November, 1980. My friend Randy had somehow found a small untended cottage down a quarter mile of dirt driveway, almost a private road, and screened from view by overgrown shrubbery and dense thickets of Osage Orange hedgerows. I don't know how Randy discovered this treasure. He lived seven miles south east of my house, and this cottage was five miles north west from there, so it was a good twelve diagonal miles away from him, and really off any imaginable route he might've taken. His job was the opposite direction and his girl friend was even further away, as was school. Who knows, he never would come clean about it.

I'd known Randy since the third grade and we attended school together for nine more years. Later we spent a year together in college where his interest in computers and what was in my eyes aberrant drug use took us apart. But at that time we were as close as two geeky male friends could be. Randy and I used to double date and after my pre-college girlfriend dumped me on Christmas, we double dated again with my new girlfriend. We both played D&D, liked computers. I was thick, he was thin; we were Mutt & Jeff and we were Abbott & Costello.

The cottage itself was one story, no basement, clearly built of sturdy materials in the 1940s, post-war, with few amenities, but it had electrical outlets, yet no power, and indoor plumbing, but no running water. We'd take dates there in a sort of post-pubescent playing house. Nothing too serious, but we spruced the place up, and cleaned the interior, ridding it of a huge swathing family of arachnids and rodents, as well as their gossamer webs and droppings. We really took care of the place in an absent way, and we'd bring in a portable hibachi to cook meals, did laundry for fresh bedding, had candles for light, a cooler for beer and soda. It was a free bachelor pad for hanging out. If the doors had locks I don't remember it; they certainly weren't locked when we discovered it.

This went on for weeks and we invested a lot of time cleaning and straightening. From the outside it still looked like a hovel, but inside was quaint and cozy. It was a Fortress of Solitude, a haven against the elders of our village, a place of silent serenity.

One day we made a horrible mistake. We invited a few friends to party, drew up maps, made sure everyone knew the rules. It wasn't our place but nobody else went there and we felt we had squatter's rights. Our extended network of friends amassed quite a few cars, all playing raucous music and spinning tires and unsurprisingly the farmers who lived nearby heard it all.

They took it upon themselves to organize a posse of other farmers and arrived toting shotguns and dour expressions. With stern words they demanded we clean the place up and leave and never return. It turns out the original owner was in a 'home' and they felt responsible to watch over the place in her absence.

The next day, a Sunday, I saw many of the same men, clean shaven faces shining, queued up to take Sacrament in Mass in St. Patrick's church. There was no hint of violence on their faces then, but there had been the night before, all over some perceived transgression of a few rambunctious teens.

Even though those men had been tasked by their sense of obligation to guard the place, they hadn't. Instead their actions had driven off the two young men who actually cared.

The randori was really below my skill level. I say that without pride but as a fact. I was alert and prepared to treat it as a humbling learning experience. My partner initiated contact with a right straight punch, I intercepted with a knife hand block, swinging my hips and body into it to absorb and deflect the inertia. He followed up with a left hand direct, rotating his torso for leverage, but slow on the right withdrawal. I shifted into the blow, catching it in my forearm.

My knife hand grabbed his gi and wrapped the sleeve into a knuckle grip. As his reflexes continued his left hand withdrawal, I slid into a similar grip on my right, and finished him with a right snap kick, toes curled up, without chambering the knee, leaning back to avoid his head butt. The ball of my foot under the big toe gently tapped his solar plexus, lightly knocking the wind out of him. Executed with full force, that kick could potentially kill by breaking the sternum and damaging the organs underneath, or be turned into a sacrifice throw if he'd tossed his weight forward to try to choke the distance on the kick or was faster with the headbutt.

The sensei called a halt, made sure of no injuries and the next sparring pair entered the marked off section of the mats. My opponent, a yellow belt said with a weak smile, "Please don't hit me with that move with full power, sir."

I gave him a nod and a wink.

I wore a white belt. I was taking Tae Kwon Do lessons. I'd received a month free as a birthday present and had no belt ranking in TKD, nor any real interest in gaining one. It's a fine art, but not a style which is suited well to my frame or background. Mostly I was taking lessons to not have the birthday gift wasted and maybe work on my side kick defenses as I expected a lot of those.

The dojang was small and... odd. Glass mirrors to reflect practice techniques, low ceiling, a ballet barre across the east wall (which sort of protected the wall-length mirrors) and numerous Korean flags and symbology across the top of the north wall, as well as a raised spectator section. A list of dojang rules in English and Korean was highly visible from the main entrance. The whole thing was basically one large room with an attached unisexual changing room and bathroom. My fondest rule was one requiring each person to address instructors as "master" and fellow students as either "ma'am" or "sir." It certainly made for a structured verbal environment.

The instructors were a mix of traditional TKD, American TKD, Hwarang Do, Hapkido, and Tang Soo Do, which made belt advancement incredibly complex as one instructor's interpretation of a correct yellow belt technique as completely different from another's. That was a big reason why I stopped attending.

Every week the lower tier of students, which included myself as a TKD novice, would do open light-contact sparring in an elimination format. Apparently the middle tier and upper tiers sparred on days I didn't attend due to work scheduling. The sparring wasn't terribly challenging and in the two months I was there, I don't think anyone landed a clean technique on me.

I eventually stopped going. Between the confusing training system, my long hours in restaurant management forcing me to miss a lot of classes and my lack of desire to explore TKD in great depth lead to me dropping out.

These days I have more free time, but not the energy to pursue another belt in another system. Of the two local school I like, one is outrageously expensive (Shorinji Kempo) and the other is a thirty minute drive (Ving Tsun) with weird hours.

... she's home.

It fills my crusty curmudgeonly heart with something akin to wonder to see her cavort and scamper and do her little puppy dog laugh, tail curled high and haughty. Is it hubris to know without doubt that I have the most precocious precious dog in the history of the world? While some others of the canine breed have earned more fortune, more glory - the Rin Tin Tins, the Lassies, Krypto, Rex the Wonder Dog, the rescue dogs, the famed St. Bernards with their casks of grog - none can match my little Zena for her shear innocent joy.

She has one tiny pain pill left, and a week or so of antibiotics and has to keep her stitches clean. For the first week, she eats regular food, then depending on the stone analysis, her diet may have to be modified, but no doubt to canned food instead of dry, which will make her even happier. But not as happy as I am to see her home.

I went in to visit Zena. I'd called and spoke with the veterinarian, who thought it would be best if Zena got one more day of antibiotics and saline intravenously to both forestall any possible infection and to flush her kidneys to the utmost.

Zena and I went for a walk, wherein she drug me around the parking lot and around the building and desperately wanted to get into my truck, which she recognized. She also refused to eat the canned food I brought from home, so I made another special trip to go buy her favorite 'birthday' kind. I left it with the animal hospital staff as I needed to go home and take my own medications and feed Levi, who was passed out asleep by the bed, didn't even hear me come in.

Zena had a little bit of incontinence, but some of that was no doubt from excitement, some from a slightly smaller bladder. She passed a little bit of blood, but her kidney function is about 90% and her creatine levels and white count were back to normal. I'm convinced now she's definitely won a reprieve. Mostly because I raised her to be a stubborn fighter.

Just got home from visiting Zena in the infirmary. She looks so much better than when she went in, I'm relieved to think she might actually make it. Her eyes were clear despite the pain medications. The veterinary surgeon had to extract her bladder out the abdominal wall, excise a hole in it and drain the stones out. They restitched the bladder wall, reinserted it and sewed her up. I'd hoped they could do a tube inflation via the urethra and a saline drainage, as that technique is a lot less invasive.

Zena's kidney function was at fifty percent. Which isn't great, but she had no kidney stones and now a lot of systemic pressure is off of the nephrons, so hopefully function will improve but even if it remains at fifty percent, that's still satisfactory for right now. They're pumping fluids through her. She ate, she went for a walk. She's still doped up, but I'm a lot more confident she'll pull through this, hopefully for many years to come. After the stones come back from the lab in a week or so, her diet may have to be modified. If anything, it'll be more wet food, which she'll like.

Tomorrow if all goes well, if it goes as I expect, I should be able to bring her back home again.

The love of a pet is the hardest part of Atheism. I wish there were some benevolent sky-god to whom I could supplicate, to ask for an extension for my beloved. Instead I'll have to hope science is enough, at least for now.

Her kidneys aren't doing great, she's eleven. The stones were removed, she's resting at the veterinarian hospital until Thursday and I get to visit her tomorrow.

The phone call saying she made it through surgery was a vast relief.

Zena, like me, has kidney stones. Hers have to come out surgically tomorrow.

Needless to say I am exhausted, both mentally and physically.

As a young child, we were poor, in a poor county, in a poor state. Not the kind of poor one associates with fly-ridden third world children with swollen bellies, just comfortably above subsistence poor. And it was a stable poor, no risk of starvation and never wanting for anything necessary and material, although we'd often be far short in the emotional needs.

So nothing was wasted in our manse. All clothes were hand-me-downs, or hand-crafted by my paternal grandmother the seamstress. I've inherited some of that frugality osmotically, maybe genetically but I loathe wasting things.

Christmas and birthdays were mostly clothes from relatives. Not fancy fun clothes, staples, usually hatedly socks and underwear. I admit to being unappreciative. Being taught manners, I was required to send a 'thank you' letter for the gift. Instead, I wanted to return the underwear. No gift meant no letter and I hated writing slightly more than underwear.

At that point in my life I was determined that writing was an art form and that art requires inspiration, and underclothing was never inspiring. (I was young and didn't appreciate female underwear models which I now find quite inspiring.) The plain truth is I'd rather receive nothing than underwear or socks.

Yes, it was ungrateful and thoughtless on my part. Maturity comes with experience.

A few years later I tried a similar approach with gardening. We always had a massive garden filled with onions, melons, corn, tomatoes, peppers, a true mirepoix of vegetative beauty. I hate everything about gardening. True it's a necessary aspect of human life, but not one I can silently endure.

Having been told to weed the garden, I promptly removed weeds from the potatoes and onions but didn't bother with the rest. When asked why, I pointed out I was allergic to tomatoes, didn't like corn, and didn't eat peppers or melons. I've since changed my tune about peppers, but I still won't eat melons ever, they're disgusting. In my mind, it was a fair bargain. I'd weed the foods I did eat, and not the ones I didn't.

Needless to say that didn't sit well with my parents and I was not only forced to weed the entire garden, but likewise forced to 'enjoy' the bounty at meals. Sometimes I'd skip dinner for days on end for the irascible irrational pleasure of wallowing in my stubborn refusal to comply. I'd already made my best offer the first time.

A stressful night at work, not because it was my Monday, but because yesterday my slightly older-than-the-other dog, Levi, wasn't well and I rushed him to the veterinarian's. That particular clinic I've taken all my pets to for a score of years now and they're reasonable on rates, clean, cooperative, pleasant and damned good at their jobs.

Almost a decade ago I took my old basset hound, Kobold, there. He was thirteen years old and suffering massive organ failure. They euthanized him and I paid the bill with tears in my eyes. You could see the saddened looks on all their faces.

I adopted Levi from the Humane Society on the 25th of July of 2001, just two days after Kobold passed away. He was about two years old, but no one was certain. Zena needed a companion after Kobold's passing. A single unattended dog is a sad dog and they get into trouble. Two dogs get into half as much trouble as one when there are no humans around.

Levi and I had a lot in common. He had just been shipped in from Oklahoma. He was covered in scars and had clearly had an abusive childhood. He was skittish around people, especially children. I've managed to socialize him a lot, but his hatred of children and cats won't go away. He does make an excellent watchdog. He was a mutt; half chow-chow and half blue heeler. His jaw had been broken at some point.

The vet did x-rays and bloodwork yesterday. Levi's liver and kidneys are shutting down, which may or may not be cancer. The x-rays were inconclusive - he has some liver damage, but it could be temporary, or at least not cancer - and Levi was badly dehydrated. He had to stay overnight for some steroid treatment and intravenous hydration. After work and breakfast, I cleaned up a little and went to visit. He has to stay at least one more day when they're going to do a sonogram to further rule out cancer. Levi looked a lot better than he did twenty-four hours ago. He rubbed his massive skull against my shin in the visitors room and made his typical 'roo' noise of affection.

Hopefully it's just a virus. Zena is also sick, but not as catastrophically. She's been running a fever and her ears are inflamed, so maybe a cold or a flu virus. If it is a virus his age may have led to organ compromise, and hydration and care may fix it. Hopefully he gets a reprieve, but today when I left it was hard to keep tears from my eyes until after I left.



Update: Sadly, it's liver cancer. Levi has a few weeks, a few months left before he becomes terminal and there's a very remote chance that he will go into spontaneous remission, but more likely than not he will be euthanized before the end of the year. At least I'll get a chance to say goodbye. Now I need to go get him and bring him home.

I have a lot of acquaintances, in all walks of life, all stripes and creeds. A few are militant Christians, a few are militant Atheists, one's even a militant Pagan. It goes without saying they don't get along with each other and they've given up on converting me - finally. I owe my dogged avoidance of conversion to Apatheism and what's probably a unique perspective on things Deific, or a-Deific.

To take two sides of this multidimensional coin: The Deists insist there is a God, and he was always there, and he created a universe from nothing. He either makes souls and puts them in bodies, or has a vast storage of souls he made, which he puts in bodies, the new bodies which are made from the bodies he created an indeterminate time ago, maybe six thousand years. Some believe these souls are recycled -- I mean reincarnated -- from other souls. Some believe the indeterminate time ago was millions of years. There's no predestiny because only God knows all things, his infinity is potential, as per Aquinas, not manifest infinity.

My Agnostic and Atheist friends believe humans have evolved from other life forms and humans are sapient, sentient creatures. The essence of humanity's sapience arises from a complex quantum level of higher-order interaction of matter, thus isn't strictly delimited by Newtonion cause-and-effect but instead this intelligence is due to a gestalt of interactions of matter in dimensions beyond our normal ken. Some say twenty-six dimensions, some say ten, depends on which version of super string theory of which you're more fond. There's no predestiny because of quantum fluctuations.

In both these cases, of divine origin and of natural selection, we have 'something arising from nothing.' In both cases, we have no predestination imposed by simplistic Newtonian mechanics nor from a divine infinite being.

So we look back, to Blaise Pascal. A child prodigy in mathematics, philosophy, religious thought. A true man of brilliance in the middle 1600s, his insights into voids, fluid dynamics and probability theory were brilliant. After Pascal's passing in 1662, some of his posthumous works included a number of references to theological issues, most important of which have been combined and called "Pascal's Wager."

In a very short form, Pascal posited there are two possible conditions: either an infinite God or no God. After a long discourse he concluded it was better to wager on there being a God and an afterlife and be wrong, than to bet against the same and be right.

A close friend, very smart, a scientist, once told me basically the same thing in other terms. Our other mutual friend, an engineer also agreed. As an avowed Apatheist I didn't bother arguing the fallacy of Pascal's Wager in front of them. What Pascal failed to integrate into his statements was that an omniscient Deity would by definition know the hypocrisy. A long-ago acquaintance and I once had lengthy argument about this very matter. I said it was better to do the right thing because it was right and she maintained it was more important to do the right thing to get into Heaven.

All Deistic arguments really hinge on morality not being absolute but rather it being dependent on the whims of a Creator.

So I created the Modern Pascal's Wager, which says, "better to bet that it doesn't matter and win by not caring."

I suppose this makes me odd. I have a lot of things I'd like to believe in. A Valhalla afterlife, a beneficent Deity, souls, all these things would make for a more logical universe for me, but I can separate my wishes from the evidence.

Flashes of consciousness, not just sentience, but true insight, like a strobe light.

First birthday, the heat of the lone candle on my face, and being prompted to blow out the flame. It was so bright and the first flame I ever saw.

Another one, lying in bed, age eight. It was a bunk bed, the top bunk acted as a false ceiling and the ladder off to one side made it into a fortress. It was dark, and the babysitter Jane, whom I loved dearly, despite feeling too old to require a sitter, shone the hallway light in to check on me. In that brief shining moment I felt as if an auspicious moment were at hand, but there wasn't anything memorable other than a short convivial conversation. The memory is odd because there's no reason to remember it. No trauma, no fear, no joy, nothing untoward, just a conscientious watcher doing her duties. From that flash of memory - if I could paint well - I could draw an exact replica of the room on that un-fateful night.

Jump ahead, to age fifteen, New Year's Eve, alone at home and I went outside to feel the cold crisp air, past the new brick walled entryway where the bulk freezer was situated. Through the screen door, to stare at the bare trees, the frozen ground, the ice-rimed, silver-painted main ranch gates and wonder where I would be in five years, or ten, but not twenty, I couldn't see that far ahead. I would've been wrong if I tried. No emotion then either, and it too shouldn't have been memorable but it's as crisp as a new photo.

Sometimes it feels like I'm a time traveler in my own life. I blink and I'm flashed forward another week, or year, or more commonly a decade. It's like when you're driving a route you travel routinely and while you know how you got there, and can remember each part if you focus on the recollection, there's an opposite form of deja vu wherein you have no idea how this event connected to the previous one. Like Jayne's 'spotlight of awareness,' my life flickers by.

A return to work, five day weekend done. Man, I hate my job sometimes. The staggering amount of stupid was stupidly staggering. Redundant but there's no other way to describe it. I swore a lot, which is the only real way to spice up a sentence. Yes, swearing is the spice of language and it makes sentences exciting and fun!

Feet hurt; forgot to trim nails. If you do a physical job, your nails, both toe- and finger-, grow rapidly to replenish the armor on the tips of your digits, and when you suddenly have time off they don't stop growing just because you're less active. So when you resume your activity, they are too long and snag on your socks (for the toenails) and everything else on the face of the Earth (for the fingernails).

When I first started at my current workplace, I'd had a sedentary job for two years, twenty-four months of sitting on my ass listening to people complain on the phone about how crooked my company's client was. And those callers were right to a large degree, but I couldn't audibly agree with them for obvious reasons. So when I started this 'new job' almost eleven years ago to the day, my feet and hands weren't as inured to privation as they are now. While I'd spent a lot of time handling hot plates in restaurants and sticking my arms in scalding water to wash dishes for the previous few years with my part-time job at the Greek restaurant, my feet were unaccustomed to walking on cement while carrying heavy loads.

On day one I ran over my toes with a double pallet of rock salt. At that time I didn't know how to run a pallet jack, although now it's second nature. A double pallet of rock salt is roughly four-and-a-half English tons. I thought for sure I'd broken big toes but I was wearing sturdy boots and all that happened was a righteous smashing. They bruised heartily and took six months to heal clear. I luckily didn't even lose the nails; thankfully I have a good circulatory system.

The time off was useful. I managed to heal up some of the chronic tendinitis, but my back was aching by the time I got home this morning. Now, to lift and stretch some more. I feel pretty good for an old geezer.

Take two cloves of garlic, remove the paper skin. Mince with a sharp knife. Pour a large pinch of sea salt or rough kosher salt onto the minced pile and using the side of the blade, grind the salt and garlic pieces together in a rolling-pin motion. (The salt acts like an abrasive to make the garlic into a paste.)

Butter both sides of two slices of thick white bread. Use real butter. Despite the healthy aspects of whole wheat, I recommend some cheap white bread, as it will have more sugar to caramelize. Divide the salt-garlic mixture into two piles and scrape each onto one side of the buttered bread. Grill garlic side down.

Flip bread to second side (garlic up now) before the garlic burns and becomes bitter, and to one slice add a few drops of hot sauce, a pinch of shredded colby-jack cheese and a slice of ham. To the second piece of bread add baby swiss cheese. Feta is a suitable substitute.

Once grilled add the two halves together to make a garlic-cheese-ham toast sandwich. Let the sandwich rest a minute until the cheese is done melting and the temperature becomes palatable.

I call this my "God damn sandwich." Because the first intelligible words out of everyone's mouth after they take a bite is usually "God DAMN this is a great sandwich."

I work too much, or so I learned. Mandatory vacation, they said, since the company has a 'use it or lose it' policy about accrued vacation time. Thus I can't work until November and I get paid for not working.

Which also means I won't be subjected to the incessant calls for small people wanting my candy while trying to sleep. And I get a few days to let my sciatica recoup. It's beginning to look like a lumbar disk is a little out of wack although my symptoms were all gone after a nap this early morning, which is a good sign. So now I sit with a lumbar dog-bone pillow and am being more conscientious with my stretches. If it's not completely gone by Monday, it'll be back to the chiropractor.

I blame a combination of the rodeo, hard living, way too many fights, being overweight most of my life, and a family history of back troubles, although I'm not as deep suffering as was some of my family (based on my limited recollections of same).

A lot of people have chronic back pain. I'm lucky in that it comes and goes and it's not so much I can't ignore the pain, and it's nothing terribly serious. The sciatica is the most alarming version as it sends shooting pains down my spine, through my right hip and causes gluteal spasms and cramps. More intriguing, since my left arm is permanently twisted unnaturally, I have permanent symptoms on my upper left side as I try to adapt to a normal person's world. It means ongoing chronic pain in the forearm, the elbow and shoulder, as each warps a tiny bit to try to accommodate to everyday activities.

For awhile that shoulder and upper back pain was so intense I sought care beyond a chiropractor from my primary care physician. He was on vacation so the partner in his practice took the case. My old doctor used to give me anti-inflammatories and physical therapy, both of which help of course. The temporary doctor gave me a cortisone, lidocaine and kenalog injection in the shoulder joint and muscle trigger sites. Best. Day. Ever. One second of pain for one week of being from the planet Krypton.

While I innately know that kenalog is bad for my liver, I want to make babies with kenalog and rub up against it suggestively.

So now I have five days to kill and no real cash to do anything grandiose and some self-imposed do-nothing time to go with it on my favorite holiday. If the weather holds up as per the usual, there might even be a big snowstorm to kick off winter. Let's hope.

"By the pricking of my thumbs, something wicked this way comes."
- Macbeth, Act IV, Scene 1

Not to overly reference Shakespeare from Monday (as sung on an episode of Gilligan's Island, "Neither a lender, nor a borrower be. Do not forget, stay out of debt.") and then to reference Macbeth today, but Halloween's almost here and every year I think of Ray Bradbury's timeless 1962 classic novel, "Something Wicked This Way Comes."

The novel is set in a sleepy midwestern town full of people with hidden desires. As these things tend to do, in paraphrase of the Buddha, desire begets suffering. In this case, the suffering is facilitated by the carnival.

So many things about the novel rang true with me with I first encountered it circa 1970 at the local library. We'd just moved from the center of a small town to the middle of nowhere and thus ended my trick-or-treating forever. I think we tried once to hit a few farm houses, but that was eminently awkward and going into town to trick-or-treat felt just odd, as nobody knew us anymore.

The novel assuaged my desire for Halloween fare because it takes place during the week of Halloween and the storyline is both dark, grim and macabre. In many ways, "Something..." is an allegory of good versus evil and two very close friends, young boys - also appealing to me then - each representing a different side of good and evil as they war against their inner natures trying to decide not only what's right, but the right way to do good.

I'm no Bradbury fan. He's fine, just not my thing. This time Bradbury wrote from his own experiences, I found out and that's what gives this novel a ring of truth. When Ray was young, he met a man something like Mr. Dark at a carnival and those events prompted Ray to become a writer. This particular story had many extrapolated (and inverted) elements of his real life encounter so the entire tale is so very full of verisimilitude.

Walking down a hallway at work, B__ says to me, "Have you seen A____ lately? She still owes me thirty-five bucks."

A long time ago, I figured out banks were for loaning money, not other people. Usually it starts as a good will gesture, but the recipient is obviously having financial difficulties, or wouldn't need money lent to him anyway. After awhile the friendship will suffer as the loaner wants the money back and the loanee doesn't have it. Oh, I'm sure there are exceptions but I've never seen them. Not counting those few times where someones says, "loan me ten bucks until I get my wallet from the truck" or something similar.

For instance, about twenty-five years ago I had just reached a point where I wasn't living in a card board box and I had enough money to actually take a day off occasionally, my neighbors at the motel where I rented weekly kept dropping hints on how they sure could use some money. They needed - no, wanted - cash to pay for a Easter treats for their two children.

Thus in a holiday spirit I loaned them a hundred dollars, which fixed all their small financial concerns. O, the joyous looks, the hugs and hand clasps. Sure, they were swell people, filled with vim and glee.

Weeks go by. The husband had gotten some part-time work again, the wife was doing some babysitting and so forth. More time passed and I hesitated to ask for my money back. I was forced to switch jobs again, as my temporary work had dried up and I hated the 'permanent' job I worked.

I never saw that money again, and in those intervening quarter century there's probably been a dozen times I could have really used a spare hundred dollars. Not as much as they needed it, obviously, so I felt bad and greedy for wanting my money back. If instead I'd done then what I do now, which is give money away to those who need it, everyone would've been happier.

Yesterday I experienced a long forgotten pleasure. I haven't felt it's blush in two seasons.

I lay down upon my bed, and the sheets were cold as soothing ice. Tucking a spread up around my neck, the bed quickly warmed to the perfect temperature.

Man, I missed winter.

I learned to cook at home, mostly by watching my mother, who was a fabulous cook. Everyone agreed, although my father would always point out she hadn't started that way. Also, from watching my paternal grandmother, who cooked different, but equally tasty fare.

In college the dorm I lived in had communal meals, all part of the package, and the food was decent and healthy, if not the sort of thing to which I was accustomed. At least it was filling and nutritious.

Then I went virtually homeless, penniless and cooking whatever I could scrape together for a few meager dollars a week. It's amazing what a can of creamed corn and a stale loaf of bread can be combined to make. It's where I learned to love the art of cooking eggs in all their cheap nutrient-filled splendor. Modern medicine vacillates on whether eggs are health. They are, they aren't, they are again. I figure they are if prepared right. If most of th time you eat them poached, you're doubly safe and they are so delicious....

Then I became actually homeless and without the facilities to cook, it was fast food whenever I could afford to eat, since it was impossible to store or cook anything on my own. I hate fast food as a result. I think the only thing I dislike more than fast food is fancy restaurant food. Salad forks and crab forks and a soup spoon all spell a pretentious meal to me.

In the course of working in restaurants I learned more cooking techniques, some intricate, most just an in-depth study of the basics. Years later I can crack open a pantry and make a hearty meal from anything edible.

I go out of my way to seek out greasy spoon diners, not chain restaurants. Omaha is blessed with dozens; Richie's, Harkert's BBQ, Amatto's Italian, Shang-hai Garden (best Mexican-Chinese cuisine on the cheap I've ever had). Most of them are dank, dark and covered in old cooked grease, but the food... the food!

On my birthday my friends usually insist I go dining. I insist on picking the place. It's awesome to behold the scandalous looks they give me. Last year it was a tiny authentic Mexican place near my house, with free beer (they didn't get the license to sell beer, so they had to give it away) and the most amazing fajitas. The two big-screen televisions blared out a version of the Blues Brothers dubbed in Spanish and in my inebriated state, I began translating for my less linguistic friends.

I remember so many details of my old life but the one thing that escapes me is where I learned Spanish (and a smattering of conversational ability in wide array of other languages, including American Sign Language). I remember my parents both being fluent in Spanish, as well as both my maternal grandparents, so maybe I picked it up there. My parents met - and I was born - in New Mexico, which has a large Hispanic population, but we moved to Kansas when I was under a year old. For whatever reason, I read Spanish fluently, can understand spoken as well, but can't write or speak it with any speed, mostly from a lack of practice I think.

I suppose it'll always remain a mystery to me.

I have fond memories of college, despite my massive failure there, said failure I attribute to three things.

- The onset of my muscle spasms depriving me of virtually all sleep.
- The environmental change from a sleepy high school to a high pressure education system.
- Most critically, our learning system.

Maybe I learn differently than most people, but give me a well-written text book and I can learn vast amounts of information in a very short time. Give me a boring lecturer who isn't talking about what's in the syllabus and base all tests on the lectures and I will do very poorly.

There was a running joke about the Chemistry 101 course their. "The course if very thorough, everything that isn't covered in the material is covered in the tests."

I suppose it all just means I don't learn well in a structured environment because the pace is too fast in some places and far too slow in others. In my later years via many different companies, I find lectures and seminars equally boring... the lecturer always feels like he or she is talking down to the audience as if they're kindergartners rather than adults. It's maddening.

Reminiscing I can think of dozens of examples, heck, I can think of two this year.

Are there really people who only learn when treated as a child? Or is that method just the most mediocre mean?

Cement hands, freakishly strong at times, painfully weak with delicate things. I feel at times like a craftsman, a blacksmith, a tinsnip, a cobbler, whose rough trade has left him unable to handle delicate teacups.

Or soft souled others.