Pet Cobra

A Revelation That Came To Me While Stuck In L.A. Rush Hour Traffic

I was behind a Ford truck that was being driven by a virgin. I know this because the truck displayed the following stickers: "JEDI ACADEMY GRADUATE", a picture of a Clone Trooper helmet, a picture of a Stormtrooper helmet, a picture of a Darth Vader helmet, and one that said "MAY THE FORCE BE WITH YOU...ALWAYS". There was also a license plate frame that read "The Force is strong in this one". Oh, and the license plate itself read "DRTHRON". (Darth Ron!)

Darth Ron would no doubt find my lack of faith disturbing. 

As I'm wont to do while driving, I drifted off into a meditative, fugue-like state. I thought of our current national discord, and how we can come together as a people. Then it came to me. Perhaps Islam got it right. Perhaps there's something to the idea of collectively looking towards Mecca and praying, five times a day, every day. In those moments, people around the world unite and in a sense become one in mind, heart, and soul. As Americans, we scoff at the idea of understanding those that our leaders claim are out to destroy us. But there must be something to be learned from this. Billions of people, scattered across the globe, living disparate lives - Canada, England, Indonesia, and yes, even here in the U.S. - and yet in a sense as a people they're never truly apart. There must be some comfort, some strength, in knowing that as you pray, at that exact moment, thousands are doing the exact same thing. We could use something like that here. So this: once a day, all of us will stop whatever it we're doing. We'll gather in conference rooms or town squares or strip mall food courts or football stadium parking lots, anywhere where speakers and soundsystems can be found. And at a given time, synchronized so that all Americans are doing this as one, a song will play. That song will be Boston's "Foreplay/Long Time" (which is even cooler in spaaaaaaaaace) and together we shall all rock out to it and play air guitar en masse, millions of Americans fret-boarding like Tom Scholz in glorious united...er, unison, because if there are two things that Americans know how to do, it's play air guitar, and go fly fishing, but who really gives a shit about fly fishing?

Today is Tax Day! Let's All Celebrate!

I know that a few of you are not happy that it's Tax Day, and that some of you are out teabagging, and although I don't necessarily agree with the way that you're going about protesting our country's taxation process - surely there's better ways to do this than licking each other's nutsacks en masse, in public? - this is a democracy and the brave volunteer soldiers who ate their own feet while freezing to death at Valley Forge fought and died so that every American would have the right to tongue-lash each other's scrotums in front of small crowds of curious onlookers and the occasional TV camera. 

Regarding taxes, we should pay them, because I don't know about you, but having things like "roads" and "firemen" and "a military"  all seem to be pretty necessary. The government does fuck things up from time to time, and by "time to time" I mean "the past 8 years", but part of the reason that we're not like, say, Somalia or Afghanistan is that despite what most people seem to believe, the government generally does a decent job with spending our money. This is why we have "mayors" instead of "warlords", why drug cartels aren't beheading our cops on a twice-a-week basis, and why we have cable TV. For those of you who think that the private sector can always do better than the public, remember what happened in Detroit, when OCP ran the police department? Yes, they made Frank Murphy better, but they also built that piece of shit ED 209. What good is an Enforcement Droid that can't go down a flight of stairs? I rest my case. 

Three Words for A Birthday

I'm a big fan of the idea of Economy of Prose; using as few words as possible, painting a picture in fine lines rather than swaths of color, leaving the reader to imagine what goes on on those spaces between those lines, is how I choose to do business. Today is Beth's birthday. What I can say about her could fill volumes. But instead: three words.

I'm so lucky.

"Thanks Easter Bunny!" "Bawk bawk!"

Validation

(WARNING: the following post is about writing and blogging and my writing and my blogging and I agree, there's nothing more boring and self-serving than a blogger who blogs about his/her blogging. So if you don't want to continue reading, believe me, I understand. There will be some whinging. Also, there's going to be some stuff about the blogosphere in general. Rest assured that if you're someone I've conversed with, DM'ed, emailed, whose work I've expressed admiration for and supported, or whose blog I've commented on, I'm most likely not referring to you. Also, rest assured that PetCobra's normal slate of obscure references involving 1970's sci-fi movies, bizarre ruminations about various body parts, and posts about my fear of gibbons will resume next week.)

Irritalation. That is a word - well, it is now - and it describes my state of mind this week. 

I didn't like my day job. That's no secret. But I liked that I was good at it, and I liked that I always tried to be good at it. And I liked that I always tried to go about the finding and recruiting of candidates in a way that was different...more me, less of what everyone else tried to do or be. 

Now I have a new day job, and I like it very much, thanks. And despite my penchant for goofy bullshit, I am dead fucking serious about writing. Writing. There's something almost sacred about it to me. No, not almost. Writing to me is bleeding all over the screen and the page. I want you to feel what I write in your guts; a stomach punch, a stitch in your side. I want you to look at what I do and see something unique, different. Me. I want to be able to ask that question that every writer should be able to ask his readers and his fellow writers: can you do what I do? And I want that answer to always be no. I approach writing a post like Tiger Woods approaches the 12th hole at Torrey Pines South. It's going to take all I've got, and I'm going to give it all I've got. 

And of course, when it comes to blogging, not everyone takes my admittedly Ahab-ish, demented approach, chasing that elusive perfect post 'round Perdition's flames before giving it up. And that's fine; the world needs James North Pattersons too - or, if we're talking about the parenting blogosphere, well, everybody loves Raymond, and there's a shitload of Raymonds out there. Something I posted on Facebook: "I'd probably be more successful if I wrote sitcom-ish, mediocre tripe." And yes, it's disheartening to see some get book deals and movie deals, when you know that you absolutely can do what they do. But you don't. Because while you can, something within you won't allow it.

Writing's a business. I get that. I know what sells. And what sells is generally safe and mostly harmless. I'm working on some stuff that will help pay the bills, stuff that will be challenging simply because I can't take Me out of the equation. (I won't have to; you'll get Me, but a less, er, PetCobra-ish version.)

That's the "irrita-" part.

The "-lation": all of a sudden, the floodgates opened up at DadCentric. Thousands and thousands of hits, new readers, people getting a chance to read a bunch of like-minded guys who think like me, who aren't satisfied with the same old stuff. I was told years ago by one of my English profs that great writing finds an audience. And many of them won't come back; they'll decide it's not for them, and move on to the next blog. But many of them will. And while I know this - that the only person you should really ever write for is the one you see in the mirror...still.

At The Bottom of The Sea

The wind came up and blew out everything. It pushed the waves down and shoved the clouds landward. The dolphins seemed to be having a good time of it; I watched them from the car, smelling sea salt and surf wax, listening to this song.

Wordless Wednesday: For Surfers, This is Worth A Thousand Words

(Got this from fellow hater Pipes_Surf.)

EARTHQUAKE!

Behold the Power of The Blog: about a minute ago, BOOM BOOM BOOM, the house shook three times, and the dog started barking frantically. (Note to Dog: your kind is supposed to be able to sense earthquakes before they happen. I thought that you were strange because you don't like Nacho Cheese Doritos but you do like peas. You need to get with the program, Dog.)

Before the quake, I was busy doing the business of blogging: emailing my new ad provider, updating the Facebook, and then BOOM BOOM BOOM. In earthquake-speak, there are Rollers (ground rolls) and Shakers (ground shakes or sometimes even jumps). This was a Boomer. It sound like an artillery strike, or maybe the passage in Cormac McCarthy's The Road, in which he describes the sound that the end of the world makes. A string of low booms on the horizon, something like that.

Earthquakes freak the shit out of people who don't live in California. This makes me laugh. Floods, cantaloupe-sized hail, hurricanes, tornados. We don't have those. They have 'em all the time. To us the rest of the country is like the post-nuclear America depicted in the classic film Damnation Alley. I'll bet they have giant scorpions and man-eating cockroaches too, only they don't tell outsiders about them, because that would be the last straw, we'd build a giant wall around California, and the mutants and the apocalypse-weather would be sealed out forever. And then that wall would eventually be converted into a giant dome. And then we'd all get crystals embedded in our palms and when we turned 30, the crystals would go black and then we'd be vaporized in a colorful ceremony, our final breathing moments spent floating above the crowds, awash in their applause, the death rays burning through our hearts. 

Anyway, it wasn't a bad earthquake. I'm fine. Thanks for asking.

(UPDATE: one of my Tweeple has informed me that it was not, in fact, an earthquake; it was the Marines at Camp Pendleton blowing shit up. I apologize for any mass hysteria that I may have caused; to the good people at Best Buy, that was me looting your store, and I will return the Blu-Ray players and the washing machine as soon as possible.)

Tracking

There was one day this past week where I actually felt well enough to get out of the house, so what I did was, I went surfing. The freedom I have, now that I'm not longer chained to a desk, is gibber-inducing; I could go on and on about how cool it is (it is), I could go on and on about making up for lost time with my family but that is actually painful. My daughter is 17 months old and by my calculations, based on time at work and the time I got to see her in the morning and just before she went to sleep...that time is measured in days, hours really, and that makes my heart hurt. I have to reacquaint myself with my child. (Still, I will not join the so-called Stay At Home/Work At Home Dad Revolution - it's the bullshit whining of upper middle classers who due to a combination of skills, education, and most of all luck get to stay at home with their kids; most dads will always have to go to a job, and miss large chunks of their children's lives, and that I don't is humbling.) 

Anyway. I had a day, a lull in sickness (for the next day the migraine hit and stayed for two days, an experience that culminated in a visit to my doc, who told me to take a shitload of Aleve every day and if that didn't help, it's CAT scan time, and that caused a small voice deep down inside to start screaming, because it's a CAT scan, and those reveal the secret depredations of the brain, monstrous cell formations that eat at your memory and steal your thoughts, your words, maybe your life) and so I threw the bonzer into the Xterra and up the coast I went. I knew where I was going, Undisclosed Location; there would be no crowds, and I could attempt to shake off the rust of shorebound weeks and hope that the muscle memory hadn't been afflicted with that particularly virulent form of Alzheimer's, the one you get when you don't surf in what might as well be an eon. 

I pulled up next to The Van. It was out of coastal legend, a faded brown Ford thing built in the 70's, plastered with stickers - No Bad Days, Bing Surfboards, Sex Wax - and stuffed to the roof with boxes of crackers, cans of soup, cartons of oil and cigarettes, laundry in cracked yellowing baskets. It was a home. The residents were wandering around the parking lot, looking for some friendly spare change, or maybe just acknowledgment that things are tough all over, and there but for the grace of God. 

He approached me while I was tugging on the wetsuit - which still fit, and I had my doubts after a few weeks of sloth. "Whadya get first? The board or the truck?" He smelled stale, wore a stained Point Loma Sportfishing t-shirt, and was missing a leg. The board or the truck...at first I didn't get the question, but realized: the colors, they match, smurf blue SUV, smurf blue surfboard. "Oh - the truck. Got a deal on it. Because of the color. No one wanted to buy it," I replied. He nodded. "Well, it's boss. And look at your board! FIVE skegs! That thing's gotta have some bite, I reckon. Bet it really holds a turn." There was excitement in his voice, and it made me both happy and sad. "Yeah, I hope so," I said. "It's only the second time I've taken it out." He grinned. "You picked a good day! Some small waves, but it sure is purty out." I finished getting suited up, scooped the board under my arm and turned toward the beach. "Take care, bro," I called back over my shoulder. 

The water was bracing. I paddled out, wheezing and coughing - that bronchitis wasn't dying easy. I didn't have long to wait - enough time to think about the van guy, and how funny it was that he used the word "skegs", and that leg, and how he lost it, and how much else he lost with it - and then there was a right, maybe waist high. I turned and stroked into it - not thinking, just doing - and the board was suddenly on rails, tracking a line down what little face there was. I was up and crouched and I had just a few brief seconds of ride before the wave deflated back into mere ocean. But there was enough time for a bottom turn, and sure enough, that board really held it.