The Rusted Musket

Last night Liz and I pondered aloud where we would put a baby Kelm if we ever had one (I think we talked about where we would put one because it’s the least intense “lets have babies” thing you can honestly talk about).

So I said the cradle would go anywhere our cozy apartment would allow because Kelm babies won’t care where they sleep as long as they sleep. But then I got really excited about the bed potential for the toddler years because then I could make the toddler Kelm a sweet bed underneath my huge computer table! It would be outfitted with LED tube lighting (like the kind I have under my pedalbaord) and I’d also let the boy or girl draw cave drawings on the underside (cave drawings due to skill level, not preference).

After I got done explaining the Toddler Kelm’s sleeping arrangements Liz said she wanted to sleep there too, and I don’t blame her…

Image Credit: Haruhara-sensei @ deviantart.com

I was subbing middle school English, watching an Anne Frank documentary, when I noticed something strange and peculiar; namely, the little Nazi in us all.

Early in the documentary, before the students turned their brains on, the narrator discussed Nazi technique used to paint Jews as inferior. While this narration went on the documentary showed footage of ugly, mentally estranged, weird looking folks.

The students, who weren’t paying any attention to the narration, saw only those images divorced from historical context and instantly laughed at them.

I hit PAUSE on the remote and spoke; “Interesting how most of you laughed and giggled at this footage. You do understand your response was exactly the type of response the Nazi’s were hoping to get from this here propaganda!?!” Silence in the classroom…

In thinking this through I’ll be honest, putting others down seems hardwired, not only in Nazi’s and middle schoolers, but you and I. In thinking this through there also seems to be another deeper hardwire, of some forgotten but deeply familiar home. A place of peace and rest with a photograph on the wall of family we don’t recognize but know is our own, and to which we owe a terrible loyalty…

As I arose from an honest slumber darling wifey asked me how it felt to be thirty two years full!? The first thing in my mind, the first words of the day;

“I have a lot to do and even less time to do it…”

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“It is vanity to wish for long life and to care little about a well-spent life.”

- Thomas a’ Kempis

The other day I passed a young man sadly walking down a semi busy thoroughfare.

He looked so forlorn

He was wearing a t-shirt with scorpion stinger encapsulated within a red triangle looking thing (+1 to the peoples who know the t-shirt origin)

I thought to myself that this young man must be sad because he’s walking to his destination, not driving; because driving, as you know, is normal. I then thought to myself how bizarre it was that I felt driving was the normal method of humanoid travel rather than us bipeds using our legs…

Perspective – Perspective

Yesterday my friend Dan gave me a Gears 3 Beta invite code, we united our powers later that night.

I got “double buried” (a term I invented to describe death by double barrel sawed off shotgun) and curb stomped a lot and somewhere in between these events Dan started calling me something altogether different; instead of “Kenuchfleck,” my normal handle, he started calling me “Ken-flo.”

It made my noobishness not seem so bad, the new nickname that is, especially when I decided to use the OP’d double barrel myself…

Update: Even with the double barrel I still stink…

The Highlander was full, completely fat with gear, man children, and accoutrement. We actually covered the last thirty miles with our weekend food stuffed under our boots and piled on our laps. The journey had been long but not arduous, time flies when good men ride shotgun.

Base Camp Wilson has this magical introduction, charming to the Nth degree, like my wife wearing nice things just for the heck of it. The final three hundred yards are flanked with mature trees going up a lung busting hill that pauses to applaud the lake giving gaze below. You descend, it’s almost reckless, then suddenly, after a hard left, something magnificent peels into view.

We’re going to be here for the next couple days, basically doing the kinds of things boys love doing, like exercising 2nd Amendment rights, lighting fires, fishing, going over zombie apocalypse scenarios, and throwing tactical tomahawks. (We even have an ultra secret codename for the weekend!)

There’s something about the northern woods that produces epic shots and colorful memories, such as the Holiday Lodge and the Red Squirrel, or the Christian Band and Avenge Me. Yes, the long weekend is replete with bulls-eyed bottle caps, burnt checks, and Saturday night Cleanathons.

A  toast then to this years great adventure, to those in attendance, and those in spirit, and to all travels in-between now and next time…

Image Credit: Josh Wilson

- The Summer Class – (though I’ve pictured a school in the spring)

Here we have an opportunity (I don’t even know if it’s fair to call it a class) to slam you through a semesters worth of learning in 4 weeks. It’s an educational blitz so fast you hardly need a change of clothes. And the final? The penultimate of short term memory regurgitation.

Let us stop and think for a second.

If you’re regurgitating and forgetting as soon as you’ve passed a test, what the heck was the purpose of taking the test or the class in the first place? Credits you say. No, try again. Cash you say. Why yes, yes, you got it! The university also trots around this thing called credit requirements, which is their way of politely saying Cash.

Tell me true, is this appropriate regurgitation or inappropriate cash grabbing? I suppose you could say all of college, all of life, is regurgitation in one form or another, but the summer class seems to me like the most blatant unadulterated pinnacle of cash grabbed regurgitated learning.

A reminder to all the writers out there:

Thoughts are things that run away, like little boys and butterflies. One slipped from my mental grasp the other day, it was a pretty good thought. Something small and witty, that could have launched a thousand ships. I was driving home and said inside my head, “I’ll commit it to paper tomorrow.” So, here I am, two days later and I can’t resurrect it from my celebral sludge.

Defend those defenseless thoughts, preserve their brilliance, put them in the book…

Image Credit: finomaxpictures

I just read this awesome quote from President Reagan:

“We must reject the idea that every time a law’s broken, society is guilty rather than the lawbreaker. It is time to restore the American precept that each individual is accountable for his actions.”

When there is a shooting, instead of putting all the blame on the criminal shooter, we instead blame the failure of our laws or our society not the person who broke those laws. Isn’t that a oxymoron? The shooter broke the law, how would more laws have stopped him? It is not society’s fault that he went out and shot people, it is his fault. Stricter gun laws won’t stop him from getting a gun. He can steal one (from police, legal gun owners, the military, the FBI) or buy one illegally (ala blackmarket).

The Arizona shooting is tragic, but it wasn’t a failure of society or our laws. It was solely the fault of the shooter.

Once upon a time I led Liz on a scavenger hunt that, among many things, ended with a BMX bike and a marriage proposal. Fast forward many happy married years later. There’s an arrow leaning against the wall in our bedroom, it’s a symbolic arrow (it was part of the scavenger hunt), but the arrow itself isn’t cool looking, it has yellow and red fins, which is why it waits in a forgotten corner of our bedroom.

The other day we had children over (not our own, we don’t own any children) and of course they found the Symbolic Arrow. As responsible adults living in a not so responsible non-kid proof apartment we reclaimed this potential weapon of mass destruction before any eyes had been poked and leather made swiss. At some point during the reclamation, or its aftermath, I found myself holding the Symbolic Arrow and immediately lapsed into some sort of nostalgic trance which took the form of a two pathed dialog tree!

Dialog Branch One: When I held the arrow, it reminded me how Liz had hit the bulls eye of my heart.

Dialog Branch Two: When I held the arrow, it reminded me how much I wanted to get a bow and some arrows.

Image Credit: Deviantart.com – DreamerSeven