Month: February 2011

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Social Networking…..OR…the Cyrillic Alphabet

 A couple of evenings ago, my cell phone jangled me out of my concentration. I don’t get a lot of calls—peopled generally text or e-mail me—so it jarred me away from reading a story someone asked me to critique. The call was from my daughter telling me a gentleman had left a message on her answering machine (in San Francisco) for me (who lives in Idaho) to call him. “Something about Marines and movies,” she said, “and I wonder how he got my phone number.”

I called him (he lives outside of Austin, Texas) and left a message and he soon called back and wanted to talk about a young Marine we both knew who was killed on March 28, 1968, during the siege of Khe Sanh. One of the most interesting aspects of this moment was that he was the second previously-unknown-to-me individual with whom I have talked about the death of Greg Kent. The first one occurred last August when Betty and I visited the Vietnam Veterans Memorial to take some pictures and videos. It was an early Sunday morning, before the late August heat and humidity stewed enough to sweat us dry-skinned Boise folk back into air conditioning, when we ran into a man looking for Greg Kent’s name on The Wall. Unlike the gentleman who called me, Greg and he had not been friends in the Marines, but had run high school track together in Lawrence, Massachusetts. Both men loved him much, but for different reasons, and that’s a subject for another blog. What interests me here is that this all came about because of social networking.

I must confess that unless I was in a bar, tuned up with Coors, Rumplemint and Johnny Walker, I was never much of a networker, choosing to spend my time in a corner not talking to people. So I have little experience as a networker and for most of my life have felt that the social networking realm was best left to bullshitters and sales folks.

Yet, my definition of social networking is getting wider by the moment and includes meeting people through centuries’ old methods such as being pleasant to someone you meet out in the world (which is how I generated the Greg Kent conversation at The Wall), to YouTube videos posted on the Internet.  The latter is where the other guy who called the other night got wind of me and what I am up to….or what Betty and I are up to. Making movies, writing blogs, making YouTube videos of poets, video book reviews.  I teach writing classes on-line, have a webpage (more than one if I think about it), and a Twitter account that I am still not sure how to best use. I use FaceBook and have found it a reliable way to generate interest in most things.

So, what’s my point?

I’m not sure and maybe I’ll figure it out on the way to sizing up the importance of blogs and Twitter at which I am toiling today. And in that vein, I also cleaned up my website spam accounts, one of the more bizarre head-busting aspects of the social networking world. Spam messages from people seeking to get me to link to their websites. How dumb am I? I guess pretty damned dumb considering the list of e-mail monikers and messages that showed up in the last few days in the comments section of my web pages. Some examples of this type of social networking follow:

Bolt Path

Viagra

Porno Online

Smoking Side Effects

“As if!”

Henkscrewd

Something written in Cyrillic script (stuff that looks like….њЩЦѲд) and I have no clue what it means, or whether it is Serbian, Russian, ancient Bulgarian or something sent to me in Greek.

Levitra cheap

1 Shopping Cart

“When I saw the title of this post, I found it silly.”

CheapChristianLouboutinShoesOnline

Chevy Camaro

Tattoos on Wrists

TraneGasWaterHeaterReviews

“I will re-use.”

and finally, Horny Bitches says, “I like this blog, is a master peace.”

Peace or piece? You’d think that someone intent on enticing me to allow them to link with my sites would have the good sense to make it look like they can spell better than I can.

Anyway, it’s social networking. I think it works. I know it works in some cases. For instance, the Internet is one of the great democratizers of the 21st Century. Witness Twitter, YouTube and FaceBook in Egypt, Tunisia, Libya. People can communicate, show video horrors, mass demonstrations. And like all forms of the new mixed with the old, delivers a variety of results, truth and lies, good and bad.

I’m pretty satisfied with my dive into the social networking arena; it earned me conversations with men who knew Greg Kent in different contexts than I did. Twitter and YouTube seem to deliver results even though I get cryptic messages in some form of Cyrillic, or misspelled messages from Horny Bitches.

Now that one might get me out of the proverbial corner.

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Things You Do For A Free Lunch With Chub

One of my favorite types of contemporary fiction is the flash, the short-short, or sudden fiction. I like this type of story for the lyrical way it is composed. I also like that the meaning is generally left for the reader to discern. One of my good friends—California writer Guy Biederman— is an expert practitioner in the genre. He chooses to call the very brief short story, “lowfat fiction.” Here is an example of lowfat composed by Guy.

Things You Do For A Free Lunch With Chub

– skip breakfast

– overlook Chub sending back his pancakes twice for being too dark

– ignore his opinions about where you should look for work

– eat slower than him

-ignore vibrating cell, even though you know it’s Shelley from Pilates and you can’t stop thinking about her

– pretend you don’t read the same newspaper cover to cover as Chub, including the article on Christian Bale that he’s misquoting

– smile tightly to keep from yawning

– laugh at jokes that aren’t funny about the waitress that dude here has no chance with

– summon a dental emergency and excuse yourself, following dessert.

Guy Biederman is a North Bay writer and teacher who lives in Sebastopol, California. His classes include Lowfat Fiction, The Writing Groove, Big Chunk, and Walk & Write, as well as daylong Saturday classes with Ken Rodgers two to three times a year. His most recently published lowfat piece, Gravity Hill, will appear in the next issue of Third Wednesday, an Ann Arbor, Michigan, literary publication.

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Leap of Faith

 
Ruby Mountains at Dawn

Betty and I just got back from the 27th Annual Cowboy Poetry Gathering in Elko, Nevada not too long ago. As always, the event was a moving, powerful experience that I learned long ago to not try and describe to people. The only way you will know the power of the event and your reactions to it is to make a leap of faith and go. 

Most years when we travel to Elko, we try to go through the country with the least amount of traffic and the best scenery.  If the road conditions and the weather permit, we travel the truest route, south from Mountain Home, Idaho, which is not in the mountains, to Duck Valley, where a Shoshone and Paiute tribal community resides and then through Mountain City, Nevada, the Owyhee River Canyon, Wild Horse Crossing, Wild Horse Reservoir and then down the long, wide valley bordered on each side by north-south running mountain ranges, that, depending on the weather, might be draped in white, or partially snow-covered with their naked aspen ghosting the cold spots. Finally we drop into the Humboldt River valley and the town of Elko. And even if the weather and the road conditions aren’t optimal we take a different kind of leap of faith and travel the byways regardless of snow pack and ice. 

I could talk about the excellent Basque cuisine we eat, and the wild “Cowboy Halloween” characters we meet, about the music old and new, and the poetry old and new, but I’m not going to. 

I am going to talk about the Honda CRV rides we take. While everyone else is jammed into tight auditorium seats listening to Don Edwards or Wylie and the Wild West sing cowboy songs, or Paul Zarzyski and Vess Quinlan and Henry Real Bird read and recite poems, we often climb into the Honda and venture out on one of the roadways out of town. Hinterland is just as close as the last subdivision in this part of Nevada; very little transition country exists. Up north you can find the Independence Mountains, the old mining town of Tuscarora, and the famous Spanish ranch, which all the locals and the cowpokes-in-the-know call “The Span.” To the southeast lies the Ruby Valley, a long wide expanse of snow when we’ve been down there, with a surprising population of bald eagles sitting in the naked willows and  cottonwood trees along the banks of Franklin Creek—and that’s pronounced, “crik” in this part of the world. At the foot of the valley lies the Ruby Valley National Wlldlife Refuge where we sat one evening several seasons back and watched coyotes hunt trumpeter swans on the channels carved in the swampy, red-willow-infested breaks catching the late light of the gloaming. 

Last year we went down there again with a carload of friends, hitting the trail just before sun-up. The light trapped in the ground fog and on the tips of the frosty sage made for great pictures, and the sun on the peaks when the lower ground was still dark created a stark idea of what the difference between life and death might be—or good and evil—in a metaphorical way. The A M light on the east side of the craggy and majestic Ruby Mountains glared back at us and one would think the glare might be too stark, but instead it was like somebody slugged you in the solar plexus with its immensity. 

This year, Betty and I dared ourselves again and went down the west side of the Rubies for an evening run to see if we could find out if the Rubies really were like rubies. The quality of evening light that time of the year is like the gold they still chase around in the rough hinterlands of Nevada. It comes in low, and streams parallel to the surface of the earth, its shine tinted a bit crimson, a bit silver, a bit bronze as it caroms off the juniper trees, sage and mountains like x-rays from outer space. 

 

Ruby Mountain Muley

We stopped where the road from Spring Creek to Jiggs intersects the south fork of the Humboldt River and watched water ouzels bicker over prey beneath the flashing surface of the river. They called and crashed, then dove below the water, then emerged to dance along the surface, as an immature bald eagle floated overhead. The willows and the water, the rugged trunks of the cottonwood trees, all caught the last brash bang of sunlight just before Old Sol’s setting. 

There are a lot of deer out along the east side of the Ruby Mountains. Big mule deer that browse alongside the roads in great gangs that warily watch approaching Hondas, then leisurely leap barbed wire right-of-way fences, then stop and curiously spy as we drive by. The bucks still had their horns and were running with the females which indicated to me they were still in the rut. 

West Side of the Ruby Mountains

At the hint of last light we got the Ruby Mountains on camera, and we now know exactly why they are named that. They were ruby. 

Then we climbed back in the Honda and drove back to the G Three Bar for a sarsaparilla and a visit with our cowboy poetry friends. 

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Feral Kittens

This week Ken’s blog features California teacher and short story composer Jamey Genna, whose writing is quirky, poignant and her irony will knock you off balance.

Well, what I constantly have been thinking about for the past three months are these three feral kittens I trapped, that don’t seem to be all that feral.  They are costing me a mint.  How can that be?  I captured them so I could take them into Fix our Ferals and get them fixed for free, then take them back to nature and set them free—where they could keep the current cat population to a minimum, along with any undeserving population of mice and birds. 

Okay, so I kept them from mid-December to late January in my home studio—a shed I have out back—a sanctuary for writing and painting, for both me and my husband.  The shed stinks of cat litter, spray, and dander now, no matter how many times I clean it and empty out the box.  Cat litter: 4.99 a bag.  Cat food: 4.99 a bag.  I had one mama cat and three two month old kittens.  That’s a large bag of litter and a large bag of cat food a week.  Two teachers from my school donated $25 each.

Okay, so the deadline for the Fix our Ferals—the phone line filled up within the first few minutes, so I got put on the waiting list.  Then Oakland called and said I could bring them in there at 8 a.m. one at a time.  That means one cat per visit.  That’s four sick days.  So I brought Mama cat into Oakland and I was there first.  I took the day off from work b/c I had a doctor’s appointment at 11.  Then eight people showed up to get cats fixed.  Since I had a feral mom who was still feeding her overgrown kittens, I got bumped to the top of the list.  There were four of us with lactating females.  They only take three.  We drew cards.  I never win at these things.  I drew the low card—a four…the number of cats I am currently trying to get fixed.  I had to go home.

On the way home—a thirty minute drive from Oakland to Rodeo, I remembered this place up in El Sobrante that fixes cats for free.  I went up to the Animal Care Clinic off the dam road.  They said, yes, we can take her today and yes, you can probably/maybe get a voucher.  Here was momma cat—hard to trap and then re-trap…stressful.  So, I said, I’ll tell you what, I’ll give you my credit card and if they don’t give me the voucher, I’ll just pay for it.  When people say, “You’re a good Samaritan for doing this for these cats,” I think, that’s not what you’re really thinking.  You’re really thinking what a fool I am, what an idiot.  Let’s get it straight.  First of all, I had no intention of catching the mom,  I only wanted the little gray and white one that was the friendliest, but once I got started  I couldn’t stop.  It became an addiction.  Then a service to the community.  Then I began to fall in love with the three kittens I did catch, and even momma cat—she was special because I could pet her if I cornered her.  She was clean and healthy and beautiful after a month in my studio.  White underbelly, calico back, scared owl eyes, and three kittens who adored her.  She hissed every time I came near.  I’m never sure if she purred or was shivering in fear when I touched her, but her eyes would relax and always, for a few moments she looked happy.

That day after dropping mama cat off in El Sobrante, I went to my doctor’s office where my appointment had been cancelled without my knowledge.  Then the voucher people called me and told me I made too much money to get a voucher—no amount of finagling got the treasured voucher out of the phone lady from the county.  I have three more kittens at home that need to get fixed.  Here we are the middle class, getting screwed again because we make way too much money.  By the way, the Oakland SPCA won’t fix them for free if they are at all handleable.  Too late—I’d already been working with them.  The kittens could be cornered, caught, petted, and kissed with a minimum of hissing.  Never mind that the gold one and the black calico—a tortie, I’m told—run for cover as soon as you come in the room.   One momma cat fixed: $120.  It cost more than my local vet and no shots were included.  Holy cow!  But momma was fixed.  Now, where to let her go?  My backyard or back up at the school where I found her.  If I let her stay, she might fight with my own two cats or my dogs.   She could do some damage, that one, but I like her.  I don’t want her wandering the school grounds scrounging for food.  HOWEVER:

I got home from work the other day and my husband is sitting on the couch in the nearing dark, not saying anything.  “What’s the matter?” I ask. 

“Nothing,” he says. 

I come back in the living room a few minutes later and he’s still sitting there.  I say, come on, something’s wrong.  What is it?  He still claims nothing, but later, he says, “I got the PG&E bill this month.”

How much was it?  I ask.

Almost $800, he says. 

This is in part from the changeover in January, but I’ve also been heating the shed for the kittens. 

I take momma cat up to the school the next day and set her free.  I still have to get those three other kittens fixed.  They are lined up right now for a low cost spay and neuter program in February.  That’ll be another $150.   I’m hoping to keep Silver, but Goldie and Phoebe Bear gotta’ go.  I’m not complaining.  I’m not.  I’m not asking for advice.  I’ve heard it all.  From Midwestern hard-core practicality—throw em’ out in a snow bank.  Why are you heating that shed?    To sympathetic cat-loving sentimentality—here’s some money.  How are your cats?  You’re a saint. 

That’s not why I did it.  I did it because once I started, I couldn’t stop.  And when you’re responsible for something, you’re responsible.  Make any analogies you care to.

Jamey Genna teaches writing in the East Bay area of San Francisco. She graduated from the University of San Francisco with her Masters in Writing. Her short stories and creative nonfiction have been published in many literary magazines such as Crab Orchard Review, The Iowa Review, and Georgetown Review. You can read her most recent work on-line at Oxford Magazine, Eleven Eleven, and Switchback.