On Her Majesty's Not-So-Secret Service

"Daddy, I want to go to the park."

A brief statement, laced with the solemn gravity that only a 5 year old queen can muster. My heart, the heart of the Captain of the Guard, flutters briefly as those words charge the air. I am a fool to think I can resist.

"I want to got to the park with the green tubey slide. The big one."

I turn away from the computer, task forgotten, no hope of completing it now. The television is muttering loudly, yellow sponges and pink stars running in circles around my peripheral vision. I smile. The Queen doesn't realize that I want to go outside anyway. She just knows that the antics on the screen bore her now, time to saddle up the royal entourage and show the royal visage to the lucky subjects at the park. The geese, the dogs: they bow and scrape before her glory.

"You mean the lake? With the big playground and the tent?"

She scoffs, as if the Captain was sorely lacking in brains. Why else would he have stated something so bleeding obvious? She sighs, and giggles.

"Yes, Daddy, where else?"

I laugh, as we walk out the door to the car. So the green tubey slide it is. I buckle her in to her car seat. Hair the color of a late summer cornfield brushes my cheek as the Queen fidgets. I double check the straps. Woe betide the man who fails Her Majesty's safety!

We pull out of the parking lot and on the access road leading away from Her Weekend Palace. The Queen, oblivious to my ruminations, chatters to herself, singing a nonsensical song that might as well be the aria of an angel. I am rapt, acutely aware of my allegiances. Loyalty? Of course, don't be silly. There is no tainted loyalty here.

Stoplight. I am watching the traffic, and I idly mention going to the boat dock at the lake, maybe looking for geese or Brother Heron. Her Royal Cuteness suddenly sits bolt upright.

"Wait, daddy, I wanted to go to the park with the purple playground!"

Purple? She clearly said green tubey slide. The purple playground, so called because the paint and plastic of the slides and bars is purple, is in the opposite direction. I will not argue.

"If we go there, we won't have time to go to the lake, alright?" I say, glancing into the rear view mirror.

The Queen looks at me with rose window eyes. She smiles.

"It's okay, Daddy, I have a plan."

I can't help but smile. It's good to have a plan, especially if you are a queen. We turn right, instead of left, headed for a child's delight decked out in the color of royalty.

1 down, 6 to go...

...and your pride is here on earth.

I guess the wages of sin pay pretty good, but how are the benefits?.

Cat Crackers, Pot-stills and Test To Failure: In Which I Meditate On One Year In The Blogosphere

Sniff, sniff.

Smell that? That oily, singed hair mixed with whisky and caramel kinda smell?

One year. One year ago today, I fell into the blogosphere.

Whew. What a trip. I had no idea then that I would be here now, with the stuff that I wrote being what it is. I certainly did not foresee that I would connect with such a wonderful, weird, invigorating community, many of whom have given my work a warm reception. There are quite a few whom I would be honored to consider as friends, and definitely kindred spirits, even though we haven’t yet met in the physical world. I am grateful that I could take the noise in my head and spin it into signals that people want to receive. I am even more fortunate to have discovered such a deep well of talented, fascinating people who can write and take pictures and narrate the things that catch their eyes, weave the fabric of their lives.

With all the upheavals and changes in my life over the past six years, I daresay the tapping of this well, the plugging in to this outlet has been anchor and sail for me. I was out of the gate fast and ran high before the wind before time and tide reined me in. But sail I do, upon an ocean I care not to quit.

In the petrochemical industry, there is a beast known as a ‘catalytic cracking chamber’. Also known as a ‘cat cracker’, it is usually a tall cylinder which is fed with heavy oil or other hard-to-refine nasties. In the cracker, a wide range of temperatures, pressures and catalysts makes it possible to “crack” the heavy stuff into lighter, more useable stuff.

In the whisky biz*, there is the ‘pot-still’. This charming creature makes it possible to take fermented barley malt and distill it into tasty libations, like single-malt Scotch (to use a particularly fine example). The process has been around for centuries and the shape and size of the still can have a marked effect on the flavor. In both processes, liquids are fractionated to produce something that people want or need or find useful. Some you can burn, some you can drink; the desired result dictates the choice.

Whether I am a cat cracker or a pot-still, or have brought you heat and light, or taste and pleasure, I am humbled and honored to know you all. Thank you all for being here with me. Thank you for a year of sharing art and life, comedy and tragedy, prose and poetry.

For your edification and delight, I leave you with this:

Bending test for the impatient from Alexander Schreyer on Vimeo.

*And it has many applications for other types of tipple, and in the chemical biz, too.

Tell Me Tales Of Love

Amor non tenet ordinem (“Love has nothing to do with order”)

– Columbanus, Irish monk a-wandering in circa 6th century A.D.

Nutty Irishmen seem to have it in with each other.

Columbanus, perhaps a brother or cousin to me and separated from me more by time than by spirit, knew whereof he spake. His ‘rule’ has earned a special place in my head and heart, as of late. I say this because I get it, and I don’t get it.

Order? Love? Through one set of lenses, they seem a perfect pair. After all, isn’t love the way of things, the path that all hearts follow? We awaken to love in youth, through the spectrum of attachment to Ma and Da, learning to love our siblings and extended family, stumbling onto the precious delights of romantic love as we turn from foals into stallions and mares…eventually diving into the overheated ocean we call passion and sex. It is an arc of which we are very familiar, and we begin to think the lenses we wear to be our eyes. In the opiate daze of passion, we can no longer tell the difference between the two. Cool crystal merges slowly into warm flesh, and we are so distracted the border between mineral and animal effectively no longer exists.

Change the color of those lenses from rose to garnet, and the order we once knew dissolves, igniting into the unchecked fire that is love gone wrong. The petty slights of an unthinking partner, the abandonment of a heart gone cold, the sheer bloody-mindedness of human beings who take things for granted: fuel for an enraged heart and fevered mind. Sometimes the flames eat at the center of our souls, like a coal fire buried in a mountain. Other times, the fire engulfs us on the outside, consuming everything in its path at a breathtaking pace. Consider the forest fire unleashing such energy that the trees explode: the sap and water boil under the onslaught of combustion and runaway oxidation.

In either case, we lose a sense of our discrete identity. As so often happens, we learn this too late the first time around, and shy from it the next. The transformative nature of these emotional transactions can never be avoided, they can only be experienced. One can only hope that we ourselves are iron in the hands of a master blacksmith, or honey in the mouths of bees.

Love. Fractal emotion that defines the swirling edges of an interior self that yearns to be wanted, to be included, to be desired. If our hearts can be described as strange attractors, our minds fervently hope that the mathematics of compassion and desire will bring us to that ideal state from which we need seek no further. Our emotions a mesh in the currents of space-time around which another soul will spiral and spiral, finally coming to rest in the bottom of the curve.

The joke, the prank that the Universe lays upon us is this: just because the heart falls into an ideal state, does not mean that it is the only, best state in which to exist. We can predict with some certainty that there will be a time, a place in which the heart feels at rest and need go no further. What we cannot know, because infinity cannot be known, is if the state we are in is indeed the best to be had…or even if it is close to being the best. Thus, the slow poisons of insecurity and jealousy and fear can knock the heart out of the mesh in which it is embedded. Sometimes it is pure accident, sometimes it is medicine…the heart wanders about, seeking another occurrence, another intersection of want and need in which to lose itself. The lucky ones succeed. The unlucky ones keep looking.

The Beatles, Jesus, the Persian poet Rumi: Many are those who have suggested that all you need is love. As children we accept this without questioning. As adults we tend to scoff at such breathtaking naivete. Eventually, though, experience transforms into wisdom, the color slowly drains from the lenses, and the heart and the mind meld into singularity. Love will not feed you, or clothe you, or put a roof over your head. It will, however, sustain you.

The chaos of love: an order that we cannot perceive, without which we cannot live.

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Speaking of the things we do for love, please check out "BEING AWARE CAN SAVE A CHILD'S LIFE" on HotDads, by Kevin at Always Home and Uncool. Thank you to Kevin, for bringing this to my attention. Blessings and all the best to you and yours.