GAME TIME

OK, pop quiz, LIANT readers. Which of the following do Tad the Grocer and the Lord Macklebrains have in common?

A. They both drive fancy vintage cars
B. They are both my coffee buddies
C. They both have Y chromosomes
D. They are both losers as of today
E. All of the above

Today whilst I was busy peddling dustcatchers and brushing up on my tourist baiting skills, our local electric power cooperative held its annual meeting and barbecue. Among the agenda items was the election of a few board members, three to be exact – our cooperative serves a large geographical area, and so there are three service regions, each of which is entitled to so much representation on the governing board. Two areas were uncontested, but our valley's had three candidates, my two aforementioned coffee pals and Greenhouse Guy.

Greenhouse Guy won.

I don't know the margins – My Own Dear Personal Dad says they weren't announced. What he did say was that Tad the Grocer had an amusingly shocked look on his face when the results were announced – Tad was appointed late last spring to fill out the unexpired term of the late Pat Shields, and so was up on the dais with the big dogs when the news came down. I sympathize; there's nothing quite like a big surprise when one is sitting up on a platform with a few hundred people sitting down below looking up at one. Yikes.

But so, anyway, I'm really wondering if I want to go to coffee on Monday. On the one hand, it's always sort of wickedly fun to watch sore losers grouse (ahh, schadenfreude), but on the other hand, it's sort of not.

But I'll probably go. Hey, I'm a hobo. What else am I going to do?

Oh, and so, um, duh, the answer is "E"

71.5 HOURS TO GO!

A half hour ago, I made a pre-emptive strike against the legion of telemarketers who are doubtless just waiting to pounce on me (I say waiting because it's only as of Tuesday that I've had an honest-to-dog land line to the Unabomber Cabin. Ted K. got along a lot better without regular 'net access than I did).

I surfed on over to The Federal Government's Do Not Call List and said, well Shazaam! Sign me up!

Actually, there was no space on the registration page for text comments, so they didn't get the Shazaam! part.

And I was all set, here and on Blogcritics, to praise the hell out of this effort for being so easy and breezy and beautiful and an actually legitimate use of the fedgov's interstate commerce regulatory powers.

But then...

The web site requires that one enter "a valid e-mail address" along with his or her telephone number(s) (nice that it's plural - you can zap your home, business and cell all with one entry!) (interestingly enough, it nowhere says the e-mail address has to be one's own, just that it be "valid"). Your entry will not be processed without this information.

So I guess it's sort of like registering to get the New York Times' headlines by e-mail (best in a fortnight - today's! #1 "Strom Thurmond, Foe of Integration, Dies at 100" #2 "Gays Celebrate, And Plan Campaign for Broader Rights" Yes, I know the gays were celebrating the Supreme Court's sodomy decision yesterday. It's the juxtaposition that's funny, guys!); it doesn't really happen until one receives a "confirming" e-mail, the equivalent of "Is that your final answer?" and responds to it as directed.

The Do Not Callee is then informed that if the site doesn't receive a reply to the confirmation mail within 72 hours, he or she will not be added to the list.

Furthermore, it will take "about seven minutes" for that confirmation mail to reach one's e-mail box.

Well, it's been considerably more than seven minutes since I finished following the instructions, and the e-mail has yet to reach me.

So now I wonder if it will.

Or if I've been tricked somehow into giving away my e-mail address to the new FDS (Federal Department of Spam).

Kate Sherrod, enlarge your penis and get a tax credit!. Unbelievable mortgage rates and complimentary phone tap! Smallest digital camera ever free with every completed IRS audit!

Oh, the possibilities! I think I have to lie down now...

Glad I used one of my junk addresses.

WHY I'M KIND OF A FATALIST

I got a new reminder yesterday of what we're up against when we want to take on institutions like the Forest Service, which, remember, is an arm of the federal government, which is beholden to all of the people of America but mostly to the majority – which ain't us.

A friend from high school is getting married Saturday, and has imported all of her midwestern pals for the occasion. The Lazy River Cantina last night, already teeming with cyclists here for Pedal the Peaks, also had an unusually high number of 30something suburbanites, who, while they had indeed enjoyed, e.g., the beauty of the Snowy Range as they drove here from Iowa or Minnesota or Indiana (one guy apparently stopped every mile or so to take pictures, as he'd never been "in the mountains" before), really actually only wanted to know one thing:

Q: How in the world do you guys get along being so far away from a Wal-Mart?

or another popular variation:

Q: What do you do out here when you want a Domino's Pizza at 2 a.m.?

While I did sort of get them to understand that for most of us Wal-Mart, etc. become special occasions, planned pilgrimages, and thus hold a greater and more numinous significance in our lives than in theirs, I didn't make much headway on the Domino's thing.

I see it as a sort of reverse cargo cultism. No matter how hard we tried to explain to the natives in the South Seas that their bamboo radio antennas and phantom airstrips were never going to spontaneously create the western consumer goods they craved, they clung to these creations and their beliefs. No matter how hard I try to make "the outside world" understand that we do just fine without midnight pizza delivery and a Blockbuster's on every street corner, they just don't get it, and so don't really see us as fully human.

So of course they don't trust us when they say cutting down trees is a good thing.

RISING EARLY

I was never a morning person, and still would not describe myself as one if asked, but, well, facts is facts.

Everything changed when I moved back to Wyoming lo these... five years ago? Six. Six years ago. Everything, including the hour at which I wake.

It's the birds, you see.

Right now as I commence writing this, it is a quarter to 5 a.m. on what looks in the dim offing to be a very pleasant Thursday. The street lights are still much brighter than the sun, and the sky is a deep periwinkle color that would be much prettier were I not looking at it through sleep-gritty eyes (but except for the true freaks among us, whose eyes that ever see this color aren't gritty with sleep? Damn few, even among the freaks. Very well, I hereby christen this shade "Sleep Schmutz Blue." Truth be told, I think we have Sleep Schmutz Blue tee shirts for sale at Dustcatcher Central. They sell well. Must be some kind of unconscious/archetypal thing).

And there are exactly two birds, very loud, very insistent, who seem to share a friend of mine's predilection for "shoving the sun up." But unlike him, they don't seem willing to wait to do it. They sort of hector it, every morning. Come on, sun. Don't you make us wait. You won't like us if we have to wait. We'll come and peck your eyes out if you don't hurry up. Or something.

OK, I know that's not the real reason. I read the Casper Star Trombone like everyone else. I know the real reason birds sing in the morning. It's male birds warning off potential rivals who might come and get busy with their mates or make themselves at home in their territory.

Maybe they regard the sun as some kind of uberbird whose after all their ladyfriends. In which case I guess I must revise my dawn translation of this one very loud, very insistent guy's calls: Hey you – don't think I don't see you trying to sneak over that hill. I'm onto you. You want a piece of me? Do you? Well I'm here and I ain't moving and you and me are going round and round if you don't back off.

I wish he would listen to reason, this guy. Because the sad fact is, despite these morning greetings (and by the way, I estimate about 15 minutes before the mallard drake who lives under my picnic table enters the dawn dialogue. We'll see if I'm right), I'm still not a morning person. I'm a stay up until the wee hours bashing away at this here laptop on the great American somethingorother no matter what person. The kind of person who is supposed to sleep later in the day and rise refreshed and revived and ready to write more deathless prose... at about 4 p.m.

But no.

Actually, though, truth be told – for the last month or so, I've been beating the birds to the punch. I've lain awake in my bed, refusing to look at the clock and thus confirm my sinking feeling that I'm already done sleeping for the day, waiting for Mr. Butch Birdy Boy to try scaring off the sun yet again.

Oops – I was off by two minutes on Mr. Mallard's joining in the fray.

Good morning, everybody.

Guess I'll make some coffee and read the paper(s).

MORE INTERFERENCE

The single greatest threat to my writing career is, of course, other people's writing. Try as I might, I cannot read and write simulataneously, at least not in any extended, meaningful way. And so, if I'm reading someone else's book, I am not writing my own. If I'm reading other people's blogs, I'm not adding to this one. Etc.

Well, it's about to happen again.

But only for a little while.

And then I'll tell you all about what I read.

If this makes you angry, blame Sam Western. He was the keynote speaker at the WAM convention earlier this month, and had something new to share with us all in place of his earlier "ag isn't everything" rhetoric that lots of people took as attacks on ag.

He's been searching around for a community that accomplished what he thinks Wyoming needs to attempt: to truly diversify its economy away from dependence on agriculture (note: once again, he did not at any point advocate putting an end to agriculture. Not. NOT!).

And he found one in Tupelo, Mississippi.

And he found a book detailing how they did it and the model for community development a sociologist generated out of Tupelo's success story.

And he recommended it to all of us.

I'm sure there was a profound rush to neighborhood bookstores all over the state on Monday morning, with my colleagues ordering copies of this out-of-print tome. We town council/mayor types take advice where we can find it, even from obscure PhDs from Mississippi.

Or from pot stirring semi-journalists who slyly turn a break-out sesion to "discuss" what makes a sustainable community into a first class brain-picking session to gather our opinions as community leaders about whether Wyoming is an inclusive or an exclusive state (overwhelming conclusion at the workshop: exclusive but deluding itself that it's inclusive). Sam asked the questions and took notes on our answers that I suspect may find their way into his next book, to be titled "The Big Empty." And got a lot of people thinking about what he's been saying all along.

So now, off with the internet and on with the reading lamp and on to Tupelo: the Evolution of a Community by Vaughan Grisham.

Give me a day or two to digest. And meet a private deadline. And then I'll be back!

THERE'S WRITING, AND THEN THERE'S...

This week marked the "sort-of" completion of the most difficult, hair-tearing, sleep-losing writing assignment I've had at least since my Senior Project at Beaudacious Bard College.

Actually, no, this was worse than my Senior Project.

I'm talking, of course, about my business plan, which was due before close of business this last Tuesday, which has haunted my dreams lo these many weeks, which could be worth as much as $5000 (if by some fluke it wins the Carbon County Business Challenge Contest) or as little as $250 (reimbursement of my tuition for the NxLevel course for entrepreneurs, my reward for [approximately] finishing what I started), but either way, not something to be blown off.

It's had many forms, many guiding ideas, since I allegedly first started working on it early this spring as the NxLevel course began. As the early stages unfolded, I was using an old idea concocted by (among others), myself, My Own Dear Personal Mom, my (former) Enabling Assistant, Martini the Photog, the Secret Cartoonist, and the ex-Sewer Queen, that of developing a news/arts/commentary magazine for our valley. As I did my research, though, most of what I uncovered (that I did not already know) about starting and running a magazine made it perfectly clear that I, Your Humble Blogger, Kate Sherrod, would be much better off just writing stories for other magazines. Become a publisher and I'd never write again, too bogged down in assuring sufficient ad revenues to meet publication costs, keeping my staff from fighting, worrying about circulation, blah blah blah.

Then I stopped being a Chamber Chick, dove into the whole freelance writing thing, and began to slant the as-yet-unwritten business plan towards just my writing career.

Boring! I already knew how all of this worked from doing it before. And another reason I took this class was because I was seeking a new challenge or two.

Then, about two weeks ago, it hit me.

I had a whole stack of fabulously original products of the pen of the Secret Cartoonist – the Platte Valley Zodiac – and a stack of silly, bogus horoscopes to go with them. Gathering dust somewhere. Entertaining no one but me.

And so my current range of silly products and marketing concepts was born. Watch this space for later details, because this stuff isn't what I'm on about right now, and quite frankly I'm just a little sick of explaining it at the moment.

Why sick? And how does that bode for actually running this business if I manage to get it going? That remains to be seen.

But... a business plan really is comparable to a Bard College Senior Project (sort of a mini-dissertation a Bardian has to complete in about a year in order to get his or her Bachelor's degree), at least in that trying to whip out the whole thing in two weeks is not recommended. There is research to be done, prose to be finely crafted, evidence to present to support one's thesis.

And layout, design and typing, of course.

But I, Your Humble Blogger, have never evolved beyond my junior high/high school modus operandi: not precisely procrastination, but a sort of outward idleness between the research and the writing phase in which weird freaky occult unconscious processes in my head and liver go to work on the raw data I've gathered until one fine morning, usually about 20 minutes before the final draft, the finished product, is due, I sit in front of the typewriter or computer and spew.

Hey, I never got less than an A, so why fix what wasn't broken, hmm?

And yes, I did more or less the same thing on the good old senior project. The first semester of my senior year I passed pitching one unacceptable idea after another to my advisor and my department – unacceptable because I was by then pretty damned sick of being a literature major, and had enrolled in a full slate of science classes for my senior year (at a time when most of my classmates were taking maybe one class, as undemanding as possible, something like "Vibrations and Waves" or "Music Program Zero" [don't ask]) – entomology, molecular biology, a history of programming languages and a tutorial on computer viruses. Oh, and the philosophy of language. Heady stuff, and it gave me heady ideas. My favorite, and I still say this would have been a kickass project, would have explored the appropriateness of the whole "computer virus" metaphor, how far it could be taken and still be accurate, whether or not thinking of lines of malicious program code really were best thought of that way or whether clinging to this analogy actually prevented us from dealing with them properly, etc.

But no. Not literary enough.

So, bleah. Finally I stumbled across Edmund Gosse, a Victorian writer whose father was a naturalist and did a hodgepodge piece of crap piece on him in the second semester, following my usual M.O.: A flurry of research in January and February, then frolicking about the science labs, skinny dipping ponds, newspaper office (all four years at Bard I was basically also a full-time newspaper chick) (and EMT, and shuttle van driver, and hash slinger. Insomnia, back then, was my friend, oh yes), pretty much everywhere but my little cubbyhole in the library.

Then for two weeks in May I disappeared, seen only by my pet freshmen who poked food and flowers and home brewed beer through a slot in the door from time to time.

When I emerged, I had about 200 pages of crap (say... I suddenly just had a thought. You don't think the Forest Service...? Nah, nah) that I never, ever wanted to look at again. And for the first time ever, I earned a B+ for something that I wrote.

Ack.

Now, you're probably expecting some material now about how this taught me the error of my ways, how I changed my way of working, how I learned to pace myself, do a little every day, that sort of thing. Well, you haven't been paying attention to this essay or this blog if that is the case.

I still write all my articles that way – interview my subjects, then sort of wander around in a distracted daze for a week or two while the aforementioned mysterious workings work (I really can't tell you how, and can't afford to examine it lest I run into the Centipede's Dilemma and am never able to write again) until finally just before deadline (this usually happens around 2 a.m., one of the many good reasons why I live alone) it all comes together in one quick, high-pressure gush.

And so, that's how my business plan basically came together.

Except for some nasty, tough stuff that I've never, ever had to do before, like quantifying the unquantifiable. What is my time worth? What is the uniqueness of my idea worth? How many of my various worts and widgets would I have to sell to recover the cost of making them? How many of same could I sell? These look like very simple questions when I type them out in sentences – and indeed, the business plan verbiage itself was some of the easiest writing I've ever done. But this stuff... this stuff...

And I did it all in two weeks, while attending the WAM convention, while selling dustcatchers, while rearranging the Unabomber Cabin so I could establish a functional home office (and yes, this did indeed involve more chalkboard paint; I should make anyone who drops by for coffee or whatever sign a non-disclosure agreement before crossing the threshold and seeing my business plan scrawled all over the walls), while cramming several months worth of research (remember; the preliminary stuff was all about a whole different industry, not even sort of applicable to what I've chosen to pursue) into that time.

Bottom line: I think I earned about a B- on this thing. I'm not terribly satisfied with it at all.

Unlike my senior project, however, I'm not willing to chuck it all. Unlike my project, this thing shows some potential if I keep working on it. Yes, it was a rush job to meet an arbitrary deadline, but I've still got a considerable investment of time and mental health on my hard drive and I'd really like to make it pay off.

So, I'm going to keep researching, interviewing, persuading, and keeping plugging the results of these into my Magic Business Formulas and see where it all takes me.

Am I a businesswoman? We'll see.

Anyway, it's something I've never done before. And that's a bigger rush even than being a hobo.

POST-CONVENTION BLUES

So this is the horrible side of going to meetings like the WAM convention: the way they end.

Three or four whirlwind days of exchanging ideas, networking, having a complete blast with total strangers, reconnecting with people who feel like incredibly close friends even though I only see them twice a year, scribbling down book citations, commiserating, drinking, playing hackey sack, listening to kickass speeches (GovDave! GovDave! GovDave!)... then we get down to the business meeting, voting on a flurry of resolutions, affirming to one another what our goals are for the coming year...

And then the meeting breaks up... quick hugs, talk about visiting one another (rarely happens), last minute brain-picking... a lump in my throat I haven't felt since my very last high school speech meet some 15 years ago...

And now is the really hard part. Not missing my WAMbuddies, though I do, I do, especially since this year I reconnected with my original WAMbuddy, the public works director for the City of Riverton (I can't tell you how we became friends, exactly, but it did of course involve Guiness... lots and lots of Guiness... as what important social relationships in my life don't?), but coming home, inspired and rarin' to go, full of new ideas and rekindled passion for what I'm doing. And it's great, this feeling, I wish I could have it all the time, or at least more often, but it's so fragile, so hard to hold on to, and there's no one here in my real life to really share it with...

And soon it will be gone, and all the ideas I'm bursting with right now will be shown to be impractical or unpopular or impossible (and some of them probably are, but not all of them, not really, surely! Surely? Surely....)... most of the people with whom I networked and who infected me with this hope have probably already forgotten me (hell, it's only with severe and immediate effort that I sort even now through my pile of business cards assembled over the weekend, matching names to faces and conversations) until next time.

And soon the central message that got through my thick skull again, which I can only, at this post-convention high moment, hope at least penetrated a little more deeply this time, that my colleagues and I, or at least I myself, need to set some goals and focus on them and stick to them and revisit them from time to time... soon that message, too, will likely fade. I'll lose it all in what I'm conditioned to believe is the real world and maybe it is, maybe it is, but there's got to be away to tune out all the noise and concentrate on the signal.

Funny, isn't it, how the signal gets through most clearly when one is being so superficially unproductive... Playing hackey sack with a dozen youth delegates from Lovell, drinking martinis and smoking five dollar cigars with most of the crew from Riverton, ranting and raving with Sam Western about the turnaround achieved in Tupelo, Mississippi, babbling to a roomful of my fellow elected officials about what I mean when I say everyone in Wyoming has a corner knocked off...

Why can't more of the rest of my life be like my WAM life?

Good question.

It is, of course, up to me to see if I can't just make it so.

But so, anyway, pardon me if I seem to be talking to myself a bit more than usual. I'm just trying to keep it all in mind, on the off chance that maybe, at some point, I can make it so.

WAM 2003

This year's WAM (Wyoming Association of Municipalities) convention is right here in Carbon County, and so far it's been kind of astonishing.

Yesterday the Historian and I wound up serving as "guides" for a delegate tour of Saratoga... for all of three ladies. About 30 people came down from Rawlins (where most of the actual convention action is taking place), but trust a bunch of local elected official/leader types to be wildly uninterested in being led around anywhere.

They did all right, though. I noticed them carrying lots of shopping bags onto the bus. Mission accomplished!

The three gals we did lead around were a lot of fun, and I had a long overdue look at my downtown through their fresh eyes. It was pretty astonishing, actually, and quite refreshing. See, they're jealous of how good Bridge Street looks, how attractive the businesses are, how nice the merchandise inside is, the variety of restaurants and stores and amenities we have (my buddy Tom, a Cheyenne council member, told me his kids think our municipal swimming pool is the greatest thing ever). Their jealousy only increased when we told them all that they had seen downtown (except, of course, the heated sidewalks, the brick and the colonial street lamps) was accomplished, not by concerted government-led effort, but by individual business owners who have pride in their places.

Then, making yesterday even better – snicker, snicker, snicker – I finished the evening back in Rawlins at the soon-to-be-golfable Rochelle Ranch Golf Course (ha ha, Sewer King! I got to golf it before you did!)... and won $100 in a putting contest.

I am, of course, so not a real golfer.

And so to today, when the real work begins. Community Development workshops and so forth.

Onward!

BLOGGING ON THE DRIP

You're in luck, dear readers: for the first time in many, many days, I am a) ahead of schedule (well, temporarily) and b) seated at a computer for a few minutes.

I'm early for our monthly Joint Powers Board meeting (a.k.a. the Sewer King and All His Court). There is some debate floating about town about whether this was to be at 5:30 or 6:00 p.m.; apparently Tad the Grocer is in possession of an agenda and/or minutes (for which meeting, I cannot say) that indicates it's 5:30 p.m., but I know for a fact we all voted a few months ago to make 6:00 p.m. the permanent official time... and my copy of the (current!) agenda and/or minutes does indeed say six (on the minutes) and nothing a'tall (on the agenda).

I'm just early because I overestimated how out of shape I am - I left off my task of the day (troweling some more Maybeline on the latest version of my business plan -- Yes, that's right, business plan -- to see if I couldn't make it fit for its first reader) thinking I had just enough time to ride my bike over to the post office and drop some stuff in the mail before making the 6 p.m. here at the scintillating Saratoga Town Hall.

I made it, all right. With like 20 minutes to spare.

So here I am, typing to you, dear readers. Never say I don't think of you. Never.

And here we have a few special guests, including Flip Chart (our consulting engineer, who comes by his name quite honestly) and the Warlock of the Waterworks, currently dishing over a nasty-gram we've received from the State Loan and Investment Board regarding a grant we applied for this year to rehabilitate our older water tower.

Seems the SLIB has swapped over some of its responsibilities/bailiwick with the Wyoming Water Development Commission and, while they didn't ever inform us that we must no longer make applications for programs like this to the SLIB, expected us to know this anyway. Neener neener neener on us. No SLIB grant, maybe the WWDC will do it, but probably we should take out a loan.

I have a feeling one or more of the Courtiers will be making a trip to Cheyenne pretty soon to plead our case.

Pick me. Pick me. Going to Cheyenne is what I live for.

But being the hothead I am, and angry as I am at certain other state bureaucracies (Bidness Council, por ejemplo), I probably shouldn't go unchaperoned.

WooOOOoooOOO!

WHAT, ONLY TEN YEARS LATE? OR SO?

Lest anyone doubt my assertion that Wyoming is not only the place where the visitor must set his clock back ten years or that it is, in fact, a cargo cult-ish third world nation in many respects, attend the following:

My Own Dear Personal Mother and I are currently driving my father crazy with our cussion, discussion, analysis and complaints about... Myst.

Yes, that same pioneering, annoying CD-ROM game that caused such a sensation in the mid-90s. The one with the exquisite-for-the-time 3-D renderings, maddening hints and clues and back story that must be pieced together through laborious reading of disappearing calligraphy in the books of the library -- that Myst.

MODPM, who occasionally fills in as a sort of assistant assistant librarian's assistant, stumbled across a mostly intact copy of the thing at the Saratoga Branch Library's annual book sale. Price: $1.

MODPM (as I sift through the small pile of science fiction books, most of which look suspiciously familar, as in didn't I donate these for the library's lending collection when I left Saratoga for college in 1988 familiar. Sigh): Kate, have you ever heard of this?

Your Humble Blogger (noting package, stifling screaming flashbacks of howling patrons all but physically assaulting the bank of computers at Cafe Liberty, the East Coast's first cybercafe, ca. about 1995): Yes. Yes I have.

MODPM: Is it any good?

YHB: That depends. From what I recall, you would probably like it.

(screechy violins rage through the soundtrack, straight out of that of, say, Psycho)

MODPM: Well, it's only a dollar. I think some of the manuals are missing, though.

YHB: Only a dollar? Buy it.

Thus, thus was my, was our, fate sealed.

I don't know that any manuals are missing because I don't recall there ever having been much of a manual, apart from the little booklet that tells one how to "zip" or turn on "transitions" mode so she can skip the endless sequences of, e.g., riding the elevator up the tower or walking down the long path to gawk again at the little clock tower on the little island that we still haven't figured out how to reach. Proof that the game designers, and the maniac who placed this item in the book sale, were not complete sadists, this.

And so now MODPM's computer desk is littered with all of the little notes and paraphernalia that littered all of your desks out there in the real world years ago - poorly rendered sketches of the constellations (we're both writers, not draughtsmen or copyists, thank you!), lists of dates and times, cryptic sequences of numbers and musical notes and voltage settings.

Pleasingly, the experience has brought us (even) closer together (though it is predictably further alienating MODPD who still after all these years rolls his eyes and grumbles when we start discussing another late arrival in our lives, Star Trek: Voyager, never before seen in Saratoga until late this spring when our cable company finally gave us a UPN station). We both blinked back tears of joy and mutual admiration earlier this week, for example, after I figured out how to set the power station's voltage to the target figure (creating in the process another cryptic scrap of paper).

Of course, now that My Own Dear Personal Parents are preparing to make their first real journey in Their Own Dear Personal Motor Home, leaving Your Humble Blogger to content herself with WAM conventions and watching the river rise and concocting a business plan out of thin air and listening to another round of (cow?)pie in the sky sewer lagoon planning, I've more or less had to swear an oath to her that I will keep my nose out of the Myst until they return, less I spoil the fun by solving it all by myself.

Yeah, like that's going to happen.

YAY, CHUCK!

Winterkill
By C.J. Box
(New York: G.P. Putnam's Sons, 2003)

Winterkill is, quite simply, the novel I have been waiting for Wyoming mystery novelist C.J. Box to write.

His first two novels, Open Season and Savage Run, established his potential and garnered him critical acclaim and bestseller status – for good reason. Box has pretty much created a whole new sub-genre of murder mystery, with a Wyoming game warden as the detective and plots that turned on the American West's land, resource and environmental issues that seldom get such balanced or sympathetic treatment as Box gives them.

Open Season, in addition to introducing us to game warden and reluctant detective Joe Pickett, explored the implications and unintended complications of the Endangered Species Act as its hero – and his family – became embroiled in a complicated set of plots and plans centering on concealing the survival of a species thought long extinct. Savage Run continued Pickett's story with a tale of environmental extremists, asshole hobby ranchers, and an unhinged stock detective.

Both books are cracking good page-turners, the characters vivid and interesting, the plot lines refreshingly unhackneyed and inventive, the ruggedness and beauty of the Wyoming terrain Pickett patrols well evoked, though at times Box strays into what I can only describe as scenery porn.**

What makes them, and Box's brand-new Winterkill truly memorable, though, is the texture, the background of the conflicts Box so skillfully sets up and executes and intensifies to the point of unbearability – a background handled, for the most part, with fairness and sensitivity, especially in the first two books. Ecoterrorists and Tom Horn wannabes both get their say and both get to be fully human even as they perform inhuman acts (environmental extremist and Saddlestring, Wyo. native Stewie Woods routinely spikes trees knowing he is creating the potential for working men he may have known since childhood to be maimed, even die on the job; stock detective Charlie Tibbs' unhinged and single minded pursuit of Woods and Pickett through the eponymous canyon is like something out of a Hitchcock movie); concerns about unscrupulous timber harvesting practices and about the true nature of "magical and beautiful" wolves get equal play. Some minor characters, most notably Savage Run's Britney Earthshare, do threaten to become caricatures, but even they get sympathetic treatment and are allowed, to a degree, to evolve.

These trends in Box's fiction continue in Winterkill, which introduces yet another seemingly fanciful but all-too-plausible element to the ongoing saga of Joe Pickett and Saddlestring, Wyo. As winter truly sets in, the mountains above Saddlestring are invaded by a caravan of refugees from every "extremist" showdown with the federal government over the last 15 years, survivors of Waco, Ruby Ridge, the Montana Freemen, you name it.

And coincidentally, a ranking Forest Service Bureaucrat has just lost his mind, been caught poaching, and gotten himself murdered almost right under poor Joe's nose!

But is it a coincidence? USFS hotshot Melinda Strickland doesn't think so.

And this is where the novel really gets interesting. While Open Season and Savage Run both feature somewhat sympathetic, or at least well-rounded villains with understandable agendas, with Strickland Box has let his melodramatic instincts run away with him; she might as well be wearing a black hat and twirling a mustache – but Box goes her one better, making her a modern day White Witch straight out of C.S. Lewis, wrapped in blankets in the back of a sledge (OK, a snowcat), an annoying dog cuddled to her breast, viciously driving her dwarf minions (OK, other USFS bureaucrats) through the blinding snow and the towering drifts on her way to exact revenge!!

A scene of note: as plans to "go get" those outlaws on the mountain are laid, Strickland calls a press conference/public forum to justify her plans and her planned actions to anyone who cares to know. The scene rings as true as any I've ever read in modern literature, and is almost painfully funny as Saddlestring residents complain about having no say in forest policy, local rangers tapdance around the issue, audience members share their pained ironic takes in sotto voce and everyone is told, finally, to just shut up because it's going to be Strickland's Way or nothing.

Medicine Bow National Forest's draft management plan, anyone?

Political/resource issues aside, this is also another chapter in the story of the life of Joe Pickett's family, which has already faced its share of tragedy – an unborn son killed when his wife is shot in the first book, the loss of a beloved horse in the second – and in Winterkill must deal with more as the Pickett's foster daughter April (Box also has a wonderful gift for writing child characters) is kidnapped and put directly in harm's way by her deranged mother, holed up on the mountain with the "federal government-hating outlaws."

An intriguing new character is introduced, too, in the person of Nate Romanowski, a falconer and true individualist who undergoes a surprising metamorphosis – not in himself, but in the perceptions of him induced in the reader. It's high time Joe had a sidekick – and what a sidekick – and I would enthusiastically nominate Romanowski for this role. More, please.

And so I wait, along with the rest of Box's growing readership, to see what he's going to come up with next. There are many other intriguing issues in which Joe could find himself entangled. Hint: our favorite saying around southern Wyoming and the town that is one of the three** on which Box based his fictitious Saddlestring: "Whiskey is for drinking; water is for fighting."

* Probably an occupational hazard: I would expect no less from a guy who still makes his actual living marketing trips to Wyoming to European Tourists. Box is the founder and CEO of Rocky Mountain International. Scenery porn is an indispensable tool of that trade.

** I'm only sure of two of the three: Sheridan, Wyoming and my hometown, Saratoga (mentioned as an aside in Winterkill for its annual ice fishing derby, which Box once ran when he was the chamber of commerce director here. Thanks for the plug, buddy!).

Final note from Your Humble Blogger: I have been absent from these pages for a few days - even weeks - because of my hopeless addiction to eating, drinking and being warm enough, i.e. I've been concentrating on writing for money. I plan to return to blogging now, but could always use help, and here's what you can do if you want: If you are at all interested in this or any of the other books I've mentioned in this review, and want to buy one or more, please, please please do the following:

1. Surf on over to the version of this review that appears on Blogcritics.org - that appearing at this URL.

2. Click on the image of the book you want to buy (all of the books I mention are individually shown below the text).

3. Buy it from amazon!

4. I get a cut of the sale if you buy it that way.

THE MATRIX: RELOADED

I could also name this essay Hunger, Satisfied, for lots and lots of reasons.

Even though there is still no spoon.

There are several films I've been eagerly awaiting of late. A drooling comic book fan from way back, I was delighted to learn that Ang Lee was taking on the Incredible Hulk. A sequel to the excellent X-Men movie would be welcome. Of course I look forward to watching them crown Viggo Mortensen king this coming Christmas.

And then there's these two Matrix sequels.

I have approached these with trepidation. I loved The Matrix, but for different reasons than most. A long-time devotee of Christian and Jewish apocrypha and heresies, I loved The Matrix's blatantly Gnostic/Manichaean theme, its hip updating of an old belief that our world is a creation of malignant forces who have trapped the divine spark of humanity in a million tiny cells to be tortured and enslaved, bound by laws of physics, confined by fear and death and base animal instinct, and only a few enlightened individuals who awakened to the truth could ever set it all free. Instead of Archons and the Demiurge we have Agents and the vast and complex machine society that grows humans as crops and turns them into batteries.

Plus, the soundtrack kicked ass, and even Keanu Reeves, one of the most enjoyably mockable creatures ever to pretend he's an actor, wasn't too irritating even if I did think of Bill and Ted a little too often.

The messianic plot was also great fun, and I'm enough of a fan of, e.g., John Woo and his Hong Kong predescessors to have also enjoyed all of the silly wire-work kung fu and all of the other special effects, too.

But, since they'd pretty much already used up the entire "Hero With a Thousand Faces" plot in this first film, I wasn't sure the Wachowski brothers could really make two more set in this milieu, at least not without betraying their original achievement.

So I almost didn't go see this film.

I'm glad, though, that I did, because the brothers had lots of other goodies up their sleeves.

OK, I'm going to try not to completely spoil this movie for those of you who haven't seen it but plan to, but I can't meaningfully discuss this movie – or persuade a few of you who might not otherwise bother with it to go see it – without giving away a little bit. If you're a complete anti-spoiler fanatic (which I am; I deliberately avoided reading any criticism of TM:R so my initial experience would have as clean an impact as possible), you might want to stop here, but for most people a little foreknowledge can't hurt.

At the end of the first film, Neo the demigod has finally been revealed as such in a dazzling sequence of light and cascading source code that conveyed better than just about anything I've ever seen how absolutely everything can change whe the apple cart is well and truly upset. He has stopped speeding bullets that were flying toward him, he has come back from the dead, he has apparently destroyed his nemesis, Agent Smith by turning Smith's own great tactic against him (i.e., diving into the same "space" occupied by Smith's "body" and basically overwriting him). And he can fly.

Unstoppable Neo! Obviously he's gonna save us all, as he says in his final phone call to the Artificial Intelligence gestalt who built and run the Matrix.

And herein lay my misgivings about sequels. How much fun would it really be to watch Neo just kick more ass and take more names? Maybe if he gets bored and turns evil, yeah, that might be fun – omnipotence and its attendant boredom always carries with it the threat of corruption.

But the Wachowskis had other plans, and they were undeniably cool ones. Neo's neutralization of Agent Smith by overwriting him meant a lot more than just the end of a fight scene; not only did Smith survive the overwriting, but there was a co-mingling of what I can only think of as Neo's and Smith's digital DNA. As we quickly learn in TM:R, Smith derived frightening new abilities (that lead to one of the most ass-kickingly cool fight scenes ever, and made a simple, two-word sentence, "Me, too" into one of my favorite movie lines, maybe ever) that make him a greater threat than ever. Neo, too, would appear to have benefitted from the exchange, having forged a whole new connection with the machines he will fight, as he demonstrates in a climactic scene when those giant mechanical squid, the sentinals, menace his actual, physical self in the non-Matrix, non-virtual "real world."

That alone would be a pretty cool basis for a sequel, but that's not all the film had to offer to satisfy my hunger for more noodle baking, more loud industrial music, more stylistic pyrotechnics and more Hugo Weaving (so much more Hugo Weaving!).

Another powerful hunger of mine was satisfied in our getting to see Zion, the last human city, deep underground and still utterly dependent on the very technology that got us where we were – machines purifying the recycled water and air, machines providing heat and light, machines refining and working metal to build and maintain the last, vast human habitat – and this irony does not escape comment.

And yet more to satisfy me: the civilization dwelling in Zion is a visual feast of utterly gorgeous and achingly real humanity of every race, hue, style of dress and body art, like the last human city should be. It's a 21st century young person's dream, everybody's just people (though it's perhaps a little disappointing that the black guys have black girlfriends and the white guys have white ones, but oh well, one battle at a time, I guess), united in common cause and, in one of the film's greatest scenes, partying like it's the end of the world because it just might be.

I live in an overwhelmingly white and monolingual state: Zion's appeal to me is very real. I didn't realize how I have been missing the sight of other faces, other races, until I was vicariously drawn into the ultimate multi-culti rave party. We are still here, the prophet-like Morpheus has reminded us, and it is our duty to celebrate that, celebrate our animal nature that makes us different from the machines, shake our groove things and get it on. Yeah!

I am also howlingly entertained by this film's journey deeper into the territory of mythology and archetype. A new character emerges, the Merovingian, and he is delightfully arrogant and French like the conspiracy theorist/heretic's ultimate idol, the monarchial descendent of Jesus Christ (the Merovingians were kings of France and some theories maintained that their origins lay in Jesus' having impregnated Mary Magdeline, and in Joseph of Arimethea's having brought her to France to give birth to and raise their semidivine progency after the crucifixion), ought to be. At first he seems meant to be a helper in Neo's quest to find his way to the core and find a way to prevent the machine's imminent attack on Zion, but he is quickly revealed as having his own agenda and no concern for what aren't, after all, his fellow humans. Like his mythological original, this Merovingian isn't really one of us, and it takes the oldest trick in the book, betrayal by a wronged woman, to get past him and out of his empire. I would have liked to have seen more of him, but maybe he'll have more to do in the last film. I'm crossing my fingers.

One last spin TM:R puts on the Matrix milieu: as mentioned briefly in the first film, what Neo et al are fighting against is not the first Matrix... and Neo isn't the first Neo! A great effort is made to convince Neo, and by extension us, that he isn't, in fact, anybody's savior, that he isn't, in fact, doing anything of his own free will; he is an inherent anomaly in the program that crops up at regular iterations and while he is something of an annoying bug in the works, the Matrix has accommodated that bug and harnessed it.

This of course raises lots of tasty issues for the final film, due out in November. Is Neo part of the solution or part of the problem? Is this just another run-through of an age-old scenario, the endless cycle of Ragnarok that is the Norse cosmology, or is this a Christian-style ultimate ending and apocalypse that's coming?

I for one think that Agent Smith, with his new abilities and his new freedom of thought and action, is what's really going to make the difference this time. I eagerly await seeing if I'm right.

A final note: Yay for the action scenes, whatever. The kung fu was amusing in the first film, but there's just too damned much of it this time, and while I knew I was supposed to be mighty thrilled by, e.g., the extensive car chase on the freeway and the battle with the monk/guardian program, for me the only fight scene that was actually fun was the Smithalicious first one. Me too.

Sometimes it's just awesome to be wrong!

GLASS ASS

I am seriously wigged out by this whole Stephen Glass thing.

For those of you who have been busy fishing or running your businesses or otherwise not being media junkies, Stephen Glass is a writer of approximately my age and education who has recently published a novel, The Fabulist, that has caused quite an uproar, pious and otherwise.

See, before he made his true bullshitting aspirations known, he was a feature writer of some repute, in demand at such tony, elite publications as George, Harper's and The New Republic, as well as stuff like Rolling Stone. His articles were pithy, slightly wacky, attention-getting, timely, and more or less completely fabricated, as it turns out.

He was finally called to the carpet when another journalist from another magazine tried to follow up on something he'd published and found that the people he'd quoted not only didn't say what he said they did, but could never have said anything to him because - they didn't exist!

So he went home to Chicago to lick his wounds and hide out with his parents and while there in hiding, wrote this book which he claims is a novel but which is clearly only the most thinly disguised of memoirs, all about how the protagonist, Stephen Glass, deceived his editors and the public and showed everyone up as an ass, including, finally, himself.

Part of me is just plain outraged about this, and stunned. Mine is a failure of imagination, here, I suppose. I just can't figure out how a person could do what this guy did, first of all. Lack of conscience? Lack of respect for the consequences? Brain damage? I don't know. I also can't believe no fact-checker - all of these magazines he used to write for employ at least one person in this role - ever caught on to him before publication... which makes me wonder, did somebody catch him earlier on and let it slide? Either out of laziness or because he was boosting circulation?

Ow. My stomach. Seriously.

Making matters worse, I can't help worrying, as I begin my own hobo scribe career in earnest, what kind of damage this joker has done to me and others like me before we even really get started.

Now, I don't have anything in my writing career to apologize for. I have never misquoted a source, never made anything up, and can back up absolutely everything that has ever seen print with my name on it. I learned this ethos at My Own Dear Personal Mom's knee and it has served me very, very well. I shall never abandon it.

But... how to show this to editors who do not yet have a relationship with me? Out in the great global marketplace I am making my first steps towards entering, the fact that tough cookies like, say, the Oracle have, historically and without hesitation, trusted me enough to give me interviews they hesitate to grant other writers in this valley, is not all that meaningful. My editors-to-be don't know the guys who trust me any better than they know me. For all they know, I've made them up.

I'll overcome this, of course, should it become an issue. My work stands for itself, and my methods and commitments have not changed. Once the initial "why should I pay you to write about this thang and not some other guy" hurdle is cleared, this will come through to my future editors and they will appreciate what I bring to their papers.

It's just going to be a harder sell, now.

If any of you, my dear readers (especially those of you who tend to nag me on the street when I haven't published here for a few days), ever happen to meet this Glass character, please, please, please, please, please give him a good clout in the snoot for me.

OK, back to the serious stuff. Another important aspect of making it as a hobo scribe: honoring deadlines.

And boy have I got 'em.

SO, WOW

It's rare in my experience that anything one has been anticipating lives up to the expectations of one's hopeful imagination.

It's even more rare when those expectations were exceeded.

Such was my experience in meeting Sam Western, the man to whom the Casper Star-Tribune and a little publishing firm who originally didn't expect to sell more than 1200 copies of Pushed Off the Mountain, Sold Down the River: Wyoming's Search for its Soul both owe tidy little revenue streams if for no other reason than sheer gratitude for, in the CST's case, filling its opinion page newsholes for months, and in Homestead Publications' case, raising that company's profile like nothing else could, maybe ever. Of course he'll never see those revenue streams; part of the suckiness of being a writer. So it is.

I'm amused rather than angered at the defensiveness he's uncovered, the attacks he's drawn with this and his speaking engagements. It's mostly old hat stuff - we all persist, for example, in insisting that it's not okay for a person to diagnose a problem unless he himself also has a cure (a perspective that is more defensible in a small and underpopulated state like ours, in which everyone who cares at all is wearing multiple hats, juggling multiple vital projects, constantly evaluating the impact of our actions, and as such a place in which to ask for change or help is to essentially demand immediate reprioritization and sacrifice from those whose attention is sought. "Hey, stop struggling to keep your business running/raise money to build your building/coach your child's tee ball team while also finishing your associates degree and listen to me and do what I want you to do."), that it's unfair to blame the problems of a state and state of mind on one industry or sector, that this analysis or that is flawed because it doesn't include what *I* think is the most important issue or accomplishment, etc.

And the defenders of the work and the call to attention that Sam has made insist first of all that it's great that he's started this discussion, that it needed to happen, blah blah blah, and even where he's "wrong" he's accomplished much in just bringing these ideas to the forefront of that rare, rare thing, a statewide debate.

Remember that all important sub-title to the work: Wyoming's Search for its Soul. That's key stuff, it really is.

We're in an enviable position in Wyoming, in Saratoga in particular. Yes, we've taken hits, yes we're losing young people, yes, yes, yes, things have looked better, we seem poised to go through another boom and bust and none of that looks enviable.

BUT... we have a chance, here, to do something that not a lot of communities have really gotten to do. Because we have a history of being very, very stubborn, because we have clung to our mythos and our open spaces and our way of life, we have succeeded in ducking progress for a good 50 years. That ain't all bad, folks -- because while progress and the new economy and the economic boom the rest of the country enjoyed recently passed us by, we also got to watch and learn from our neighboring states' mistakes, didn't we? We've watched nasty trends in land development and speculation ruin what most of us have liked about places like the Steamboat Springs area of Colorado, for example. From a slight distance we've seen it happen, seen how it happened, and resolved as a people that it isn't what we want.

We have bad examples all around us from which to learn.

The challenge now is putting the wisdom we've gained into practice.

And that truly is where Sam's work comes in. Agree with him, disagree with him, call him a hero or a schmuck, whatever you please. But please, also accept the invitation he and his followers are extending: to dream.

What is most vital in searching for Wyoming's soul is imagination, the will to dare to envision what we do want and start trying out ways of making it happen, knowing that not all of them are going to work but that the law of averages and the weird will of the gods and the bizarre collective unconscious of humanity pretty much guarantee that some of them will, though maybe not exactly the way we thought they would.

The alternative is the mixture same as before, a culture of complaint and quiet desperation as the world passes us by.

We don't have to be like the rest of this world. But if we want to be our own thang, sooner or later we have to decide what that is and get off our collective asses and made it happen.

One last thought before I sign off today and go spend the rest of Mother's Day with My Own Dear Personal Mom: Sam has been criticized by a lot of you for just what I'm haranguing about today: not having a vision, a prescription (though I think he does and many readers are missing it, perhaps willfully). Others see a vision there and hate it. Hey, that's okay.

The thing people seem to want to forget that no one in the history of history itself has ever completely gotten his own way. Even Caligula in the end ran into Jung's version of god, that which crosses one's willful path.

You all are as free as he is, as I am, to dream and to try to make those dreams come true. And because we don't all dream alike, no one can ever really sweep and trump the will of the rest.

But the ones whose dreams do wind up carrying the rest of us in their currents are the ones who roll up their sleeves, grab the oars, and row, row, and row -- despite what the dead weight passengers in the stern bitch about.

HE'S COMING! HE'S REALLY COMING!

But I've blown it, too. It's been a little over a week since I posted here, and I could have been beating the drums all along. Mea culpa, dear readers, mea culpa.

But it's not me who's the author of this wonder, that being the fact that SAM WESTERN will be in town TOMORROW NIGHT to speak at the Saratoga Inn. So it's not 100% my fault that very few people around the valley seem to be aware that SAM WESTERN will be in town TOMORROW NIGHT to speak at the Saratoga Inn.

Sam Western, longtime LIANT readers may recall, is the pamphleteer behind the most talked-about book about Wyoming, maybe ever, Pushed Off the Mountain, Sold Down the River: Wyoming's Search for Its Soul. He's now making the rounds as a speaker through Wyoming's humanities endowment speaker's bureau, and his next stop is here tomorrow night!

Very longtime LIANT readers are aware of my enthusiasm for this man and his book, and of my own efforts to bring him here to be the speaker for our chamber of commerce banquet in January, efforts that, alas, got the kabosh from the higher-ups.

So it's no suprise that I'm VERY EXCITED that SAM WESTERN will be in town TOMORROW NIGHT to speak at the Saratoga Inn.

But why don't you know about this?

Politics, I guess. Politics and misplaced faith.

Last I heard, this wonderful, wonderful news was all set to appear in our local newspaper and on the chamber's big purty marquee, but it is not, today, Thursday, the day before SAM WESTERN will be in town to speak at the Saratoga Inn.

I'm sure the Soroptimists, who are the brave and wise souls who are bringing my proto-hero to town, are going to want the newspaper editor's head on a plate, but I also know what the editor will say back to the pitchfork and torch crowd: the only way to guarantee that a specific announcement is going to appear in a particular edition of a paper is to buy an ad. Which will only make them madder, but as my deeply experienced coffee buddies constantly counsel me, it is highly unwise to pick a fight with a guy who buys ink by the barrel.

So anyway, I'm doing what I can to help spread the word.

Once again, SAM WESTERN will be in town TOMORROW NIGHT to speak at the Saratoga Inn.

7:30 p.m. Refreshments and stuff. Book signings. I'll be at the front of the line waiting to shake the man's hand.

Woo!

FRIDAY FIVE, AGAIN

Just because I'm stumped for something to write about during this, my lunch break from Retail Heaven doesn't mean it's OK for you, my dear readers, to go another day without hearing from me.

Thank goodness for Jill and the girls over at The Friday Five for breaking the ice in Your Humble Blogger's Humble Head.

1. What was the last TV show you watched?

I watched CSI last night up at my parents' house. It's become a Sherrod family tradition to have a large, satisfying meal and then watch quite possibly the grossest things on TV today - Survivor (gross for its exhibitions of really obnoxious behavior, backstabbing, pettiness and that silly guy Rob still fantasizing about a threesome with those girls) and CSI. That they are also the two most insect-intensive programs ever devised (at least the most so outside, e.g., the Discovery Channel and its ilk) is just a happy bonus. That one of the lead characters on CSI is a forensic entomologist just melts my bug-lovin' heart. Gotta love anything that features an entomologist as a lead.

2. What was the last thing you complained about?

A tough decision I'm facing. I have a dear old friend who is in a worse financial pickle than I am, who wants me to move in with her to share expenses until we both "get back on our feet." My first impulse was to say "sure" because she really is very dear to me... but then I looked at the place with an eye to cramming me and the Collie of Folly (who would be one of four, count them, four dogs in one goofy two-story townhouse) in there with whatever stuff might fit and... no, it looked like kind of a bad idea.

"Kind of" changed to "very" when, unable to sleep last night, I whipped out my Sewer King-inspired handy dandy "Am I Wasting My Time Or Should I Just Go On Con Watch" spreadsheet and ran the numbers. I wouldn't even be saving money. And I'd be giving up my autonomy, my backyard full of ducks, my chalkboard-painted walls...

So, nah.

But my friend is kind of counting on me now. And I'm going to have to tell her I've changed my mind - as soon as I can track her down.

I was just complaining about this to my wacky boss at the dust-gatherer store before heading home for lunch. So yeah, that's the last thing.

3. Who was the last person you complimented and what did you say?

I told the Collie of Folly she was a very good dog when she didn't argue with me about whether or not it was time to "load up" in the front seat of my car.

She counts as a person, right?

4. What was the last thing you threw away?

The plastic wrap around the last piece of my super duper homemade semi-Sicilian pizza that I made for my #1 reader Wednesday night. I threw the wrapping away and then I ate the pizza cold. Damn, I'm a good cook when I bother. Even the leftovers are lovely.

5. What was the last website (besides this one) that you visited?

I was reading a book review at Economist magazine's web page. The review was of an interesting tome examining the political history of Beethoven's Ninth Symphony - how it's been interpreted by everyone from Adolf Hitler (who ordered it played on his birthday often) to Ian Smith, who made it Rhodesia's national anthem. Looks interesting.

WHAT IF THEY GAVE AN INFO SESSION...

...And nobody came?

Well, now I know. Last night marked Rawlins' turn to host a public information session regarding the proposed capital facilities tax and, well, the choir showed up but the pews were empty.

Our good sheriff gave his County Jail Slide and Pony Show, in other words, for a hauntingly empty room at the Jeffrey Center, his audience consisting of, well... the entire membership of the jail planning committee, the mayor of Rawlins, the former mayor of Rawlins, the capital facilities tax campaign coordinator, a deputy sheriff, a county juvenile detention officer, the county treasurer, that amusing man from Elk Mountain who ran for governor, the Oracle, and Your Humble Blogger.

To liven things up, I proposed that the Oracle give the sheriff's talk, the coordinator give the Oracle's talk (on the Saratoga community center, natch), and the sheriff give the coordinator's talk. It could have happened; we've all heard all of these talks enough times to make it quite feasible. Hell, I could probably give the sheriff's talk in my sleep - I've been hearing it for something like three years in more or less its current form, and I've been hearing arguments in favor of a new Carbon County jail over the dinner table at Fort Sherrod since long before I was of voting age, as My Own Dear Personal Dad was the first sheriff who had the guts to say the Yellow Submarine (long the county's affectionate nickname for the current jail, a woefully inadequate and antiquated facility perched like a boil atop the county courthouse with walls painted, in Miss Quote's phrase "daffodil yellow") had to go.

We don't know what to make of this lack of interest, the Oracle and I. We hover between hope and utter disgust. Rumors are in the air that the tax proposal and all the projects planned for it are dooomed, dooooooomed, that Hanna hates our community center project, that the valley hates the overpass for Rawlins, that everybody hates the jail... but we never seem to get a chance to address them head on (hence the persistent belief on the part of certain knucklhead members of the press who shall remain nameless, and a few others, that the Oracle and I are trying to build a duplicate of the $300,000-a-year subsidized day care nightmare known colloquially as the Hanna Rec Center. For the record, we are not. Not even close. We did tour the place, pretty much to establish what we do not want).

What I personally hear most often is individuals approaching me with some version of the following: "Well, Kate, I'm planning to vote yes on the tax, but it sounds like nobody else is" or very seductive words to that effect (well, that and merciless and tireless teasing on the part of the Sewer King about how funny it is that his brother, the Oracle, and I, the two most harrumphingest libertarian types in the whole valley, are campaigning to add an extra penny to the sales tax. A gifted ironist, that Sewer King. Gifted) -- seductive because they suggest that actually most folks are going to vote yes. Ponder that again... everybody who approaches me is saying he or she personally plans to vote yes, but those nameless, faceless, uncounted and possibly merely theoretical "others" oppose it.

If there is one thing I have learned to trust it is my instinct not to trust any blanket statements about what unnamed and unnumbered "others" think. It's too easy to invent these others out of one's own delusions, too easy to project one's own doubts, fears, suspicions, and bad motivations onto these others. I've done it myself, haven't you? "Well, I like that shirt you're wearing, really I do, but 'other people' think you look ridiculous in puce."

So anyway, I'm not going to worry about it. If the tax passes, yay, the jail starts getting built (on top of pilings sunken into that stupid akalai swamp... joyous, by the way, that others, including no less a person than jail committee member Judging Wade is constantly reminded of the bit in "Monty Python and the Holy Grail" when the king regales his son about his castles, built one by one on top of each other as they sank into the swamp... "But the fourth one, the fourth one stands!"). Of course, the jail will get built one way or the other - the other way being, as the Choir indicated last night, an additional $20 in property taxes for each property owner in the county... which wouldn't be all bad, as that way the mineral companies will pay a good share of it.

And the Schmommunity Center will still happen in some fashion, though caveat voter: the ultimate design and contents of the building will more likely be determined by the wishes of the private donors who cough up the bucks, and what they want might not be what you guys want. And the big money that is possibly floating around for the thing isn't really all that interested in recreation as such. Conferences, meetings, performing arts space, yes. Sports? Less so, at the very least.

Speaking of sports and things, yes, I voted yes on the skate park, after putting a few of the darling kiddies on the spot in the council meeting, the ringleader of which is due to report to me this Friday afternoon about how much money they plan to raise through raffles and whatever to help defray the cost, how soon they plan to have it to us, and when they're going to show up to help put the equipment together on the island.

Yeah, I caved, basically. I have a soft spot for kids, too, and I remember what it was like to be a teenager here with nothing to do but hang out in front of the 7-11 at night or go to keggers or drive up and down the highway (cruising in Saratoga: lock the wheels and hit the gas). And probably what the Former Minister of Fun and his cohort did in the 80s is not possible any longer because of liability and other standards - home-built equipment, Superman insists, ain't gonna cut it and the first boo-boo that pisses off the first mom could cost us a bundle in court if that's what we put in.

All I can say is the little twerps had better use it. I'm going to be watching them. And so are my downtown businessmen who keep complaining about skateboarders and property damage. If the kids have any brains at all, by the way, those businessmen will be the first ones they hit up for help.

!Bah. Onto some writing that pays.

BLOGGING FOR DOLLARS?

Well, dear readers, I knew all of that whining about being an unemployed hack for hire of a hobo wannabe writer fending off ridiculous job offers and jacking up your water rates would pay off someday.

Somebody wants to pay me to blog!

Now, before any of you wailing and crying and gnashing your teeth and pouring ashes over your head at the thought of having to pay to read my drivel, rest assured that said drivel will still be free; I shan't be discontinuing LIANT, and as far as I know my Hip New Employer doesn't charge to read stuff on their site, either. No indeed; said HNE, Backwash.com*, simply channels some of its advertising revenue to keeping its contributors in gum and mouthwash, or maybe it's in ramen noodles and Sanka, or maybe it's in Schlitz and cigarette papers, or maybe it's in teabags and carpet fluff.

In other words, I ain't getting rich off of this new gig, but as you know I'm a sucker for anything that nudges up that fame bubble, especially if that anything involves me doing pretty much what I'm doing anyway (Mark Ames' formula for evaluating such prospects – a ratio of fame to work, i.e. how can I squeeze out as much fame from as little work as possible – suits me as well!).

Look for me on the site pretty soon (as soon as I get this column posted to LIANT and a different one posted to Backwash, actually) under the in-your-ribs moniker of "Officially Elected Hobo Scribe."

I don't suppose I'll inflict quite so much municipal/Wyoming politics on the Backwash audience as I do on you (unless you think I should. Should I?) (hell, why should I start using my mindshare responsibly now?), nor so many book reviews, but I can prattle on about national issues and trends as well as anybody else, I guess, so that's probably what I'll do.

Well, that and my incredible collection of stories and nonsense about the Sewer King, the Oracle, Tad the Grocer, Jet Fuel, the Heart Surgeon, the Lady of the Lagoon, Squeaky, Sketch, and the rest of the gang. Nobody can ever get enough of those. Not even the people who know these characters personally.

Onward!

*Backwash, in the persons of the Bewitching Vagabond and the Zenball Wizard, having been the first big bad website out there to take notice of little ol' me and start directing traffic my way about a year or so ago. Once I was even, for reasons that are still unclear to me, one of the site's "Top 40" rates sites for a week in 2002. No accounting for taste. Or something.

BACK TO WORK... SORT OF

I started an extremely part-time job today.

It was fine, really.

I'm back in the wonderful, wacky world of retail, just in time to join a good friend of mine in completely freaking out getting everything ready for the end of mud season, when the tourists come back with their disposable income, unreasonable demands, and terrible taste in tee shirts. She insists that lots of people are going to queue up to buy tank tops depicting several cartoon moose pulling down their cartoon jeans (don't ask) and baring their cartoon butts (really: don't ask) at the viewer. I'm willing to stipulate that she is right, though I still insist that I'd really rather not meet those kind of people...
Still and all, I do need ink for my printer and electricity to run it and stuff.

At least the interaction is brief.

And it's going to be fine and dandy and mostly harmless. Our staff meetings include margaritas, and I will have zero responsibility, which is glorious, since I have plenty of that in my other other life.

Nice contrast there, today. At 4:30 p.m. I stopped being Kate Sherrod, retail peon and became Kate Sherrod, Municipal Budget Bee-hatch. Yup, that glorious day came at last: our "goal setting" workshop for the FY 2004 budget for the Town of Saratoga.

We're still in the process of figuring out the actual size of the pie we're going to get to carve over the next two months of workshops, meetings, strategy sessions, etc., so we didn't talk dollar figures, natch. Really, we didn't talk about much at all, except for the upcoming capital facilities tax election (May 6 - for god's sake, go vote, people! And please, vote yes! There's a county jail, a water plant for Dixon, a decent town shop for Hanna, a sewer lift station for Riverside, water line replacement in Encampment, and of course the community center in Saratoga at stake! And this is the most equitable way to pay for all of these facilities... and the county jail, which, you may remember, My Own Dear Personal Dad fought to construct more than TEN YEARS AGO when it would only have cost five or six million dollars is now looking more like 15 million, and do you think it's going to get cheaper if we don't lock in a project now?) and the community center, and the fact that our favorite local newspaper hasn't caught on yet that its favorite police chief has resigned, though the paper up in Rawlins has.

Ah, me.

But I digress, as usual.

Now you'll all have to excuse me. The aforementioned ODPF is hungry, and MODPM is off working an even more part-time job at the branch library, and so it falls to me to feed the boy. Into the kitchen wid' me!

LIBRARY MUSINGS

Just now I finished my latest library book – since I became a full-time hobo, I'm able to catch our little branch library when it's open, and of course I have ample time for reading – and happened to look at the date due slip on the front page.

The library acquired this book (Frank Herbert's God Emperor of Dune for those of you who care) in June of 1982, when it was first published and I was just 12 years old. I first checked it out in January of 1986, when I was 16. During that span of four years, only five other people read this book.

Only six others have read it since me.

With a little effort, I bet I could tell you who those eleven people are. There aren't that many science fiction fans around here to begin with, and few of those use our public library.

Regardless of whether I know who they were, I feel connected to them as I hold the book which they held, too. I feel their curiosities as I proceed through the story. I wonder what they thought of the subtle sexiness of Leto-the-almost-worm, the army of women he formed around him, the worry about a made-up planet's ecology that permeates every page.

I have a queer urge to try to track them all down and ask them. I want to see what else joins us besides common possession of this book. What other books bind us? What else do we share?

Who all of us is still trying to make a go at living here?

I look at the list of library card numbers and wonder, am I the last? Are any of those people still here? Will someone read this book after me, and who will that be?

What's the likelihood that this book will now just spend the rest of eternity gathering dust on that high shelf in the Saratoga Branch Library, until it all returns to dust?

How much of this physical volume's fate is tied to the likelihood that the Sci Fi Channel will continue its efforts to transfer Herbert's works to the small screen. We've had a good mini-series version of the original Dune novel and an interesting adaptation of Dune Messiah/Children of Dune mooshed into another show. Is a movie of God Empereror of Dune now in the works, and if so, how strange will James Macavoy, who played Leto in the recent mini-series, look with his face and arms poking out of a CGI worm suit?

Will that make more people want to read God Emperor? Will that send some curious 16-year-old to the Saratoga Branch Library to check it out, or just funnel him over to Amazon et al to buy a cheap paperback copy of his very own?

Not that even shitty paperback editions of new books are very cheap anymore. I hate to sound like a codger (OK, I'm lying: I actually pretty much get off on sounding like a codger, on out-codgering my coffee buddies. I know it's weird, but I also know that when I actually am a codger I will be well practiced at it, good at it, not shocked or ashamed or afraid of it. I will age much more gracefully than all of you dingalings who cling foolishly to the vanities of youth, you silly young whippersnappers, you!), but the sticker shock of seeing books that I could have afforded simply by skipping my coffee group once or twice a week now exceeding my former hourly wage by a bit is profound.

When I was a teenager, I bought the original three Dune books for something like $3 apiece. The Elric books (which I've also since checked out of the public library – I seem to be on a weird book-nostalgia trip these days, turning ever more often to the stuff I read in high school to see if it still gives me a thrill. It does, but it's a different thrill from what I felt then, but that's probably the subject for another blog) were $2.95 apiece when I was a teenager, and I snapped up all six of them in the course of a speech season's wanderings through the malls in Cheyenne, Casper, Rock Springs, then moved on to Moorcock's other slim volumes about Corum, Erekose, Jerry Cornelius, devouring like Agak and his sister Gagak until the supply was exhausted.

Of course, I can remember when candy bars were 26¢ with tax, too. And remember my cranky old grandfather grousing about how you used to get more chocolate for a nickel back in his day. My current ramblings are about as productive. I'm digressing, as I will with no editor to sit on me and make me stick to my subject, which was what again?

Oh yeah, the weird continuity of library books, and the likelihood that anyone else is going to borrow the one I just returned. Which is small; the population has changed rather dramatically since the first time I checked out God Emperor of Dune and the library's collection reflects this; recent acquisitions (narcissist that I am, I dub anything acquired after I left Saratoga in 1988 as "recent") tend more toward what I regard as true Old Fart Literature: endless hack mystery novels and westerns, with a smattering of "book club" books like Ahab's Wife, plus a complete selection of L. Ron Hubbard's awful Battlefield Earth novels (Beggars can't be choosers; someone bequeathed every last Scientoscatological one of these to the Read and Return section. I wonder if anyone has ever taken them out; unlike the rest of R&R, these still sit in the bottom of the spinner rack in perfect order, showing none of the wear and tear that paperbacks display almost immediately after first being opened. Definitely one-reader depredation on those suckers) no saner person would touch.

So, OK, this is the part where certain among my readership feel anew the urge to urge me to get a life already. I've just devoted something like 1000 words to my having checked out a library book that only a few other people have checked out. What next, a thorough examination of the dust motes slowly accumulating on my nicknack shelf? A discourse on the contents of my refrigerator? A song-by-song criticism of all of the tunes I ripped off during Napster's heyday?

Hey, you never know. Anything to dissolve that writer's block, you know?

Cuz you know, I aspire to being one or two of those dusty, infrequently consulted hardcovers on the shelves there someday myself.