helping yourself. Is there any way you can go back to what you were doing?"

Gee, go back to the job that was killing me from the inside out? Hmmm, lemme think about it. What about instead we deal with what is, rather than wishing for better? I hate to conjure Donald Rumsfeld — ever — but it's like he almost said, "You go into life with the money you have — not the money you might want or wish to have at a later time."

Nor did it help that the planner used to send us holiday cards that featured photos of the planner's family on vacation on a discontiguous continent. Since I had not been overseas since I was an infant Air Force brat, and camp within California for almost all our vacations, I couldn't help but wonder on whose dime these adventures abroad were conducted.

So we muddle. We reveal our numbers, to our chagrin. They are paltry, undernourished numbers. Brittle-boned, they nonetheless underpin the planner's proposal for what to do with them, and based on what we can understand of the proposal, we make our plans from it. The paltry numbers become dollar figures, and are shuttled to this or that fund or bond, each of which promises a different benefit for a different dreamy purpose. It's tacit among all of us in the meeting that the numbers won't become those dreams, not fully, but doing nothing would be worse. On we muddle.

Don't pay attention to what the money's doing day to day, the financial planner usually tells us in parting. It's better to let the money take the long ride, and trust the fund managers to do their work. Set it, the planner says, and forget it.

Which we do. We're good at that part. So good, unfortunately, that the markets tanked while we were laissez-faire-ing all over our money, and we ended up having to pay extra to have the planner right our little ship.

Now we are engaged in preparations for a macabre race toward death, the object of which is to cache Mason jars of money along the race route that will sustain us until our dying day. We have picked out our ages of death — in other words, we decided based on anecdote and shoulder shrugging and no science or reason whatsoever, how long we'd probably live, and are planning our finances backward based on those expiration dates. What could be stranger?

Our plan now is to help our kids through college — yet another race that we're willing as patiently as we can to proceed. We want to do all we can to make sure they get the optimum education, no less and no more (the latter would be on them to pursue). In the process, we have begun talking about cutting ballast — smaller house, selling stuff, living leaner long-term — in order to reach that finish line and die debt free. Find me a financial planning commercial touting that scenario; you'll die trying.

My mom and dad, who died far sooner than I thought fair to them, managed to bestow that gesture upon their kids, living lean (though given their spare upbringing, still comfortably) and leaving a modest benefit, without burden.

We hope to do as least as much by our kids, dropping the ballast before they must take it out on their journeys into the world. Without grand plans for retirement (I'll probably work until I kick, though I'd like to help fulfill whatever my wife wants to do), I guess we'll plan our work and work this leaky plan.