COMMUNITY CENTER, SCHMOMMUNITY CENTER

The title of this entry should tell a lot of people a lot of things already. But for those of you just joining us...

Supposedly a lot of people here in Saratoga think the absolutely most important thing we could possibly do to assure a viable and prosperous future for this town is to build something called a community center.

Why do I say supposedly?

Because the only evidence we have that any significant number of people want such a thing comes out of the Wyoming Rural Development Council's community assessment of Saratoga (my opinion of which I believe I made clear on Tuesday in this very space); through the initial listening sessions and a follow-up meeting or two in which a large group of Saratogans took a stab at prioritizing the mishmash of ideas that came out of those sessions, the number one priority of the whole project turned out to be a community center.

I'm not sure that I would take these results as gospel, however, as more or less the exact same phrasing has come out of more or less the exact same mouths as a more or less automatic response to the ever-tempting question "What do you want/need in Saratoga?" for something like 30 years.

Nonetheless, a committee was formed to start putting it all together and make it happen. It was going to be the first real achievement to come out of this whole process, a justification for the tax and other money spent to make the WRDC and these assessments go, and of the increasingly great amount of time and effort those of us on the steering committee that grew out of the community assessment were putting in.

The only thing this committee has settled on to date is how this facility is to be paid for, that being out of your pocket and mine through the sixth cent capital facilities tax that will either be up for a vote in November or in May of 2003 (depending upon to whom the Carbon County Commission finally decides to listen), a tax that is already going to be huge and long-lasting because its primary purpose is to build a new county jail that can't help being expensive in principle and is steadily becoming more so in practice. As municipal projects large and small for each of the nine incorporated towns in this county get tacked on, the tax gets bigger and bigger. The bigger the dollar amount, the longer we're all paying it off, and, incidentally, the longer we are prevented from developing any other capital projects in the county.

That's not the only problem dogging this community center, either. Actually, it's not even the biggest or most important.

See, what never was settled in the early or the later stages of this thing (plan? project? these words imply too much order and deliberation for it) is what constitutes a community center. Some say what's really needed is a sports center (i.e., indoor pool, raquetball, dwarf-tossing, whatever.). Some say it's a performing arts center (stage, lights, sound, seating). Some say it's a convention or meeting center, with a banquet hall and break-out rooms, etc.

Of course, nobody agrees, and no one is willing to compromise, not even, it appears, to listen to each other. The committee that was going to make this all happen hasn't even bothered to meet since November because the factions are sick of squabbling over what this center is ultimately going to be.

And while a few very vocal, very wise, very passionate people, the kind we are most fortunate to have living here, the kind that I would wish for every community, are still making known the view that this community center has "just got to be built," I don't see any of these vocal, wise, passionate people stepping up to organize an effort.

Indeed, the most common sentiment I have heard expressed in the days since our last Saratoga 3000 meeting has been "You can't let this die, Kate. It's too important. It's not for me to do, but it has to happen."

News flash. It's not for me to do, either, because I don't think this nebulous fantasy facility is a priority at all, even if somehow it winds up not being paid for with tax dollars (a notion that doesn't seem to have occurred to anyone except me and a few of the more realistic members of the Platte Valley Arts Council, who are wisely pursuing their own venture to build a performing arts facility with private donations).

There are a lot of other, more appropriate things to do with the people's money.

Not to beat a dead horse (that I first started whipping in my town council campaign speech in 1999 that none of you were there to hear anyway), but taxes are paid by every citizen, and are paid on a less than voluntary basis. People go along with them, usually grudgingly, because it's better than the alternative (jail, property seizure, having to forgo buying gasoline, food, etc.) and because according to the tacit social contract under which we all live, that money is going to be spent by the government in ways that benefit everyone, to provide things that everyone needs but no one could effectively provide him- or her-self on any other basis: things like roads, police protection, ambulance coverage, water and sewer services, civil and military defense, etc.

A useful nutshell phrase is "protection of citizens from force and fraud" which I would couple with the provision of certain amenities that we in western civilization have come to think of as necessities, like sanitation and running water, roads along which all the goods of our consumer economy can reach us, etc.

Some would make the argument that a sports center or an arts center or a convention center would also benefit everybody, but what they usually mean is "everybody who wants the same things we do." But suppose I don't care for swimming or raquetball or volleyball. Suppose what I really want is a professional grade roller derby arena.

My point is that no facility can satisfy everybody, so inevitably some will get what they want while others will not. Those who don't get what they want will still be forced to pay for the facility – as will those who don't use it at all.

No, when you're getting into something like this, it is a matter for the private sector.

I think there is a niche, a demand for all of these things I have mentioned here. I would love an indoor pool (but, unlike most of those few fellow citizens of mine who are still clamoring for one, I have looked into what it costs to build and maintain one, and have seen that it creates a burden that our present population and tax base cannot currently afford. Not even close! Not even if the indoor pool fairy flew over our town and magically gifted us with one out of thin air. I will provide numbers if anyone who reads me is really interested). I definitely see great potential for a convention center here.

And if some entrepreneur wants to pull it together, raise the capital and build one or more of these wonderful things, more power to him. And since his would be the risk, the effort, the investment, his alone would be the reward – making it worth his while to be absolutely sure he was giving this town's citizens and visitors what they want and would use the most in the long term and the short term (I am leaving alone, for now, what happens down the road when the novelty of the shiny new facility wears off and the tragedy of the commons sets in).

Or, if an individual or group wants to take this on and raise the money privately – if the project you have chosen is truly what the people want, financial support for it will be generous indeed, as the Town of Riverside discovered last year when it put out coin cans to help pay for mosquito spraying and routinely found $20 bills in amongst the spare change. Conversely, if no one is all that interested, raising that money will be proportionately more difficult, perhaps sending a message that something else is wanted.

I would wholeheartedly support either of these ways of getting something built (provided, of course, that there's something in it I like; after all, it's my money, and if someone wants it, they have to persuade me to part with it. That's the way a free society works, folks).

But I will not support some half-assed attempt to build something that only a few noisy people want and a lot of people are going to be forced to pay for. I won't support it and I certainly will not organize or coordinate or spearhead such an effort, as many around town have strongly suggested I do.

If nothing else, folks, shouldn't the person who's leading the troops be someone who believes the battle is one worth fighting?

You wouldn't have put a draft-dodger in charge of the bombing of Kabul, would you?

But I will tell you this: it's going to take someone that actually wants to see this happen, and wants it badly enough to quit flapping his or her jaw and start rolling up his or her sleeves to accomplish anything on this. And if no one steps up, guess what?

Nothing, that's what.

WHAT ISIN A TITLE?

A recent discussion on National Review Online about the policies of the New York Times and other papers as to who does and does not get cited as "Dr. So-and-So" provoked one great reader response from a guy who is just learning the pleasures of working closely with young enthusiasts:

“I’ve always thought that the coolest honorific one can have is ‘Coach.’ It was just bestowed on me this year, as I’m coaching my four-year-old’s T-ball team. When you have a bunch of kids and parents calling you ‘Coach [Smith]’ or just ‘Coach,’ it makes you feel pretty good. Forget all that ‘Dr.’ bunk; ‘Coach’ is where it’s at!”

I bet that's true, not that I would really know, of course. While for the first time in my life I am officially an assistant speech and debate coach for my alma mater, Saratoga High School (it's even in the minutes of the January meeting of the Carbon County School District No. 2 Board of Trustees! They formally ratified my hire along with an assistant middle school basketball coach or something. And I'm getting paid to do it! Wough!), I have yet to be addressed by that title. Nor do I get the expected (stuffy, politically correct) "Ms. Sherrod" or the less-expected (stuffy, old-fashioned) (but what I actually prefer, curmudgeon that I am) "Miss Sherrod."

No, what I usually get is "Kate," as in "Oh jeez, we'd better knock it off or we're going to kill Kate" – an actual remark one of my kids made during yesterday's practice.

I still haven't shaken the fishing derby flu entirely, you see, so it's been a little dangerous to make me laugh, as I tend first to wheeze, then to gasp, then to cough, then to choke, all the while making barely audible laugh-like noises and shaking my shoulders while my eyes water and my face turns purple... which is of course a very funny sight and one that is bound to produce further witticisms, which make me laugh more, which produces more choking, etc. on and on ad infinitum until one of my more compassionate charges makes an observation like the one quoted above.

But in the context of speech practice, it's pretty much impossible not to make me laugh!

Those of you who enjoy blooper shows on TV or the outtakes that sometimes run at the end of movies nowadays would really, really love speech practice, the barely controlled chaos of which is like a two hour-long blooper reel every single day.

It takes a certain kind of person to get up and do an oral interpretation, repeating eight or nine minutes worth of the exact same words every day, accompanied with the right tones of voice, character placements, gestures and facial expressions – and invariably, the kind of person who can do all that is a) not going to get it perfect every time, b) going to flub in some wildly amusing, frequently Freudian way, and c) going to react wildly amusingly to said flub.

It's then my job as coach to get that person back on track, which is not easy when said person is still bouncing around in front of me, launched into a five-minute riff on whatever mistake he or she made, its background in the day's events, a plea for cutting out the source of the flub (usually a strange word or a corny phrase), or just a weird little dance... I have one student who sort of hops every time she blows a line, another who trips off in to weird rhymes on whatever word she mispronounced, another who I cured of looking at the floor by means of a note I placed on the floor in front of him that reads "Don't look at the floor, dummy" so now he looks at his duet partner (a no-no in the rules for duet interpretation), still another who starts giggling sort of freakishly whenever I look at him...

Usually the performer rights him- or herself, eventually and we wander back on track, but not before sharing some funky moments for which I would trade nothing in the world.

I can see in their faces that they think I'm the dorkiest thing they've ever encountered, and they're not far from wrong – man, when did speech kids get so cool, so fashionable, so knowing? When I was in high school, my mother rightly referred to my teammates and I as "the nerd herd," and for the most part, it was painfully awkward, out-of-it things that we were, living for the weekends when we could slip into the phonebooth (Okay, a school bus), do our quick change (Okay, drive for six or seven hours to places like Powell or Jackson or Gilette) and be Superman for a day before having to go back to plain ordinary school on Monday – but they indulge me and listen to me and occasionally put my suggestions into practice, which is of course incredibly gratifying.

James Hillman has observed that the reason a lot of people dislike or avoid being around adolescents is because their own adolescences were so painful, and I think that's true. It's a horrible, awkward, scary time for most people and it's natural to want to forget about it or at least avoid any reminders of it more concrete than a nostalgic song. Raising a teenager or being a high school teacher and putting up with all of it all over again at close range is considered heroic largely for this reason.

BUT, there's a lot to be gained for those who put this instinct to avoid aside as I have. Yes, it's really weird to be wandering again the very same halls I hated at age 16, to see on one wall my 18-year-old face peering out of a composite of senior pictures (my hair short and badly cut, my frame shrouded in a huge baggy sweater, my eyes rimmed with smeared eye make-up because I insisted the photo be taken outdoors and I had not yet, at 18, found any real cure for my rampaging pollen allergies... god, I hate that picture, but there it is, for all time) and to see roaming those halls the kids and grandkids of people I've known my whole life as rough contemporaries and friends. It's hard to watch the kids struggling as I struggled, making mistakes I made, expressing opinions I once had but have since outgrown (oh, how many of them tell me how they can't wait to get out of Saratoga! And they don't really see the irony of this at all).

BUT, it's also, as I've already illustrated, really, really fun. There's a lot of good stuff that happens then, too, and it's mostly the good stuff that I get to share as a speech coach. School is out but they're not yet home with mom and dad; they're in a zone in between, semi-autonomous, with room to experiment. And so am I.

And... it gives me a new perspective on my own time within those halls. I see a lot of me, then and now, in a lot of them, and that rekindles my fellow feeling in general, which is always a very good thing.

Yup, coaching is great, with or without the title.

(Of course, I have yet to make a road trip with this crew, so, so... well... all of the above sentiments are probably subject to change. Especially since the head coach, who was once upon a time my coach, still has a lot of bad habits like shopping and McDonalds, two things I still hate. But time will tell on that one. Time will tell. Stay tuned.)

THE WRONG WAY, THE RIGHT WAY, AND...

I'm fading fast, so I'm just going to give an executive summary.

I think a bunch of my colleagues and I learned a very important lesson tonight: Big, ambitious, worthy projects don't happen because a bunch of people got together and then said "Hey, this is a great group, bet we could really do something with a group like this, uh huh, uh huh" and then said "Okay, so what are we going to do?"

NO. Big, ambitious, worthy projects happen because a need or is perceived for something in particular, and a few people decide that fulfilling that need is so important that it's worth a sacrifice of time and effort (sacrifice in that, in order to do one thing, one is always sacrificing the opportunity, the possibility, to do a hundred other things) to do it, and those people make a plan, and start gathering resources and help and more people, and they do it.

There is nothing more useless than solvers in search of a problem, which is, I'm afraid, what was created when a certain state-level bureaucracy came to town and sold us a top-down bottle of snake oil.

I'm probably going to piss off a lot of people in saying this, but then again, I think a lot of the people who are going to be pissed off are people who weren't at that meeting.

Look, ordinary, dedicated, busy, intelligent, caring people just like (and pretty much including) those in Saratoga 3000 have done some really amazing things here recently. A good example is the Saratoga Community Playground Project, in which a bunch of busy parents put coin cans all over town and had funky little nickel and dime fundraisers and taught themselves to write rather impressive grants and put in a rather impressive brand new playground structure smack in the middle of a local park.

The difference between that group and Saratoga 3000? The problem came first! Not the solvers. Did the Playground Ladies sit around for months and months and stare at each other and say "what should we do with all this abundant free time we have?" No. They knew what they wanted FIRST, decided they wanted it badly enough to roll up their sleeves and do something about it, and then the went out and did it.

Anyway, I challenge any of my readers to tell me one true life success story that started out with a bunch of do-gooders who assembled first and then tried to think of some good to do second. It seems to me, more and more, that such an approach leads at best to some pretty half-assed good, and at worst to a pantload of wasted energy and time.

Certainly, it looks like a very poor method for polis-building.

But I'm trying to keep an open mind about this. So really, dear readers, if you have an example to share, please E-mail it to me.

(Note to my out of town readers: Saratoga 3000 is an ad hoc organization formed after the Wyoming Rural Development Council came to town in November of 1999 and conducted a "community assessment" for Saratoga, an exercise in which WRDC experts of one stripe or another conducted "listening sessions" with various segments of the population in order to "identify" our town's strengths, weaknesses and possibilities, as well as develop some kind of picture of "what people want to see happen here". The WRDC presented the town council and the chamber with a thick, steaming report summarizing what they had learned about us. The report included suggestions for "where to go next" now that we know ourselves, and of course strongly recommended that a committee be formed to act on those suggestions [yes, we're all still getting over the shock of the notion that a government agency recommended forming a committee]. The committee came to be known as Saratoga 3000 about a year later [the name was my idea, and there are still those who mock me for it] after the group finally hashed out that the overall goal would be to get Saratoga's population up to 3000, a figure that research suggests might be a good critical mass for sustainability but is not above what our current infrastructure can support])

DANGEROUS READING...

...And in the constant reading of orators, historians and poets his intellect took increasing delight in observing between the remotest matters ties that bound them together in some common relation. It is these ties that are the beautiful ornaments of eloquence which make subtleties delightful.

- Giambattista Vico in his Autobiography, Fisch & Bergin translation

...There are three planets... that are extremely favorable to contemplation and eloquence: the Sun, Venus and Mercury. Moving together with equal steps, they leave us when night is coming on and only when the day begins do they rise and revisit us...Thus, those people who study at night when these planets leave us, or who get up in the daytime after sunrise, when these planets are entering into the prison-house of darkness, lose out. On the other hand, those people who at sunrise are there seeking, rising, to contemplate and to write when these planets also rise – only these people think with sharpness, only they can write and compose their work eloquently.

- Marsilio Ficino, Book of Life, Boer translation

One can never serve two masters, and this early morning finds me caught between two formidable ones, my two favorite Italians ever (Vico wrote in the 1720s, Ficino in the 1480s or so). And they're both right. So I'm pretty much screwed.

Most of you who read me know the experience I'm caught in right now: you borrow or buy or steal a new book, dip into it at an odd moment, are intrigued but think you can save it for later, take it easy, let it dissolve slowly into your brain... but then something in it grabs you and won't let you go, and even when you put the book down and away still a part of you is reading it, fully engaged in it instead of what you should be doing, whether that's running a meeting or measuring a fish or sleeping.

A really good book, like either of those from which I've quoted or like the one I'm almost finished reading now at 4:46 a.m. of a Monday morning, makes me see "between the remotest matters ties that bind them." Making connections between what I am reading and have read or watched or seen or written about is more fun than anything; when I really get going I can hardly believe it is my brain at work as the ideas and connections mimic the oysters in "The Walrus and the Carpenter": "thick and fast/they came at last/and more and more and more." Damn! There went another one! Won't they stop?

But of course, I don't really want them to stop. As I've observed before, it's our capacity to be distracted that makes us who we are, keeps our lives interesting and worth the living.

It would be nice, though, to have at some point gone to sleep tonight – not that I didn't try. The book I've been reading, however – I won't go into detail over it now lest this become my most bloated blog entry ever, but it's a nifty new discourse on military history and the rise of Western civilization – went to bed with me and I kept reading it, arguing with it, drawing connections from it to everything from my beloved Ajax (I now have yet another interpretation of him to play with) to the singular phenomenon about a year and a half ago when a group of about 30 untrained and inexperienced Saratoga volunteers spontaneously and without leadership assembled a large and complex array of playground equipment in two days flat.

All that went on in my head at about 2 a.m.

By 2:30 I'd gotten up, taken a shower, gotten dressed, made some coffee, and taken up my book again. I know myself: I'll read right through until I'm late for work (how fortunate that my commute is less than a block!), so I'd best get everything else done before – including, as I realized at about 4 a.m., this blog entry, for I have a very, very busy day today, one in which I have planned to do my very best to catch up on all that didn't get done last week because I was home tripping out on cold medicine. Which means that when my day, at the office and then up at the school (speech practice! I've not even seen my kids in over a week! I'm going straight to coaching hell!), is finally over I'm going to collapse right at my doorstep and luck alone will steer me towards the couch or (less likely) my bed.

And until then I'm going to be a wreck. All because of a new book.

It's unhealthy, so unhealthy to proceed in this fashion, even if you don't believe Ficino (on either a literal or metaphorical basis – either way, it is wisdom). My friends around town who will be getting up in an hour or so will be well equipped to handle whatever this Monday throws at them (and at least a few of them will be annoyingly smug about this fact when I stumble blearily in for coffee in, oh, five hours to see their smiling, perky faces, the jerks) while I'm going to be a complete wreck by lunchtime (though, for once, my hair will be dry at lunchtime) (hey, we take our boons where they're granted).

I'll make it through, though. I always do – this happens rather a lot, I'm afraid. You'd think I'd have learned to deal with it, or prevent it, or minimize it, but I haven't. I just muddle through and trust in all of you to indulge me if I look a little bleary-eyed and occasionally mutter about something not even remotely germane to what we've been talking about.

It just means I've observed another tie between the remotest matters, and am going to lose out because of it.

WAITING TO CATCH A STAR

Bucking yet another major trend of my generation, recently I took the plunge and actually subscribed to a newspaper. Not a web edition or an e-mail digest, either: an actual, physical, stain-your-fingers, clutter-your-living-room, wrap-your-fish newspaper.

I did that a week ago today.

I started getting it on Wednesday.

Now it's Sunday morning, just past 7 a.m., and I just caught myself pacing and peering out my window and wondering "Where the %#@$& is my newspaper?"

I've been up since 4 a.m. (wages of sin and cold medicine and a wildly irregular schedule) and I've spent most of that time online. I've read most of the New York Times, El Pais (very informative little cartoon there detailing the accommodations at the Gitmo Hilton, where the Taliban/Al Quaeda prisoners are enjoying their surprise vacation HERE, the Washington Post, the Singapore Straits-Times and National Review Online, and Atlantic Unbound (The Atlantic Monthly online), so you could say I'm about as up on current events as anyone without cable TV could wish to be (only thing I miss about cable is C-SPAN. Well, C-SPAN and the Sci-Fi Channel, but C-SPAN was my real addiction; I lost entire weekends to that weird little portal on Washington and other wonk stuff).

So why am I so annoyed that I don't have my Casper Star-Tribune? It's Sunday, for crying out loud! The legislature isn't in session yet (for which we should all give thanks), I don't care about sports particularly (my interest pretty much tops out at the Saratoga and Encampment High School level – except for every four years when I pretty much disappear for the entire month of June to watch the FIFA World Cup) (might have to get cable or something for that. Hmm. Do they offer just one-month subscriptions?), and I've read about all I care to about the state's budget for now. What else will be in there? A follow-up to the alleged Enron suicide? More European protests about our stuffing Koran misreaders into cages in Cuba? Maybe something more about the mostly bad alternatives to just letting people snowmobile in Yellowstone?

Bah!

No, what's really at issue here has nothing to do with current events and everything to do with basic psychology: one's demands always adjust upwards.

I've gotten used to having that paper right at my doorstep every morning already. It only took four days for newspaper delivery to go from pleasing novelty to basic human right in my head.

Of course, now that the sun is up, another possibility bears investigating: maybe my paper is here and I just couldn't see it in the dark. I'd better go look. Of course, in looking, I know that if I find it the last two hours I've spent reading other material and stewing over its absence will be rendered pretty damned silly... but much of the rest of my life is pretty damned silly anyway, so what's one more morning.

Here I go.

And there it is. Way out on the sidewalk. Almost under my car. I'm going to have to put on a robe and slippers and pad out there in the frost to go get it.

MOST dissatisfying.

There'd better be something good to read.

IF OPRAH CAN DO IT...

OK! Just what all of you have been clamoring for! For all of you LIANT fans who can't get enough of this blog or who have too much time on their hands or who just want to know with what kind of stuff I fill my head each day that makes me the babbling blogger I am, I bring you...

The Life In a Northern Town Book Club! Sponsored by, well, nobody! This is not a marketing stunt! I don't care whether you buy these books or check them out of your fine local library (if you can ever find it open! Ho ho!)! Actually, I don't care if you read them at all! But I guarantee that at least once a month from now on (and possibly more often if Writer's Block again rears his ugly head), I will write an essay of some length about a book I think should be more widely known – if not by my readers, at least by somebody out there.

For my first entry, I am shamelessly promoting a fellow Bard graduate. Matt Taibbi ('92, just like me) took off to Russia after some ambling about the world and joined his equally twisted friend Mark Ames to bring Ames' paper The eXile to new heights of obnoxious journalistic "emperor-has-no-clothes-ing" and new depths of depravity and death porn.

Then they wrote a book about how they pulled it off. And it's a dandy.

The eXile: Sex, Drugs and Libel in the New Russia
by Mark Ames and Matt Taibbi
(New York: Grove Press, 2000)

As the subtitle might indicate, this is not a book for the faint of heart, nor is it a straight-up history, though the portrait it paints of post-Soviet Russia from the early '90s to 1998 is pretty vivid in all its pornographic, bloody, vomitous, sexist glory, making it a pretty damned good history anyway.

The book is divided into eight chapters, four written by Ames and four by Taibbi. Many readers have complained that Ames' sections of the book are Warhollianly dull, too petty, personal, splenous, what have you, while praising Taibbi's sections for their directness, adherence to and expressed admiration for basic journalistic principles and (false, false, false) relative modesty. But I will go on the record as admiring both.

Ames... poor Ames. Poor, poor Ames. After reading this book I really want to meet this guy and tell him he's not alone, that he's no more an epic loser than are most of the people who have walked this earth (though his Chapter One case of scabies in which the mites had transformed into "the Albert Speers of the arachnid world," constructing "about thirty or so bunkers on my ass: hardened, red modules which rendered the Kewell lotion and Elimite lotion useless" might argue for at least minor epic-loser status). But were I to do so, I would be subject to invective on a grand scale; this guy has clearly read Dostoyevsky's Notes From the Underground too many times.

(Not that I think that's a bad thing.)

But that's okay. For every self-pitying narrative about scabies or his inability to get laid in Prague or his dependence on speed whenever left to get an issue of the eXile out by himself, there are still gems of hilarious realism like the following:

"What people forget in every article ever written about drugs is one simple, basic fact. PEOPLE TAKE DRUGS BECAUSE THEY'RE FUN. That's it. There's no mystery to the drug thing. Peiople drink water to quench their thirst, they have sex because it feels good, and they do drugs because they're fun...

Even Hunter S. and William Burroughs couldn't state it that plainly;: they elevated drugs to the mythical level, keeping mum on the single most obvious, dangerous fact. So I'll repeat: PEOPLE DO DRUGS BECAUSE THEY'RE FUN. It's no different from alcohol or roller coasters except that drugs are A LOT BETTER."

Co-author Taibbi observes later in this book, after a brief reflection on his childhood growing up in the newsrooms of Boston and New York, that "If, as a consumer, you want good newspapers, you're not going to get them if the reporters are people who only reluctantly tell you the truth. Ideally, you have a bunch of people who are outcasts, even sociopaths, who get off on telling people the whole truth because that's the point: The other parts of society – government, business, etc. – have to be able to function while trusting the public to know the worst."

In these two quotes we can find the eXile and this book in a nutshell. Ames and Taibbi are two people who get off on telling the truth, and make no bones about the fact that they do get off on it. Hence their infamous "Death Porn" section, their version of a police blotter, in which the goriest crimes they could find in Russia that week (the eXile is a bi-weekly paper, for the most part, though the dummies occasionally convince themselves to try to be weekly with hilariously disastrous results) are recounted with mocking slapstick horror, in true tabloid fashion, complete with cartoons illustrating basic, recurring story elements, i.e. a little Thanksgiving turkey to indicate the victim was "carved up like a turkey", a piece of Swiss cheese to indicate "riddled with bullets," a hamburger bun with a human haand sticking out of it to indicate cannibalism (quite prevalent out in the provinces where people, still waiting lo these many years for the goverment to pay their back wages, have little to do but hack each other to pieces and eat each other) and, my favorite, a squad cap next to a vodka bottle to indicate an "investigation ongoing."

But Death Porn and little drug and scabies excursi notwithstanding, why should you, my comfortable, mostly middle-class and American readers read this book? Because it also tells the story of a newspaper that has been a huge pain in the ass to an expatriate community in Moscow that has done little to actually help convert Russia to a free-market economy or to prepare its citizenry to live in such an economy. Those whom Ames and Taibbi have skewered over the years in their paper have been both highly-placed Russian oligarchs who have taken state corruption to unbelievable new levels (I would refer readers especially to Taibbi's in-depth look at Anatoly Chubais and his loans-for-shares program which should have been a global scandal but was deemed "too complicated" to cover in the western press), and American and British consultants who lived the high life spending foreign aid money on luxuries for themselves, investing it with each other's mutual funds, and creating scandals like the Investor Protection Fund, meant to bail out poor Russians whose first forays into private investing led to their being defrauded (to date the IPF has not paid out one rouble to any bilked investors – but it made one mutual fund manager a lot of money for many years!).

But this book is not to be read as an exercise in schadenfreude: most of the worst villains in the eXile's hall of shame are Americans, and it is a theme throughout the book that once Americans are in any way freed from the usual constraints on their behavior, they are the most corrupt, scaly lizard-beasts one can find anywhere. Even an ordinary suburbanite, once she lands in Russia, winds up threatening gangland hits on the authors once they piss her off with one too many dick jokes.

And it could happen here, if we ever cease to keep an eye on each other, on our elected officials, and on our press. For, as Taibbi notes with dismay, the age of those outcast sociopaths is gone; today's "reporters," at least in the western press in Moscow, have become "a bunch of corrupt, cheerleading patsies," largely because there is no longer any competition between papers, magazines, networks, what have you, and thus there's no one paying attention to the accuracy, fairness, or relevance of what is coming out of those Moscow bureaus - and thus no reason for western journalists in Moscow to work very hard at all.

The authors leave open the question of whether this might not be true in other parts of the world or back home, but it does make me wonder about what I'm reading about what's going on in Kabul, in Israel, and in Cheyenne.

I know too many Wyoming reporters to be able, truthfully, to say that nothing like that can happen or has happened here. I've done it myself, run stories without double-checking facts, accepted sources' words as gospel because of my personal fondness or respect for those sources, left out story elements I didn't think my readers would understand... I just never got called on it.

I fervently wish that there could be more papers like the eXile in the world, while knowing that there can't be: it is only Ames and Taibbi's unique position – out of the reach of American libel laws and unread by the officials whose corruption they expose in Russia because they print in English – that makes the eXile possible. But in a perfect world, there would be an eXile in every city, Death Porn, pornographic club reviews and all.

By the way – you can read the newspaper itself online! Every few weeks, surf on over to www.eXile.ru and see what they have to say. They've been especially entertaining in the many creative ways they've called for Osama bin Laden's blood since 9/11 – while also, in one of their less tasteful running columns, using him as the mock-voice of their weekly NFL picks column.

MY TWO FAVORITE FOODS

OR - Cold Medicine 2, Electric Boogaloo

As I knew would happen since I was home today hacking up a lung and trying to wake up from my drug-induced coma, I appear to have missed another memorable, epic-level debate at my mid-morning coffee klatsch.

Thank goodness I have my dear friend the Sewer King (I have to call him that or he doesn't realize I'm writing about him) (at least I think this will work, since he gave himself that name, unprompted by any of us – but he claims to have a poor memory) (but he should at least recognize himself now by the predicate to this sentence I have now parenthetically interrupted three times) (make that a gratuitous four times) (how about five) (or even... but I'll knock this off now and finish my thought) to fill me in on the good stuff I missed.

Sad but true, my coffee hour is probably the best hour of a typical day (at least of a typical day that doesn't end with the Artist or the IFB or my New Darts Partner or the Minister of Fun knocking back Guiness with me somewhere downtown), and it is largely because I never know what the guys there are going to be talking about on a given morning – or to what flights of fancy, foolishness or philosophizing they will fly in response to a stupid remark of mine.

Today, I am told, the argument centered around which of two businesses, the hardware store or the bank, has the best popcorn, the best popcorn machine, and the best popcorn servers.

I feel I may safely weigh in on this subject because, apart from coffee, popcorn is my favorite food. I can also approach the matter with an unbiased judgment and a clear conscience for having missed the banker's and the hardware man's no doubt very entertaining but quite possibly damagingly biased arguments.

I must first, however, lay all my cards on the table. I am a girl, and, moreover, a girl who does a lot of accounting and bookkeeping and general mucking about with money. I am therefore in the bank much more often than I am in the hardware store and so have had greater exposure to the bank's than to the hardware store's popcorn. It is simply the way of things; especially this time of year, I am in the bank most every day, while I am in the hardware store only occasionally, and that usually to discuss the sewer system and pending ordinances and other actions pertaining thereto with its king.

Some might argue that these facts might prejudice me somewhat in the bank's favor, already demolishing my supposed objectivity on the matter. BUT, there are more disclosures to be made.

Outweighing any bias toward familiarity is a little matter of long-dormant childhood fears that wholly distract me from the quality of the popcorn at the bank.

You see, one of the primary popcorn ladies at the bank is an old enemy of mine, one whose very voice once filled me with such fear as to keep me, Kate Sherrod, perhaps the most deeply addicted bookworm ever to stroll the halls of Saratoga Elementary School, right out of the Saratoga Elementary School Library.

She knows this of course, and we laugh about it from time to time as I nervously accept a sack of popcorn from her hand, but as I do so, my own hand shakes in memory of years of fear that bordered on hatred from back in the day when this sweet old lady towered over me.

She terrorized me in the library, where fear of her kept me from having the temerity to check out the "big kid" books my teacher had encouraged me to read – after one attempt to check out The Hobbit in first grade I meekly darted into the little kid stacks whenever the Aide was present (and felt very foxy one morning when I came into the library before class started and the true librarian let me have it without a remark).

Fear of her also has left me with a distinct gustatory and olfactory memory shared only by my immediate contemporaries at SES. It was a guarantee that if the lunchroom was serving spinach, the library aide would be the lunchroom monitor – and she was a firm believer in Cleaning Up Your Plate, and never mind that the spinach on that plate was boiled, swimming in vinegar, looking like the devil himself had thrown up a little pile of nori and left it rotting there about six months ago.

We tried everything to get away with not eating that spinach, but six-year-olds are not that cunning, and she was wily and experienced, could nose out where we'd hid our spinach on our plates without fail.

And that is why, to this particular refined and educated palate, the popcorn served up by the bank, while in and of itself very fine popcorn, fluffy white and warm and cheerfully served, has unpleasant notes to its flavor, notes of spinach, vinegar and sour milk that no amount of liberal applications of popcorn salt, no assiduous cleaning s of the gleaming metal of the machine, no trips to the therapist could ever really remove or disguise. It's unfortunate, but true.

The hardware store's popcorn, on the other hand, just tastes like popcorn, though perhaps not quite as salty as I like it. That is a point on which the hardware store does deserve praise, however, for it is far easier to add a little extra salt to one's own bag than to take away too much salt from the bag.

On all other points, I would have to declare them more or less equal. Both are offered in a spirit of customer appreciation and generosity and are an effective appeal to customer loyalty in a way that nugatory rulers or calendars are not.

So I applaud both parties, and encourage them to keep up the good work.

And keep on cranking out those groovy free pens. They really cut down on my office supply expenditures at the chamber.

(Though the ones I acquired for use at the fishing derby proved considerable disappointments, as not being able to stand up to the cold at all! Fortunately, I also stole, quite by accident I assure you all, a somewhat pricey gel pen from the Hotel Wolf the night before the derby. It proved our precious savior, a pen that wrote when all others choked up, and I would have returned it to the Hotel with gratitude after the derby had not some goofy fisherman walked off with it after signing his prize affadavit late Sunday afternoon)

But I digress. As usual. Must be the Nyquil.

NOW I KNOW IT'S JANUARY

Ladies and gentlemen, my first ever Blog post on cold medicine!

Yup, the wage of derby dame-dom is apparently a visciously virulent virus (the old-fashioned, semi-living kind, not the kind about which hoaxes are spread via e-mail every week). One hour I'm running all over town rejoicing at getting the last huge wad of disgusting, grimy, oily, smelly money (a possible vector for my current troubles... but more likely it was one of "my" kids on the speech team, several of whom trooped on valiantly through their symptoms trying to get ready for their first varsity tournament of the year) (or maybe I got it from one of the fish we measured. Maybe I'm the first case of whirling disease in humans! Certainly I'm a little off balance as I type...) out of my keeping and into the bank where it belongs, the next I'm feeling a little tired at my desk as I write tons of press releases (which can be read at the chamber's blog site,) and the next my assistant is commenting on how I sound a little wheezy and look a little stoned and did I maybe have something funky with my lunch?

Then this bug came down on me HARD AND FAST.

I barely made it up to the grocery store to buy a box of Nyquil gel caps (and all hail the inventor of the gel cap, which allows me a full dosage of Nyquil's floor-hugging, drool-spreading, coma-inducing goodness without my having to choke down that horrible, viscous semiliquid) and a gallon or two of OJ. I'm lucky traffic was light and there was enough snowfall to force everyone to turn on their headlights or I might have involved myself in a spectacularly silly crash of some kind the likes of which no car of mine has seen since I was 16 and decided to try to beat up a fence post with my daddy's pickup truck whilst exiting the airport.

And that's BEFORE I drugged myself.

Now I'm home and waiting for the Nyquil to kick in. I think I only have a few more minutes of what now passes for lucidity before I sink into blissful semiconsciousness, the weight of my head pulling me down, my head so dense it might implode or at least permanently deform my pillow as the force of it actually rearranges the pillow's component molecules... and my arms turn into useless, flapping appendages dangling loosely off the side of my futon... my legs disappear... my eyes melt... God I love Nyquil.

And so, though it's not yet 4 p.m. Mountain Standard Time, though the sun is still in the sky, though time and tide wait for no man and a day's, a year's, a life's work still waits uncompleted before me, though many in the world suffer far greater pains each day than I do with my little viral aches, for today, I surrender. Today I let the fever and the dextromethorphan hydrobromide (ah, bromide! by my side! which like a tide! carries off pain and dulls my pride! takes me for a sleepy ride! with thee always I'll abide! as off to dreamland now I glide! ah, bromide!) carry me off, not caring anymore what becomes of anything. Others will be there to push up the sun in the morning, and as for everything else, well, it will still be there when I return.

And since I caught this early and had the luxury of tackling it in this proactive manner, ready to wrestle this bug down with vitamin C, zinc and pseudoephedrine hydrochloride, that return should be tomorrow.

Good afternoon, evening, and night!

MORE DOINGS OF THE DAME

It's not every day that my ultimate purpose is finding a guy who has reportedly set his ass (arse, to my British readers, who still think an ass is something with long ears that brays) on fire, but it's not every day that I'm in charge of distributing prizes in an ice fishing derby, either.

The time was mid-morning this last Saturday, the place, Saratoga Lake, the occasion, the 23rd mostly annual (we skipped one year when the lake got drained) Saratoga Ice Fishing Derby, and the person in question was, in my opinion, in the lead for the Hard Luck Fisherman Award, a tradition I'd decided on the spot to resurrect when I came into possession of a really dumb board game called "Gone Fishing."

The incident in question had reportedly happened in the predawn chill and may not have happened at all; elements of the story smacked of what passes in Saratoga for urban legend. Our unfortunate angler had had a bandanna sticking out of the back pocket of his Carhartts when he bent over to retrieve something and bumped a little too closely to the flame of his propane heater. The rag, then the seat of his pants caught on fire and it took a while to put it all out; he was reportedly still about on the ice with the ass of his pants burnt out.

I received word of this while huddling in a dark, tiny trailer, hawking derby tickets and cheerleading my crack team of fish measurers. We all agreed it was the best story we'd yet heard in the derby and would be hard to top. I told the fisherman who shared the anecdote with us to keep an eye out for the assless Carhartts and advise their owner he had not suffered in vain...

...But alas, he was never heard from. A pity. It looks like a really fun board game. I'll save it for next year. Unless I hear a better story as I conduct the derby post-mortem.

There were some strong candidates. No fewer than three teams of fishermen told tales of losing their poles down an ice hole, with two of those later recovering said poles when the fish who'd sucked the things down bit again on other bait and earned a trip out of the hole, their earlier prize still attached.

The preponderance of this story or variants thereof has led me to form one conclusion: the fish may be fairer and more honest than those who go after them; no fewer than eight derby contestants approached me during the two-day tournament with plaintive questions - "Has anyone turned in a pole?" "Has anyone seen my folding chair?" "My auger was missing when I came out of my hut; has anyone turned it in?" "I lost my keys; if somebody finds them could you bring them out to the green Shappell over by the dam?"

Nothing at all was turned in during the two days of the tournament, leading me to conclude that the prevailing ethos among ice fishermen may well be an especially harsh form of finders, keepers, or at least a powerful belief that a found pole/auger/bobber/bottle of eau de minnow has come to them in karmic repayment for a pole/auger/bobber/bottle lost many years ago at a fishing derby far, far away.

Fishermen are nothing if not superstitious, of course, witness the locals of my acquaintance who have been fishing this derby every single year in the exact same place, and who would not budge from it even after not even seeing a fish for an entire day.

My cadre of volunteers and I were actually very amused at the concentration of locals on the supposedly "hot" end of the lake and the number of them (ZERO) who were bringing in fish to be measured.

"So much for local knowledge," one fish-measuring wiseacre observed.

"Maybe they just think everyone is bringing in bigger fish and they don't want to get shown up," a more charitable ticket-seller countered.

Actually, I have to doff my hat/scarf/earwarmer to my volunteers, especially those who measured the fish for the big fish contest, who endured the cold touch of alien flesh (even through rubber gloves thoughtfully provided by our valley's medical clinic this was still a funky experience for many of them, most of them non-fishermen even in the warmer months), the oozing and sometimes squirting of fresh Saratoga caviar (brown and rainbow trout eggs), and the determined flopping and flipping of the fish they were trying to measure (indeed, on two occasions the damned things jumped right off the measuring tray, getting lost on the counter, inside the trailer, or in one memorable instance, flying out the window to thump against a neighboring trailer!).

Maybe now said volunteers will believe me next year when I tell them the real fun is out on the ice, as my special guest derby official, the famous Dan Brain of Laramie, and assorted other friends of mine discovered, as they trudged (or in Dan's case, skied) out onto the lake for an afternoon's hob-nobbing.

At his concert at the Cantina that evening, Brain observed that he was the less fortunate of the day's ice judges because while a young friend of mine stumbled across a tent full of fishermen who gave her Crown Royal to drink "All I got was... Watermelon Pucker."

But it was Brain who got to see perhaps the most entertaining tableau of the tournament: several guys who'd managed to get their camper out on the ice and who'd surrounded it with ice holes. In between bouts of jigging, they were ensconced inside said trailer... watching Arnold Schwarzenegger movies.

Now that's fishin'!

Nor can I complete an account of this banner weekend without mentioning its crowning moment, its high point, it's incident of maximum greying (for my hair): that time around high noon on Saturday when a guy from Colorado came in to our booth with A TAGGED FISH!!!

Not only a TAGGED FISH but A TAGGED FISH WITH THIS YEAR'S TAG!!!

Honestly, I think I was more excited than he was. I'd been praying for weeks that someone would catch a tagged fish this year. It would be so cool to finally get to give away the big money ($25,000 this year) on my watch.

Unfortunately, when the gods grant prayers, they tend to get annoyingly specific.

I had not prayed that someone catch the $25,000 tagged fish, you see, as was verified some 15 minutes later after I'd navigated our insurance company's hideously involved and code-ridden automated phone verification system. After 15 minutes of punching in and verifying identification codes, a cheery voice informed me "Sorry; that is not the winning fish" and disconnected me without so much as a by-your leave.

Fortunately, the man in question was pretty cool about it all. He was already something of a hero for actually having caught one; a small crowd had been around to watch the proceedings and many of them were heard to express surprise that there were actually tagged fish in the lake.

And he did go home with a decent prize anyway: a nice new ice hut, a really good power auger (recent events have taught me to appreciate the value of a really good, well-behaved power auger. As to why, well I should only have to indicate that my ice fishing buddy's own power auger has manifested such a personality that she [not it, SHE] has earned the name of Bitch) and a sled to pull the rest of his gear in. Not bad for landing a trout with a piece of plastic sticking out of its dorsal fin.

There was more to the weekend, of course... much more... moments of unexpected lyricism (a young angler from Fort Collins emerged from his tent just in time for Brain to hear him observe that Southern Comfort tasted "Like an Angel Pissing on Your Tongue" - an observation that Brain had made into a short country song in time to serenade that angler when he came into the Cantina that night), gustatory glee (our local American Legion Auxiliary really knows how to make fry bread) (and the Knights of Columbus make pretty good pancakes), technological innovation (a good pair of neoprene Cabela's gloves with the rubbery traction grip are damned near perfect for holding down a wiggly fish that doesn't want us to know how long it is), scenic beauty (the only thing prettier than one sunrise seen over Saratoga Lake is two in a row), childish charm (one little girl from Green River one the Small Fry hourly "big fish" prize three times, and her eyes got wider and her smile bigger every time she came up to have a fish measured), and that special funky state of mind that comes with extended sleep deprivation (who needs drugs?).

And then there was that joy, greater than any I have ever known, that came when I staggered into my apartment at 5 p.m. Sunday evening, peeled off my 17 layers of clothing, turned on my electric blanket, crawled into bed, and slept for 16 hours.

Bliss beyond compare.

DOINGS OF THE DERBY DAME

It's just 5:30 p.m. on Ice Fishing Derby Eve as I sit down to type this. Early reports tell me there is a veritable tent city on ice where Saratoga Lake used to be as avid fishermen from all over the region have converged on our little valley to angle for the magic $25,000 prize fish my colleagues and I turned loose there Wednesday morning.

This is hardly my first derby, but it's my first in charge, my first turn as the Derby Dame and I'm pretty jazzed. I spent this entire day whizzing around town like a human pinball, collecting door prizes here (door prizes! You've never seen so many door prizes – or such quality in them!), picking up ticket stubs and money there, making bank deposits (counting our coffee klatsch this morning, the manager of our local bank saw me five times today, poor thing! But I just hate having that much cash on me, actually physically loathe money, the slightly greasy feel of it, the texture, the smell it leaves on my hands. Freud was right to equate it with excrement). We've loaded up our new chamber president's truck with all of the prizes and paraphernalia, we have two, count them, two travel trailers parked out at the lake to serve as derby headquarters – and unlike at certain other derbies in which I have participated this year, they will be impossible to mistake for anything but derby headquarters.

I've lined up a special celebrity derby offical, a popular Laramie bar singer who is also entertaining at my favorite local bar tonight and tomorrow night. As of this writing, I'm planning on taking up residence there both nights, but am very worried about pacing myself, as breakfast, courtesy of the Knights of Columbus, is at 5:30 a.m. each morning, and then I've hours and hours of being the one to whom everyone turns with problems ranging from "is that a trout or a sucker?" to "can we use minnows as bait if we kill them first?" to "what if the person who wins the giant 25 gallon bottle of schnapps is a teetotaler?"... so I'd better be at my best.

I don't suppose the weekend I'm anticipating is everybody's cup of tea, but right now the satisfaction of seeing plans begun back in September coming to some sort of fruition outweighs any dread of freezing cold, stress at unforseen difficulties, dismay at long hours, or disgust at all the cash I'm going to have to handle that lurk deep in the recesses of my brain, untouched by the repeated surges of adrenaline (and of powerful gratitude – those of you who do not live here cannot imagine how cool everyone is being, how generous with their time have been the volunteers I've drafted, how creative have been the businesses from whom I've solicited door prizes, how accommodating the media outlets through whom I've advertised this thing have been. Really, this is an event with so much history and goodwill attached to it that Clytaemnestra could have made it go well) which have helped me overcome every challenge so far.

But today is meaningless, as my ever-so-supportive coffee buddies never tire of telling me.

We'll see how I feel when I come in for java Monday morning.

'SENIOR MOMENTS,' HUH?

I've been getting lots of e-mail forwards lately about what have come to be called "senior moments" (I believe the term has even made it into the dictionaries), and they make me laugh, but not in quite the way they are intended to do.

You've all seen something like them, I am sure: elaborate narratives or pithy lists that illustrate, in gentle, self-mocking tones, the writer's inability to keep track of the minutiae of modern life. Some are positively elegiac in their wistful evocation of earlier, better days when the narrator could juggle knives, breathe fire, balance the books of a major corporation, roof a house, raise two children and three St. Bernards, and supervise an initial public stock offering while still keeping track of car keys, glasses, haircut appointments and household bills.

But the nostalgia is not the thing that makes me laugh – and wince – and fume.

It's the basic assumption about what human beings are and can do and should do that underlies these things that bothers me.

I am often, especially when I'm a bit in my cups, heard to observe that we late 20th/early 21st century humans have created a world in which we are not competent to live.

Even when I'm not in my cups, I stand by this observation.

Ever since we first developed machines that could generate a thousand exact copies of the same piece of cloth, brick, cut of wood, coffee cup, or glass bead, we've been establishing for ourselves ever higher standards for perfection and uniformity. Handmade or animal-powered (and yes, human-powered is still animal-powered) devices, gewgaws, parts are now simultaneously inferior (because not uniform and hence not universally adaptable, not identical, idiosyncratic, flawed - and thus undesirably impractical) and superior (because not uniform and hence not universally adaptable, not identical, idiosyncratic, flawed - and thus desirably unique and imbued with considerable snob appeal), but they are NOT the standard.

The standard is a mechanical perfection; the right size and fit, the right weight and density, the right composition and design, so that the thing can be effortlessly incorporated as a part of the whole with no surprises, no breakdowns, no pauses or inconveniences.

And because our tools and toys now work so well, that same standard of perfection now applies to people, whether we like it or not – because ultimately the equipment is only as good as those who run and maintain it, right?

What is more dreaded, what more assiduously avoided, what more sneeringly discussed, than OPERATOR ERROR?

Operator error happens because we are idiosyncratic and flawed, designed for much more – and much less – than just supervising machinery, obeying mechanical clocks, adhering to procedures. We're made of water, that weirdest of elements (my high school science teacher, in preparing us for a discussion of water's weird properties, opened his remarks with the memorable observation that "Water is a strange duck," and the surrealism of his statement exactly captures just how odd water is. Surface tension alone, that quality of water that makes it possible for Yeats' long-legged fly to skim across a pond, can, if I let it, get me to doubting most of my assumptions about the way the physical world works), and of dozens of other elements set to growing along certain largely predictable patterns – but there are all sorts of crazy wild cards in our genes that can give us disease, make us taller or shorter than "normal" (and thus harder to clothe since everything comes in standard, machine-made sizes now).

We are to a certain degree slaves to our DNA and the drive to replicate that molecule skews a lot of our behavior patterns, distracting us with direct and indirect thoughts of sex (think for a moment of how much of what you do in a day isn't in some way an attempt to impress the opposite sex? Your material needs are only a small part of why you work to make money, for instance) (and these drives and more are still there even after you've had children, grandchildren even), eating, drinking, and other messy and imperfect activities..

In other words, our bodies, which only the seriously deluded can even try to say do not affect our temperaments, preferences, and patterns with a straight face, have other priorities than accommodating the requirements of a machine-based society.

But do we accept this and deal with it? Or do we see this as a character flaw which must be ruthlessly corrected?

I feel foolish from time to time when I come home to my apartment and see that there are four or five half-filled cups of lukewarm coffee strewn about – sometimes in very odd places. A reasonable, stable, properly functioning person should only need one cup to drink her morning coffee, should remember where that cup is at all times while she follows a rational, orderly routine in getting ready for work, should methodically empty and refill that one cup instead of forgetting she's already got one going somewhere and grabbing a clean one and pouring... right?

But really, who's in charge here?

What purpose would be served by my devoting a significant portion of the weird sac of water and grey matter in my head to keeping track of whether or not I've left a coffee cup on my dressing table?

And more importantly, what else could I be doing with that brainspace were I not focusing so on where my coffee is?

A large part of the fun of being alive is the funky play that's going on in all of our heads each day. We sit at our desks, for example, toiling away at something but every once in a while we chuckle for no good reason because our inefficient, illogical brains have decided suddenly to remind us of that stupid joke a friend told us the day before, or of a sweet remark a spouse or lover made as we were leaving for work that morning, or of a piece of rueful e-mail about the little indignities of growing older that a colleague just zapped our way.

Our capacity for being so distracted is one of my favorite things about our race, if you can't tell. This capacity is what has produced all the good stuff – all of the books and the plays and the music and the paintings and the photography... and all of the machines. Everything we have made started with someone being distracted from what he was "supposed" to be doing by something that seemed more interesting, amusing or important.

I got started writing this column, incidentally, because I couldn't find my keys. And it's funny: in the course of writing it, I have remembered that I left them in my coat pocket last night when I got home to confront the coffee cups. Yep, there they are.

I don't feel a bit sorry for having lost track of them for a while.

And neither should you.

NOTES FROM A HOG AND PONY SHOW

When I started this web page, I made myself a promise. I promised never to mention, criticize, tease or otherwise acknowledge a certain other media outlet serving my fair valley, lest I come to appear petty, vindictive or otherwise unpleasant to have at parties.

But... but... but... but...

Anti-pig ordinance?

Anti-PIG ordinance?

WHAT FREAKIN' ANTI-PIG ORDINANCE??????????????

We don't have an anti-pig ordinance, and, I'll go out on a limb and declare, we never will, unless, say, Al-Qaeda somehow finally defeats us all and we are forcibly converted to Islam (under which code the pig and all of its kin are ritually unclean animals).

Imagine if we did have an anti-pig ordinance for a moment!

No bacon at the grocery store (Oh, hey, instant opportunity for a black market. Maybe I need to rethink this whole thing...).

A certain long-established and civic-minded family would have to go to court to change their surname or else leave town. Granted, the middle daughter is a senior this year and so we only have one more season in which to extract more state championships out of her, but still I think they'd be missed.

And of course we'd have a certain paucity in the area of law enforcement.

No, we have many interesting things in the Saratoga Municipal Code, but there is nowhere an anti-pig ordinance.

What we have, as part of Titillating Title 18's Chapter 42, which outlines general district regulations (i.e. rules common to all zoning categories, be they residential, industrial or commercial) and in section 150 treats on the matter of horses and other barnyard animals, runs as follows:

18.42.150 - Horses Any person who keeps a horse or several horses on any lot containing a single family dwelling unit shall keep not more than one horse for the private use of each member of the family living on the premises. The horses shall not be kept or housed within fifty feet of any street or highway. The lots shall have at least ten thousand square feet of area for each horse. Provisions shall be made by the individual landowner to maintain the horse on such property. The keeping of all other barnyard animals in residential districts shall be prohibited.

(Emphasis mine)

All hooting about anti-pig ordinances aside, it is under this section of the zoning code that our planning commission has called Saratoga High School's ag program onto the carpet. Two pigs are currently in residence behind the school, in violation of this section, and there have been complaints from neighbors.

So last week, the planning commission took up the matter formally with representatives of the ag program, as was reported in a local newspaper.

BUT...

While it is true, as has been reported in a local newspaper, that Exhibits A and B in the great Hog and Pony Show of 2002 have been given a period of 120 days to remain in their current quarters, it is not true that the planning commission, the town council, or anyone at all has agreed to change any part of the Saratoga Municipal Code as pertains to this matter!

What has happened is that a certain degree of public support, together with planning commission members' own respect for what the ag program is trying to do in developing such a good, hands-on project for students, has prompted the planning commission to attempt to reach a compromise in the short run – the school year will be over before the 120 days are up – and give program students yet another good, hands-on learning activity this year: the kids and their teacher have been strongly encouraged to work with the commission in developing a proposal to amend the zoning code to allow certain, limited, exceptions for the school. While they're learning to raise pigs, why not learn a bit about how municipal government works, too? I daresay a good civics lesson might be more universally useful to the kids in the long run than a bout of animal husbandry.

(I am trying very hard to refrain from remarking that certain other entities within the community could use civics lessons as well, but as you see I am failing miserably).

If the kids help draft an amendment or addition to Title 18, and if what is proposed is reasonable, the planning commission will consider it, and if they find it acceptable, they will recommend to the Saratoga Town Council (to quote my lifelong hero, Frank Zappa, "That's me! That's me! Ohhhhhhh!) that it be passed and adopted.

Then the council will give the change three readings, during which it will be much discussed, possibly amended, subjected to legal and law enforcement review, and made the subject of hilarious political cartoons in the local media before it is at last accepted or rejected.

That's going to take a while.

But for now, no poor little piggies are getting turned out – though I for one and our planning commission chairman for another would really rather this whole line of thinking were discarded and the pigs moved. The commission chairman has pointed out to me that Carbon County School District No. 2 owns property very near the school, where its bus barn is located, that is zoned differently and where it would be acceptable for the pigs to be kept. No, it's not right in the school's backyard and the kids and teacher would have to walk a block or two to reach the animals, but it's not, I think, any farther than the football team walks each day between the football field and the locker rooms.

As for the many citizens in this town who have voiced their warm support for the Saratoga High School and Hog Farm, be assured that I have taken note of your opinions. I have taken very careful note (and have observed, to my not very great surprise, that all who have expressed support for the piggies live well upwind from them). I will remember who among you told me to quit picking on those poor pigs. And if any of you later come to complain of the smell or the horse flies that will most likely accompany the pigs into the warmer months (anyone remember the last time hogs lived on the west bench? I still have a few scars from some nasty insect bites...), I will remind you of these expressions of support.

Yo he hablado. Harumph!

THE FINE ART OF FRIENDSHIP

"I think back to the time
When I wouldn't drink wine,
And they taught me right and wrong
And black and white.

"Sometimes I cried
Stumbling through my youth,
'Cause I loved so much
Yet so little."

- Doug Pinnock, Ty Tabor and Jerry Gaskill, "The Fine Art of Friendship"

It's a good song I've quoted here, better than most of my readers will ever know, but even I never really appreciated it, never really got it before tonight.

In 1988, I was 18 years old, fresh out of high school, ready to take on the world, riding swiftly out of town on a big scholarship to a swanky school of which no one in my little world here had ever heard. I did not look back, couldn't get out of this town fast enough, thought of Saratoga and its environs only as a torture chamber in which I had suffered and from which I was now free. I would never come back willingly, except to visit my parents, whom I regarded as the only people here whom I would ever wish to see. I burned no bridges in reality, but in my soul the very borders of Wyoming were scorched beyond recognition.

But still I carried all of this life we've known with me. I made a name for myself on the east coast for telling a good yarn about the people I'd left behind, for being the only person in my dorm who knew how to tap a keg (a skill I'd acquired during my elementary school years as a dugout rat for the infamous Over The Hill Gang), for being from a land more exotic and unknown than even Casablanca or Patmos or the Yangtse River. I carried it with me and over the years it grew within me until I had no choice but to come back.

And now I am back, and now I know what was going on before. It's straight out of one of my friend's books: as many who have read them know, James Hillman is a firm believer in "life lived backwards," as his illustrations of, e.g. the famous bullfighter Manolete demonstrate. Manolete as a youngster was so shy he never ventured beyond his mother's skirts; he feared everything and everyone. James says (and so do I) that this was because something in him knew that someday he would face huge hulking fierce hellbeasts for a living, but the six year old he then was could not cope with them. With such a destiny before you, would you not cling to such skirts as were there in which to hide?

So did I feel nothing but misunderstanding bordering on contempt for the people for whom I would someday feel such tremendous stewardship that I would endure anything that fate threw my way to remain among them.

A lot of things have happened to make me feel this way.

An example of what I'm talking about came this last weekend, when for the first time I got up before my own people and spoke (True, I had given a campaign speech of sorts when I was first a candidate for the town council, but that forum was poorly attended, and the small number that was there largely comprised my own well-wishers who were so determined that I would succeed that I probably could have been much more silly than I was and still met with their approval). My duty was merely to welcome them and prepare them for the full slate of oratory (and yes, even I agree that same wound up being a little too full, and our young advocate for embracing change and I are busy paring down her speech for competition) that lay before them (I am a terribly partial speech coach, I am!), but still, as I looked out at that gathering of over 100 people whom I have come to admire and respect more than anyone else in the world, I felt a swell of pride and love and hope and the will to do even more than I have to keep this place one in which we could all justly say it was worth any sacrifice to live.

It's still there, this feeling, many days hence, because of the other gift I received in coming back to this valley.

I have the most stunningly remarkable collection of friends that perhaps has ever existed anywhere in the world, people who do nothing deliberately to raise my spirits but do so simply by being themselves and sharing their thoughts.

I have a veritable Henry Miller in my life ("I have no money, no resources, no hopes. I am the happiest man alive" Miller wrote in his first and greatest book. My friend who seems to me Miller reborn is in a materially much more favorable position, but has reached that same state of grace, as rare today as it was nearly 70 years ago when Miller sat typing away in his garret in Paris, and one which is infectious and communicates itself easily to me whether I spend five minutes or five hours talking to this modern counterpart).

I have a friend down in Riverside so passionate and so radical that he makes me seem a church-going, Pat Boone listening Rotarian, and who recharges my own passion, my will to work and to take care of what the gods have set before me like no other.

I have an ice fishing buddy whose insights into the human soul at 22 awe and humble me and fill me with giddy anticipation as to what kind of person, what kind of citizen he will be when he finally is able to take his place here.

I have a friend whose eye and hand can make heart-breaking images of the most ordinary sights - a rusted car, a rock, an abandoned launch site, and who keeps me believing that someday I will have a contribution to make to this world on a par with his. It might not be so, but belief matters, as he has taught me.

I have a friend whose every word is some surreal kind of poetry that I understand instantly and yet could spend the rest of my life trying to interpret.

And there are more, so many more. A desert mystic, a hilariously funky speech coach, a gifted teacher, a rock painter and a caretaker, a chef, a poet, a ruthless businessman, a quirky attorney/horticulturalist, a duo of wine connoiseurs who also like a good cheap shot of horrible schnapps... the list goes on, and I'm still only talking about the people who physically live here.

I have a night sky above me vivid and pulsing as I make the drive from one town to another in my endless stream of meetings. To my right as I return from Encampment burns Orion, which always reminds me of Ajax, my particular patron hero who is worth a column all his own for his impact on my life, and on yours, too, if you let him teach you. Poor Ajax, so often thought to be just a warrior lunkhead, standing athwart history and fate at the cost of his sanity and his life. He's there in all of us, and especially in me, and in you who set your jaw from time to time and draw a line in the sand and say "this further and no more," and maybe you successfully fight back the forces that oppose you and maybe you don't, but still you stand.

As I read over these lines, late of a Monday night that has been filled with giddy, silly winter carnival plans and Guiness-soaked plots for Encampment's future and intense reminiscing about what this valley was and can be, I have to laugh at what many who don't know me, don't know us, would make of it.

Any trained therapist except for James, for example, would look at this entry and mark it as a symptom of mania, as he would doubtless examine my private notebooks, written in the depths of insomnia and a serious sense of my own unworthiness to complete the tasks I've been set, and say AHA! This girl is bipolar, or manic depressive, or something. Clearly deluded, in need of help, even chemical assistance. There are those who would read this and put me on Paxil or Zoloft or some other godawful pharmaceutical horror that certainly would temper my reactions, soften my edges, dampen my mood swings, but at what horrible, horrible cost? I'll take the dizzying highs and the horrid lows. I'll take the depths and the heights, for they make me know that I am alive, and that I am where the gods have always expected me to be.

On a small scale, happiness is sitting in a beloved pub with a beloved friend, swilling Guiness and ranting about jury nullification. On the grand, happiness is being where one is supposed to be, in accord with the wishes of whatever powers placed one there, doing the work one was born to do. When all that is right, the very air around one sings out that it is so, making it, admittedly, hard to sleep at night, but the loss of a little shuteye is worth it.

This is the place and the time to be here. Many in the world would envy me, envy us for being here, where there is faith and trust in one another even if we don't always like each other all that much (winter here is funky; in another month or so we will turn into Scandinavia, populated with freaked out and despairing drunks staring blearily over glasses of rum and vodka at faces they are so sick of seeing that they'd very nearly blind themselves just for the change).

When I need volunteers for an event, it's easy to find them. When I need donations or advice or a little push to make something happen, it is there. Always. How many people in the world can say that?

I have advisors and critics (and often the critics are the most valuable; nice as it is to be loved unconditionally, the ones who think I'm a waste of human flesh often have the sanest, most reasonable perspective on what I'm trying to do), assistants and accomplices, drinking buddies and study partners, people into whose eyes I can look and know they just get it, get it all and people whom I will never understand at all, but all of them, all of them, are pulling along with me on the same yoke.

I've loved them all all along, but didn't really get it until now.

Or maybe I did, and just wasn't ready to face it.

AT LONG LAST, THE PASSING OF THE POULTRY

Bank the fire! Fill your pipe! Get comfy in your chair:
The Bard of Saratoga's here with tales both odd and rare.
She's going to tell a story; though we all know how it goes,
The fun is in the telling, the recounting of the blows
In this long-standing prank war twixt a lady and a lord
Of long acquaintance, rivalry and occasional kind word.

"The origin of this ritual is shrouded in the past,"
The Bard begins, "Who cares though how it's started? It's a blast!
The Passing of the Poultry! It's a marvelous event
And one on which all pains and care and effort are well spent.
One early salvo, I recall, came when like some devilish fox
The lord filled up the lady's yard with a dozen fighting cocks.

'I hear that she likes chickens' came the crowing explanation.
And that is all he ever said about this new sensation.
So all the while the roosters wandered 'round their new abode
At every mention of the jest the perpetrator glowed.
For her part, the lady bore the jape with one thought on her mind.
What else was there for her to do but to respond in kind?

Time passed, and all of us in town enjoyed indeed the wait.
When now would she strike? And how? What was the joker's fate?
Then one happy Christmas morning all of town let out a whoop,
For on the lord she had bestowed an ugly chicken coop.
It stayed there, quite an eyesore, till he had it hauled away,
Vowing underneath his breath that she would rue the day.

It seemed his turn, his time to strike – or so we at first thought.
But the coop was but a thread in this, the injured lady's plot.
A warning shot it was; a tiny token of esteem,
Foreshadowing, as so it proved, of this witty lady's dream.
For to the lore of Togie she would make this contribution:
For every Poultry Prank there must be Poultry Retribution.

And what came next you ask? What form then did vengeance take?
What filled the bird lord's yard upon the next year's Christmas break?
Alive and gobbling, ruffling downy feathers, oozing charm:
The brand new dwellers in the brand new Togie Turkey Farm.
(And just when he'd got rid of them, had thought that that was that,
Those turkeys' feathers showed up in the poor man's birthday hat!)

Well! No man's pride can e'er sustain so many heavy blows
Without a thought of sweet revenge, and sure 'nuff, one arose.
The lord engaged the aid of someone skilled with thread and needle,
And from some crusty mad old fart a union suit did wheedle.
The pair adorned with feathers that fell hideous underwear
Till it was something that would give a scarecrow quite a scare.

He topped the suit with something I'm near powerless to describe,
Something that he knew for sure would amuse the whole damned tribe.
In shape it's like a lady's cap in a painting by Renoir,
But that is not what he did hope would stick there in her craw:
For true to form and function and to meet all expectations
It was a chicken hat and he collected congratulations.

All innocence he joined for lunch the lady and their friends
And upped the ante in their epic game that never ends.
In front of all and sundry in the famous Wolf Hotel,
Bestowed his gift and smirked there when she told him it was... swell.
She wore the hat through lunch, I'm told, and bore it well, they say.
But not the suit; she said perhaps that's for another day.

She had of course already made her yearly Christmas move
As the rubber duck in his iced tea quite shortly was to prove.
The ducky was, of course, of her revenge but a small taste:
That selfsame morning she had with much calm and little haste
Built for her friend a duckpen in his very own front yard
And thoughtfully left also a most tasteful Christmas card.

Without the card and ducky we might still be unaware
Of what nature were those beasts that she left pooping in his care.
Silent they were and docile, but alarming to behold,
The most hideous ducks that ever, ever, came into the fold.
Of mottled black and white were they and of alarming size,
The foulest fowls that ever fouled a pair of mortal eyes.

When one escaped next day there was indeed a mad uproar.
'Help help, the devil's duck himself is scratching at my door!'
Came the all too typical complaint over the phone.
'Send on a cop or something; I can't face this beast alone!'
And that is how on one fine clear and cold December day
Our town crew found themselves at last a part of this whole fray.

A lady cop was first of all arriving on the scene.
She thought she'd catch the beastie but the beastie proved too keen.
So then our stalwart treasurer bravely came up to her aid
But of his brave attempts to help a mockery was made.
The ice was slick, the duck was quick, and so he quickly fell.
(But was not injured; last I heard, I heard he's doing well)

Next round the corner fighting off the weather and the chill,
Came our Minister of Fun with just the tool to fill the bill:
A fishing net turned out to be exactly just the tool
To snare the wily duck, to capture this unholy ghoul.
The trio brought the bird back home with nary a quake nor quack,
But some reason found the duck farmer did not want his duck back!

The ducks are gone by now on this cold quiet New Year's Day,
But I am sure the next attack is not too far away.
The lord cried foul and asked to have his lady friend arrested
For trespassing, but e'en in this the poor man has been bested.
The mayor gave his prankster foe a lifetime of immunity,
So the Passing of the Poultry can continue with impunity.

And that's the tale, though I am sure it's just the tale so far.
I know both parties, know full well how devilish they are.
The whole town waits and smiles now every year with bated breath
For we all know this aviary battle's to the death.
We've years of entertainment, laughs and cackles yet in store,
As each of them tries year by year to even up the score.

HAPPY NEW YEAR

As I write this I'm just minutes away from heading out the door to our Best Ever Impromptu New Year's Eve Party. My ice fishing buddy, my brother in anthropology, the pumpkin/rock guy and the physician's assistant (there to keep the rest of us from overdoing it, perhaps?), and who knows who else will soon be partaking of a fabulous fish dinner of freshly caught trout and other delicacies, Guiness (it really does go with everything, even fish!), many different wines and asti at midnight.

Originally we had planned to go party hopping – all four Saratoga bars are open all night and have DJs and other hijinks planned, and Saratoga's one local band is due to play at the big fancy roadhouse just outside the city limits – but as my fishing buddy filleted and the physician's assistant looked up recipes and I looked over my vast stock of beverages and assorted hors d'oeuvres makings, we realized we would nowhere have as much fun as right there in the house.

Elsewhere people I love dearly are gathering to play charades up on the hill, and farther away my brothers and sisters in Secularity are gathering at Mr. Wilson's house (i.e. the house used in the Dennis the Menace movie as Mr. Wilson's house) to drink scotch, smoke cigars, and play the ever-popular Crunch Beast Game in formal wear.

Myself, I'm probably the only person who will be "dressed up" for our fish fry, but I do so in honor of Secular Johnson and... I'll bring a bib.

Already this is the best New Year's Eve since last year's.

2001 has been a tough year on both a national and a personal scale for pretty much everyone I know. I don't know of anyone who will be sorry to see it pass. It was a boring year until it became a terrible year for us all – but at the same time, it's a year in which amazing new friends came into my life at least, old friendships deepened, and my love for the land all around me and the people has deepened. Surely I'm not the only one...

Here's hoping that all of you who read me have something lovely to look forward to this evening and next year.

(I'll be drinking my first toast at 11 p.m. Mountain Time so I can share it with Sec-J – and especially with Opera, who was the one who finally got it through my thick head last year that it was indeed Richard Strauss who composed Also Sprach Zarathrusta in time for us to find the CD and play that tune at midnight last year).

I wonder what we'll play at midnight tonight?

Probably St. Booty.

BE CAREFUL WHAT YOU WISH FOR

“I got some gumdrops!”
“I got a caramel apple!”
“I got chocolate!”
“I got a rock..”

- paraphrasing of typical trick-or-treat dialog in “It’s the Great Pumpkin, Charlie Brown”

As the above quoted-from-less-than-perfect-memory passage from an old cartoon might indicate, not too many people out in the wide world would be too thrilled to receive a rock in their Halloween goodie bags, or, for that matter in their Christmas stockings or wrapped up as a gift under their Christmas trees.

But we in Saratoga do not live in the wide world. We live in Saratoga. And this Christmas, the hot gift, the most coveted keepsake, the most memorable mathom it was possible to exchange as a token of affection, friendship or just as a jolly good joke, was a rock.

To explain why, I suppose I should hearken back a few months to Halloween, when a new artist-about-town (with a little help from his new reprobate friends, the chamber director/town councilman and the town recreation director) set out to introduce himself in the valley by the most creative means at his disposal: selling custom-painted pumpkins to area businesses and individuals.

It was a merry trio indeed who took a spooky Friday afternoon off to wander about Saratoga hawking pumpkins and introducing the new artist. It is perhaps a pity said artist met the movers and shakers of Saratoga’s business community while in such company, but it can’t be helped now, and doesn’t seem to have done quite as much harm as was originally feared.

Quite the contrary; those pumpkins, decorated with business logos, expressive cartoons, caricatures or nature scenes as the customer requested, became something of a status symbol, coveted and much prized.

My own pumpkin, some two months later, still sits proudly in my office window, still sound, not stinking at all, and still proudly sporting the chamber’s logofish for all to see.

Foreshadowing? Certainly.

Less delicately decorated, less carefully kept pumpkins were scarcely rotting in pieces in the post-Halloween streets before our artist had planned out his next venture.

When first he came bursting into my office with the news, I thought he’d already lost his mind as he waved around his first rock, which he presented to me as a token of thanks for helping him launch himself in Saratoga.

But what a rock! I’m holding it now as I write (a few minutes’ interruption here, the artist himself came in for a chat, and he can’t know yet that I’m writing about him. He’ll see it soon enough. That’ll teach him to bug me about when I’m publishing next!). It’s small and smooth and dark, and on its flattest surface is an exquisite small painting of a brown trout. On the reverse is his signature along with a note that both the rock and the water used in the painting came from our very own beloved North Platte River.

Little did I know at the time that I was holding this year’s Hot Christmas Gift in my hand.

Word about these rocks spread quickly, and soon all sorts of people were engaging my friend to paint all sorts of things on them - elk, rams, deer, pets, scenery, and of course trout. Lots of trout.

My own dear personal mother started joking about rainbow rocks and brown rocks and brook rocks.

Then the subterfuge started.

My poor friend found himself engaged in just about every Christmas conspiracy going on in town (well, except for the primary one, about which more in another column - believe me, the traditional Christmas Passing of the Poultry is something worthy of an entire book and not just a column). As he busily painted rock after rock after rock, he had to be constantly on his guard in his downtown studio lest the intended recipient of one rock get an early peek at his present whilst ordering one for the giver, and so on.

At this time I have to express my personal admiration for this artist, into whose studio I tended to come crashing several times a day throughout the holiday season, plotting this, planning that, making suggestions, inviting him and his wife to parties, arranging fishing excursions... while he worked, in fits and starts, on my own fabulous Christmas present: a set of river rock bookends emblazoned with an authentic image of an Athenian warrior in battle dress, one celebrating the Odyssey and the other the Iliad.

I never saw it coming.

How many times did he have to duck and cover? How many times did he have to rush and hide his work over the last month? My ice fishing buddy, for whom I commissioned a rocky cartoon depicting him standing eagerly on the shore of an unfrozen lake, his auger and pole and jigs in hand, eyeing a thermometer reading 70 degrees under a blazing hot sun, exhorting the water to “freeze, come on, freeze!”, nearly saw his own gift several times in the course of a single week.

Before December was even half gone, our artist was feverishly at work nearly every time I saw him, all the while wondering when he was ever going to get his Christmas presents made – for he had planned long ago to bestow trout rocks on all of his family and friends this year.

But as each rock was completed, it was sold. The faster he churned them out, the faster they moved (and without, let me add, any decline in quality; his latest rocks are just as beautiful as mine).

Towards the end it became quite entertaining as he worked ever harder, scrambling for more rocks, more paint, more TIME!

At least the guy who invented Cabbage Patch Dolls wisely farmed them out to a big manufacturing firm before that craze hit.

But of course, were my friend to have done so, the whole point of the thing would be missed; these are unique, beautiful, hand-made things that celebrate a specific place and specific personalities, things that all of us who know him now, and certainly the many who will know him in the future, will treasure always both as tokens of our new artist friend and the people who seized on his work and gave it as gifts this holiday season.

My own father had two rocks in his stocking this Christmas, one from me decorated with a buffalo (my friend saw the buffalo in the rock before anyone asked him to paint it; the rock was shaped just so, and his eyes lit up when I told him what my dad would really like was a buffalo), and a rainbow rock as a gift from the artist himself.

I could almost hear his delighted laughter here in Saratoga as he pulled out his prizes in faraway Portland, where he was visiting my sister.

As for me, I still have a big, stupid grin on my face every time I look at my new bookends, which are like nothing else in the entire world and will certainly confuse archaeologists someday when I am long gone.

Yes, my artist friend is well-launched here in Saratoga, and is still filling orders for late gifts. He is discovering, though, that one should indeed be careful what he wishes for.

For the ice fishing derby is coming soon, and with it visitors, all of whom, I am sure, will want to take home a brookie rock.

Brace yourself, Kevin.