The Lady Rose and Her Attendants

This is the continuing saga of our visit with Big Pat's dog Rose while he cavorts in Brazil, a big man in a small thong on a bright white beach. Rose (like the kids) is all right. She sleeps a great deal and eats quickly. Pat has Rose on a regimen: She eats at 8 a.m., noon and 5 p.m. She is to be given *slightly less* than one scoop of dry dog food moistened for exactly 20 minutes.

She is to be given no treats and no table scraps, though any tidbit that falls to the floor is fair game for her, assuming we are not inordinately sloppy. She gets five walks a day for the purpose of elimination, though we take her out more often than that because we are both afflicted with "weak bladder," so we empathize.

This visit isn't going to turn us into dog people, but we do appreciate Rose's individual appeal. She is a gallant little thing, given the fact she has epilepsy, and occasionally gets the quivers, and has some back problems, so she can "hardly wiggle" (as E's mom use to say at the end of a hard day).

Rose in a nutshell: quivering but not wiggling, if you want to get technical.

I don't know why this is, but when I take her out in the yard -- she likes being on her leash; it seems to give her security -- we do what needs to be done with dispatch. She sniffs, she eliminates, she totters back toward the house.

But when E. takes her out, Rose is far more adventurous, leading E. down the walk toward the neighbors where The Madness That is Torri the Neighbor's Jack Russell Terrier jitters and yips behind their gate.

E. says it is because E. is easily dominated, but I say it's a simple case

Cover of Thelma & Louise

of Hot Girls Together, just another chapter of Thelma and Louise.

We Have a Visitor!

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Patrick is off to Brazil, and we are entertaining Rose while he is gone.

She's a very quiet dog. She needs to piddle five times a day, an activity she does not like to undertake off-lease, which is interesting. Apparently, she likes the security of limits, which may (or may not) be analogous to child raising.

Not having any -- dogs or children -- we are theoretical rather than practical. Because she is very old (and very short; she is a dachshund), we are not supposed to let her sleep on the bed with us because she might fall off. That's our great fear: Rose expires through fate or illness while Patrick is gone.

I'm not sure any friendship could survive that because there would always be suspicion.

Well, possibly not in Patrick's case. He's a pretty good Buddhist. Anyway, we are scrutinizing Rose closely. Yes there she is breathing. I'm looking straight at her. And she just quivered. Unless it goes on too long, that's a good thing I'm pretty sure.

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Biking with E. Third Time Out

Return of the Biker

I Fall Down, Go to the Emergency Room

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Big Pat Daugherty and I bike Thursday mornings. One week last year it was raining just a little, and I did not show up. Of course, Pat biked on, probably twice as fast and much of the time reared up on a single wheel.

I concluded I had done a timid thing. At the REI I bought a rain jacket and rain pants as if courage was all a matter of being sufficiently garish. I think the prediction this Thursday a.m. was 90 percent chance of precipitation, but it was only spitting rain when Pat and I rendezvoused at the Albany Bulb. Gradually, the rain increased in intensity, but Pat proceeded at a stately pace -- and my rain gear was working wonderfully well -- so perhaps I was complacent about an hour into the ride when I decided to move from beside Pat (I was chattering away) to behind him as we approached a curve.

I touched his rear wheel with my front wheel, jerked the handlebars to the left and went sprawling. It would seem -- and you must trust me on this for the photograph of the bruises is not suitable for family entertainment -- that I came off the seat and down on the bike frame before the bike tipped and dumped me.

I was very rude to myself, if you follow me.

I was mostly concerned about tearing a hole in my wonderful orange raincoat. I felt a little ... compromised, but I got back on the bike, and we finished up, and I hurried home so I could rush over to USF to greet our new transfer students.

I fell about 11 a.m. Around 2 p.m. I suddenly felt quite dizzy as I sat in my office. I walked down the hall to get a drink of water and fainted, absolutely terrifying several students who were nodding respectfully in my direction at the moment of collapse. They hauled me up (it took four of them) and kept an eye on me as I returned to my office.

About this time E. called. I told her about the fall, though I did not tell her about my fainting.

Which was stupid. And then I drove home.

Which was stupid.

Meanwhile, E. had called Kaiser and made an appointment for me at six o'clock at the Minor Injury Clinic in Hayward since -- not knowing about the fainting -- she assumed we might sit for hours in the Oakland emergency room.

I was quite proud that I was not embarrassed when the Physician's Assistant (female) examined my wounded man parts. They took an x-ray of my pelvic area. And I told them about fainting three hours after the accident.

It was then that I learned that fainting is apparently a Get Out of Jail Free card (in the sense of being a Get into the Emergency Room Fast card). I thought it was self evident that getting whacked in the testicles might light a fuse of time-delayed pain and somatic distress that would produce a fainting fit in the best of us.

Of which I do not claim to be.

Anyway, I was poked a bit and prodded a bit and deprived of several vials of blood as the docs explored the possibility of concussion, heart attack, pleurisy, walking pneumonia up to an including out of body experience. Around midnight they let me go, saying that my name had been turned in, and I wasn't cleared to drive until my regular doc takes a look at me sometime next week.

Friday morning I woke up *in pain* my friend -- barely able to walk, had no interest in walking, developed an aversion to the word. As I said, I had quite a nice bruise, which my wife has documented. (With the instructions, "Put your hand there. For modesty.")

I feel much better today, though when I sat down on a hard chair about a half hour ago....

The point is that riding in the rain didn't cause the accident. It was a diminution of caution caused by our slowing down because we were riding in the rain that caused the accident.

Or, as my wife says, parse it how you will, you don't have to be a CSI spinoff to diagnose yet another tragic case of testosterone poisoning.

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When Somewhat Bad is Pretty Good: We Go to the Orson Welles Movie

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Two things: E., BPD and I went to see "Me and Orson Welles" at the Shattuck Cinemas last night.

The nominal star was someone named Zac Efron, who played the male ingenue. I knew he was some kind of teen star but had absolutely no idea why. Anyway, he's plays a kid who bluffs his way into a small role in Welles' 1937 production of Julius Caesar. Without spoiling the plot for you, let me just say that if you conclude that the kid actor is not a very good actor, the plot makes more sense and the resolution is more emotionally satisfying.

However, it seemed to me that Zac Efron is not a very good actor, which is not the same as a good actor playing "bad." But maybe a good actor playing "bad" is too subtle by half and can spoil the fantasy, particularly if the good/bad actor is familiar. Hey, we know you are a good actor! And thus we fail to accept the fiction as it is presented.

Of course, any way this played out was going to be dissonant, I guess, though maybe I was just working too hard. During the movie -- which I enjoyed and recommend -- I kept wondering just where Efron was trying to pitch his performance: Was he trying (and failing) to suggest that the kid was actually a pretty good actor, which would have made the ending rather sad? Or was ...?

I guess the short answer is where is a young Richard Dreyfuss when you need him? The great thing about Richard Dreyfuss is that he always both repulses and attracts, in roles and in person.

E. had no problem with Efron. She "read" his character as pleasant, open-hearted, likeable and -- in the acting scenes -- unformed, good enough in context because in Julius Caesar he has a very small part. In other words, he was just right, not all that interesting but fine in context because the nonstop hugeness of Orson Welles would probably have worn us out.

We all agreed that the guy who played Orson Welles -- Christian McKay? That's what the credits said -- was spectacular, capturing the inner Welles and well beyond imitation, BPD said.

Then we went to the bar at the Shattuck Hotel and had a drink. I can't honestly recommend the bar at the Shattuck hotel because E. wanted a grasshopper, which the bartender did not have the goods to make. We asked him what else he might suggest -- girl drink! girl drink! I kept saying -- and there was a long silence, as if he was stupefied by the question.

I mean, the silence did not end, not until I suggested a glass of port. (I should have thought Cosmo. My bad.)

Either the bartender was a great actor, playing with us as a cruel youth might do to tottering elders, or genuinely didn't have a clue.

The Day After: Rereading this post the day after -- and I do, marveling at the greatness that was Robertson Yesterday -- I realize that I omitted one other possibility for my judgment of Efron relative effectiveness. It could simply be miscasting. Everyone else in the cast has a Thirties New York face -- big features, often eccentric, even Claire Danes who really sometimes does look like a handsome man in drag. But Efron has smooth small pretty boy features. He just doesn't look like a citizen in this particular movie.

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Walking the Labyrinth

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Tonight E. and I accompanied Big Pat Daugherty to "labyrinth Friday" at Grace Cathedral in San Francisco to listen to Karma Moffet play his 24 Tibetan singing bowls, his Tibetan longhorns, handbells, Tingsha Cymbals, conch drums and bone horn trumpet while we walked the labyrinth.

The music was variety in monotony, a pattern of long, low weirdly beautiful harmonic droning, and nothing about it I have the slightest qualification to be able to adequately describe. I will attest to my deep enjoyment of it, shrug and shut up.

The labyrinth is a design on the floor at the base of the cathedral's nave. It's a circle 40 or 50 feet wide containing a passage perhaps a foot wide that bends back on itself again and again and again until it arrives at the center of the design. At that point, it is customary for walkers to turn around and wind back out, negotiating your way past those who are still winding in.

After the music begins, people line up and are released onto the floor by a starter, as the starter might at a Tour de France time trial or a Winter Olympics slalom. As an experienced Buddhist meditation walker, Big Pat was somewhat critical of those walkers who "walked" -- if you get the drift of my quotation marks. They styled, as it were, somewhat self-conscious -- somewhat to very, it seemed.

But E. was indulgent. She said it looked as if people were finding what they needed to find, and if their third eye had drifted off 10 or 15 feet and was staring back in admiration, E. found pleasure in their self-satisfaction.

It's all metaphor, of course -- the idiosyncratic pace, the silence, the contemplation even as you focus on pace and the avoidance of collisions, the act of gracefully sliding by the slow walkers, and, of course, the slow walkers themselves, content to create a bottleneck for those behind them, leaving the decision of what to do in your hands (or feet).

E. and I waited a while to hit the floor, as we would at a dance, perhaps feeling a bit like spiritual wallflowers. But after 45 minutes or so I decided to get out there and get some before it was all gone -- the line certainly wasn't getting any shorter. And then we stood patiently in that line, as one might for a thrill ride at an amusement park, the thrill here being a willingness to dispense with thrills and go ten rounds (hah!) with introspection.

I quickly found my metaphor: balance. I had a very hard time keeping my balance as I walked because E. and I quickly found ourselves bogged down behind a pause-and-stare type, and so we had to pause and stay paused. I was not vexed by this. It was what it was, and, because I was not able to move continuously, the challenge not to totter was great.

I suppose I became what might appear a bit mannered, bending at the knee, making slow and elaborate movements with my arms, just trying to stay steady. Writing this I realize I may have looked quite foolish, but I was aware only of myself and of my concentration. I didn't feel foolish, and I didn't feel interesting. I felt involved. I'm not saying I didn't look foolish to myself, that I escaped self-consciousness -- I'm saying I was involved, not evolved. I say only that I did not assume others were looking or that their judgment mattered if they were.

Then we walked down to North Beach and had an Italian meal at an out-of-the-way restaurant and talked and drank and laughed. It was all the same journey.

Editor's Note: This contemporary business of walking medieval mazes is pretty interesting. If you're interested, I assume you'll Google it, as I did.

Editor's Note to Editor's Note: The blogshark keeps linking or it dies. Here's a very nice description of the Meaning of Labyrinth.

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At the Football Game with Pat, Brad and Peter: We Love Our Redwoods (Who Should Really Be Named the Mute Inglorious Miltons)

which is a reference to Elegy Written in a Country Churchyard for those of you playing at home

Rose is Going to be a "Wild One"

Pat is shopping around for one of these for Our Rose as I call his Rose now that she has been our houseguest in his absence. He will, of course, settle for a used one -- as long as it fits. You would think there would be many such out there on Craigslist or Ebay, given the fact dachshunds are susceptible to problems with their rear legs.

But so far not. As it is my duty, so is it yours to keep our collective eye open (the eye that shops, hence the general singular) to help him out.

That clash of leather and metal in the distance and getting closer with every second! It's a bondage and domination squirrel! It's a stunt miniature from Transformers 2!!

Oh no and oh boy. It's Our Rose.

How Dare the Local Media Ignore Our Own California Redwoods Crushing the NY Sentinels in Hot UFL Action

At New Candlestick last night. Later this week there *will* be a video.

Pat's Rose is Old. We Fortify Ourselves in Art. Works for Cats, Too, Likely for Guinea Pigs and Parrots. For the Rest, Applications Being Accepted.

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Brother Peter Moore unearthed this.

The House Dog's Grave

by Robinson Jeffers (1887-1962)

I've changed my ways a little; I cannot now

Run with you in the evenings along the shore,

Except in a kind of dream; and you,

If you dream a moment,

You see me there.

So leave awhile the paw-marks on the front door

Where I used to scratch to go out or in,

And you'd soon open; leave on the kitchen floor

The marks of my drinking-pan.

I cannot lie by your fire as I used to do

On the warm stone,

Nor at the foot of your bed; no,

All the nights through I lie alone.

But your kind thought has laid me less than six feet

Outside your window where firelight so often plays,

And where you sit to read‚

And I fear often grieving for me‚

Every night your lamplight lies on my place.

You, man and woman, live so long, it is hard

To think of you ever dying.

A little dog would get tired, living so long.

I hope that when you are lying

Under the ground like me your lives will appear

As good and joyful as mine.

No, dears, that's too much hope:

You are not so well cared for as I have been.

And never have known the passionate undivided

Fidelities that I knew.

Your minds are perhaps too active, too many-sided...

But to me you were true.

You were never masters, but friends. I was your friend.

I loved you well, and was loved. Deep love endures

To the end and far past the end. If this is my end,

I am not lonely. I am not afraid. I am still yours.

Biking with Pat, or "The Goddess is My Co-Pilot"

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One of best days ever for biking along the Bay, given the temperature, the views of the city, the absence of wind. Some knee pain, but -- as Pat promised -- that subsided.

Good luck or good design? Perhaps indicating I'm still not hitting on all eight, I put my bike on the bike carrier and forgot to strap it down. I notice this on the express way at 70 looking in the rear view mirror.

The bike did not bounce off! Well, one side of it did, but because of the rake of support bars, it bounced toward the back of the car and was still held up by those support bars.

I like to think that on Amazon Island, Mom took The Goddess aside and whispered: "My son-in-law needs a little help. Please?"

Would You Like Zombie Fries with That?

Spent a happy hour-plus on a conference call with our Florida lawyer, E. and her sister being on location in the actual lawyer's office, talking about how to settle Mom's estate. The estate consists more or less of a ten-year-old car, some dishes and stuffed animals, enough knickknacks to jump start the Victorian age and some decent pieces of furniture in which E. and I (snobs to the core) have no interest.

If the estate seems vacuous, as you know nature -- and the legal profession -- abhors a vacuum, so we are expected to keep tossing money into that vacuum to "get things settled." (Editor: Insert sound of shrugging shoulders.)

After I got off the phone, I went biking with Big Pat. We struggled. It took us an hour-five to cover a distance Pat used to do in half that, and probably still could if not encumbered by me.

Then I dropped by Pat's apartment to look at Rose, his dachshund, who may be near her end, if a dachshund can be said to be near her end. (Sorry).

She is such a gallant little dog. Her rear legs twitched frantically as she tried to control them. We made hopeful noises and suddenly she walked six inches and produced a handsome example of dog excrement.

That fine turd is her ticket to ride. As long as she eats and eliminates, Pat will keep her alive. Her gaze is still strong, and she cornered me with a flurry of barks when we came back to the apartment. Perhaps, I should say I carefully positioned myself in relation to her barking so that we achieved the semblance of cornering. It's all about respect, which Rose deserves .

Then we walked down the block to Berkeley's finest Nepalese restaurant -- there are three, which is wild -- where I had a Blue Himalaya beer and a lamb curry with extra naan and a big serving of vegetables, which should reassure E. that she also has me cornered when it comes to healthy living.

Continuing the dog metaphor: Lassie, come home. I hope by Tuesday she will.

A New Feature: Friends of the Blog and Their Owners. Here's Rose and Her Patrick.

Rose, the Dog Who Came to Dinner (But Would Not Stay)

Letters from the Grave

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Drove Big Pat over to the hospital this morning so he could get one of his carotids rooted out.

He left his truck, his dog, his billfold, his keys, his medical power-of-attorney and an envelope of farewell letters in case things went wrong.

(They didn't. We dropped by intensive care around six, and he was looking positively beatific. There was some mention of morphine.)

About those worst-case missives he was most emphatic: Don't open that envelope. I have taken the preparation of these seriously, so take this prohibition seriously.

I'll be giving them back to him tomorrow or the day after. E. keeps a journal in which she writes most nights. I've never been tempted to sneak a look. If she were to die before me, I'm not sure I'd want to read it then. Any criticisms would wound, no matter what the overall ratio of pains to joys. The absence of criticism would make me wonder where the real journals were haha.

I do not disparage the idea of final letters, since many relationships are on hold because of distance or some slight misunderstanding never resolved because lives don't always run on parallel tracks. In most case, a summing up might be healing. But in the case of someone with whom you live day to day -- I mean E., of course -- I rather think you should assume your letter will go astray before being read, and there'll be no time for last words either, so that you better create memories more vivid than final sentiments.

A kiss. A joke. An apology. Life will make these sincere even if in the moment you think not, even if you are only putting them down on account, like a kind of emotional layaway.

My Wife's Cut of Yesterday's Bike Video

It's not her cut exactly. She said that at ten minutes the video was unwatchable and that I should cut it to 50 seconds. (That's what she said. No hyperbole.)

Of course, she's right. But it's *work* to edit. (Originally, I had "edit down," though not all editing is cutting, just the most useful kind for most creators.)

Anyway, here's The Directors Cut of Dr. Peloton and Spiro Go to Richmond.

I Will Enjoy This, and Pat Will Enjoy This And ... That's About It

Daugherty and the Buddhist Retreat

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Daugherty is dry to the point of crisp, self-aware, *clean*. I wish I had the confidence to write like that; instead, I throw in every damn thing and hope for the best.

It’s Sunday night now.

This morning’s breakfast was oatmeal with prunes and honey. The bowl I dished out for myself contained my normal portion, but twice times larger than I needed, or, come to think of it, what I wanted.

I have my parking spot — very important, since the center is a long way down a steep, narrow dirt road. I have a camper, and it’s parked at the end of the road for maximum privacy; in fact, it’s the only spot on the property that can fit a camper. I got here early to score that. I have my spot in the Zendo: it’s second row…don’t like to be in the first row, a little too kiss-ass, but second row is just right, good view. I have my shower time; there’s only one men’s shower, and I have it to myself at 11:45. Got my pot-and-pan job; it’s the best job because it’s the first job in the morning. Got my dining spot: an easy chair next to the wood stove. Within 48 hours I have my routine locked in and am ready to defend my turf.

I see what I’m doing. I’m still doing it, but I see. It’s a start.

Ballyard