Rhubarb Ranch

Hot Dog

2009-07-25T09:24:00.003-05:00

Summertime, and the living is easy, mostly because the Rhubarbs are working, and not blogging. And here it is, the end of July, and we've only consumed about half of a 40-pack of Ballpark Franks, "they plump when you cook 'em." We buy the 40-pack at Sam's, but usually they're gone right away - a big picnic, a cookout, camping with friends - along with a case of those ready-made quarter-pound hamburger patties. Hell, this summer I haven't even reloaded the propane in the gas grill or been to the lake. I don't really know the difference between a Frank (Frankfurter for you Krauts out there, like my lovely wife) and a Hot Dog, except maybe the quantity of unacceptable bovine body parts and organs contained within each. Hebrew National, "no ifs, ands, or butts," probably make the best hot dogs: beef, Kosher, bovine anus-free, but you can't beat the price of Ballpark (all-beef, but probably chock-full of anus tissue and other organ meats) at the Sam's; chunk some of those bad boys on the grill, toast up some buns, break out the Guldens Spicy Brown! Light on the Heinz, some diced onions, good all-American food, named after Germans or canines, go figure. I love the summertime.

Naivete

2009-04-28T12:16:00.003-05:00

The wet-behind-the-ears Obama administration and their left-wing congressional counterparts are either stupid or evil, as indicated by the recent declassification of photographs and documents about "enhanced interrogation techniques" used on enemy combatants captured in Iraq and elsewhere. These politicians - mostly well-off, mostly Democrat, mostly urban-dwelling, elite, effete, pseudo-intellectuals, who have never served in the military, never held a job outside of government, never done an honest day's labor in their life - refer to these interrogation methods as "torture", but clearly have no real-world frame of reference to what "torture" really is, or what really goes on over there in enemy territory.

Here's what the enemy does to people they capture: They wire their testicles to car batteries, they blow off their kneecaps with handguns, and eventually cut their heads off with a saw.

Here's what we do: we have dogs bark at them, we play loud music, we pour water up their nose, and make them wear underpants on their head. Sounds like a frat party, only without the beer.

Historically, Enemy Combatants are treated by the Geneva Convention as spies, and therefore, aren't entitled to the same protections as prisoners of war. In World Wars I and II, and even Korea and Vietnam, enemy combatants were simply taken out and shot. Let's bring back that policy; it will save us all from the pointless debate about what to do with Guantanamo inmates or what constitutes "torture."

Ambulance

2009-04-15T11:01:00.004-05:00

I've never been in an ambulance, but have always been curious. Anything with a siren going by was fair game for us kids; if we were lucky, we could follow on our bikes and witness real-life adventures performed by real-life superheroes - firefighters, police, emergency medical technicians. Maybe there would be carnage - a car accident, or perhaps a house on fire - but sometimes it was just the cops pulling someone over, never a shootout or hostage situation. You generally didn't get a look inside the ambulance, it was a lot different than a fire truck, with all the controls on the outside, the dials and valves and hoses and ladders. Back in the day, the firemen would ride on the back of the truck, ready to jump off and pull out ladders and hoses and start fighting fire at the drop of a hat. The ambulance was always secretive, curtained, or doors with very small windows, now big cubic vans, but formerly low slung custom Cadillac station wagons, with a big gumball machine on top. My dad had the chance to ride in a number of ambulances before he died, including several rides on an Air Ambulance, probably CareFlight, a big Sikorsky or Bell or Huey helicopter, multi-million dollar equipment and personnel, and a pretty expensive ride, but I think most people would think it was worth it.

Test Tube

2009-03-12T11:17:00.005-05:00

The test tubes that came with the chemistry set were lame; tiny little things, fragile, not heat resistant. My dad, a biochemist at the time, fixed that right away, delivering large, thick Pyrex tubes, built for real industrial-strength chemistry. My experiments were confined to the garage, smelling of toluene and kitchen matches. The chemistry sets of 30 years ago were certainly better than today's: I don't think you can even make a decent stink bomb with one now, and they probably don't contain anything dangerous, like mercuric oxide, which, when heated up over a burner rendered a little silver blob of mercury. I bet today's chemistry set doesn't even have a burner, and I'm sure any kind of fire (or even heat), or flammable chemicals, is regulated out and forbidden in today's nanny state. Back in '60s, it was caveat emptor, you're on your own, don't fuck up. That kind of freedom is ruined by Stupid People. My dad's famous college chemistry story, probably apocryphal, is that he blew up a chem lab while making nitro glycerin. That kind of initiative would probably be unappreciated today.

Buckle

2009-03-10T15:08:00.003-05:00

They seemed impossibly large; how could you sit down wearing something like that? Like WWF trophies, but won for riding or roping or staying on a bull for more than eight seconds. I guess that last part is kind of like the WWF, hanging on to a multi-ton gyrating bovine, who's every intent is to shake the would-be passenger to the ground and stomp him to jelly. Risking your life for a damn belt buckle, although usually quite large and made out of (mostly) precious metals, like gold and silver. Even the FFA kids raising calves or pigs could get one, highly engraved and filigreed. And they would sport them around their freshly laundered and pressed jeans, Wranglers or Levi's over ostrich skin polished boots, a crisp starched shirt with pearl buttons tucked in, and the giant WWF trophy girding their loins like a shield, protecting their abdomens from a Mexican shiv or a rearward hoof. I always wondered how they stayed so clean and pressed and shiny around all those animals and their dust and waste, those polished boots that never seemed to step in steer manure.

Fashion

2009-02-20T12:03:00.009-06:00

Just what the hell were we thinking in 1976? I distinctly remember: bell-bottom jeans (Levi's), polyester shirts, ruffles, puffy sleeves, Dacron, acrylic, garish geometric prints in avocado and rust, and the hair! Oh, the hair, my God in heaven, the hair! Long, but it only looked good on folks with straight hair. If your hair was wavy, or heaven forbid, downright curly, it became not only long, but Big with a capital "B", a tremendous structure cantilevered out from your skull, gravity-defying, possibly even a pseudo-afro, as large horizontally as vertically, a living, breathing, talking Chia pet. And now, it has all come back around, that clothing, those hairstyles, because Fashion has run out of ideas, again. This too, happened early in the 1970's: leather jackets, t-shirts sporting a deck of Marlboro's rolled up in the sleeve, peg-leg jeans, boots, a greasy DA combed-back, the Fonz, Grease, Happy Days, Brillcream, an embracing of 1950's hoodlum style. I'm actually hoping for the day when fashion promulgates the look seen in post-war film noir, the men wearing grey flannel business suits and fedoras, and the women in tailored A-line skirts and fancy hats and high-heels. A cigarette in every hand (lit with a naphtha-fired Zippo), scotch whiskey and martinis all around.

Pastry

2009-02-19T07:57:00.005-06:00

The white icing comes first, sticky, slightly gooey if it's warm, drizzled in a matrix, a latticework or swirl or whorl of sweet atop yeasty dough painstakingly rolled flat again and again, flour and lard forming paper-thin layers that compress and ooze when bitten, sugar seeping out onto taste buds and into cavities, pain and pleasure emitting forth from this invention of the Danes; manna, not from Heaven, not nourishing but hellish, clogging the arteries and slowing the heart, eventually killing the overweight host by starving it of oxygen, diabetes destroying its internal organs and blinding its eyes, dead at breakfastide, oatmeal and fresh fruit untouched.

But the humorless Norsemen have nothing on Greeks bearing gifts; how about some baklava?

Poetry

2009-02-18T08:48:00.004-06:00

I'm not really a poet, but occasionally I'll write a song. Typically, these songs don't see the light of day - they are usually bad - but more often than not, they just sit unfinished in a notebook, hidden away. When I was younger, much younger, I and my pseudo-intellectual friends would sit around, smoke joints and cigarettes, drink copious amounts of coffee, and have long very, very meaningful conversations about all things pseudo-intellectual, from philosophy to politics, physics and psychology, basically anything that started with a "p", or made that "s" or "f" sound while using the letter "p". Part of that exercise involved writing long passages in a common journal called a "Bitch, Want, and Stroke" book. The concept was simple: we all lived in, more or less, the same house, most of the time, and the book was a way to say things that might be awkward or uncomfortable to say in person, in real time. Sure, there were times when we would move back in with our parents, or shack up with a girlfriend, or even get our own place, but we would spend a great deal of time together, often weeks or months, at the same house. The book was the low-tech version of Facebook or MySpace, a way to keep in touch, abreast. There was ranting about people not doing their fair share of the vacuuming or eating the last yogurt, compliments given and favors cashed in, and the random bit of prose or poetry. Sometimes an excerpt from a song, sometimes something original, usually in response to a jilting or a perceived injustice; maudlin, bad poetry, brimming with teenage angst, seasoned with bitterness, garnished with narcissism, littered with adverbs.

Playground

2009-02-06T10:27:00.005-06:00

In the small California town where I grew up, we had some of the best city parks and playgrounds in the world. Huge expanses of manicured green grass, rolling hills, tennis courts, mature pine trees that were easy to climb, all in safe neighborhoods free of crime and child predators and gang violence and graffiti. There were huge sand pits surrounding the massive steel playground equipment - giant slides, monkey bars multiple stories high, towers and ladders and huge swings hung with steel chains that could secure an ocean liner. The inevitable human-powered merry-go-round, kids falling off into the sand, dizzy, sometimes puking, laughing. There wasn't any sense of responsibility or liability on the part of the Parks and Recreation department; if we got hurt, it was our own fault and we shouldn't be so careless. The responsibility was on us, the liability our own, as it should be. The cool pits of sand sheltered by sycamore trees was a favorite place to play in the summer, we would make sand castles, but we had to dig down deep to get to the wet sand, in order to make massive ancient cities perfect for army men or Matchbox cars or Tonka trucks. Occasionally, we'd be digging in the sand and run across an unexpected clump of the wet stuff, too shallow to be the mother lode, and we'd hand it off to our sister, who'd be asking, "Did you find some wet sand?"
"Sure, here it is; oh wait, no it isn't, it's cat shit!"

Concentration

2009-01-27T10:00:00.004-06:00

This is harder to do, the older I get - keeping this many balls in the air - there just doesn't seem to be enough time for anything anymore. My feet hit the floor in the morning, and it's a sprint, then a long distance run, followed by another sprint, sucking the life force away until evening comes and there's nothing left; it's all I can do to just sit in front of the television, not really watching it, just staring into the light, the remaining life force sucked away until it induces a fitful sleep. Then awake in the middle of the night, always have to get up in the middle of the night, only a few hours until the alarm goes off, then back in the hamster wheel. I get less accomplished every day, and as a consequence, that which was not accomplished piles up in the Unfinished Basket, further behind each day, one step forward, two steps back. Unfinished, unrealized, undone. Harder to keep the focus, maybe soon I'll be repeating myself, treading ground already trod upon while the undone grows in scope and complexity. The sunset, the twilight, once one of my favorite times of day, soon to be accursed, a lovely time turned horrible, the things which were once so familiar now unrecognized, unrecognizable.

Blackberry

2009-01-23T10:32:00.003-06:00

I don't really know what the Object Writing people intend here; is this the fruit, or the electronic communication device? We have the former, growing wild here on the ranch; but not the latter, which we eschew because of their cost and annoyance factor (both high). One can make jam out of the former, which is exactly what Mrs. Rhubarb did this year, her first effort at canning, wonderfully executed. The grandson and nephews promptly devoured it, and placed an advance order for more. Well, unfortunately, there won't be anymore until next Fall, but then Mrs. Rhubarb and I will put on our tall rubber boots and work gloves, and subject ourselves to thorns and minor lacerations as we pick wild blackberries from our own property (eating plenty as we go) so that our friends and relatives can have blackberry jam for the Christmas holiday.

Subway

2009-01-21T08:35:00.005-06:00

The stations were very space age, gleaming chrome and glass and enamaled colored brick, long escalators rising impossibly high above the street, or descending impossibly low underground. The shiny white cars, built by Rohr - I think they were Germans, legendary for prompt locomotive transportation. Now the cars are brushed stainless steel, I know, I've seen pictures. Back then, you got on at Concord or Richmond or Orinda, purchasing a ticket from the machine, and placing it in the reader slot at the gate - whoosh! - instantly your ticket would pop up out of another slot five feet away, and the gates would slide open, tilting away like a ladies fan, inviting you in. That long damn escalator up to the platform, the chirp of the electronic train whistle as the gleaming electric car rolled quietly, quickly into the station, pushing a wall of breeze before it followed in the wake. Through the East Bay hills, then plunging into the Trans-Bay Tube, under San Franscisco Bay, underwater but dry, emerging on the other side to the smell of busses and steam and fish and Chinese food and saltwater, today overrun by idiots - transplants and busybodies looking for free love or lunch, minding everyone's business - but back then, maybe even now, beautiful.

Workshop

2009-01-20T11:19:00.002-06:00

Dim and dusty, the darkness sliced away by shafts of light coming from windows and skylights, a divine lighting, the particles in the air giving definition to the pillars of light solid enough to support weight. The sweet smell of lacquer - nitrocellulose - poisonous and carcinogenic, milky white and thick like sugar water, nauseating and rich. Tung oil, woody, thick, and slippery. Spruce and cedar and oak, smooth and raw, white, unprotected, the grain impossibly complex and unique. I sharpen a chisel on a stone until I can cut paper, and carve away translucent curls of wood, wispy and delicate.

Sandpaper

2009-01-15T09:32:00.002-06:00

Gritty, it puts my teeth on edge, like the blackboard when I was a kid. I hated the blackboard, biting the inside of my cheeks as I took the chalk in hand, chills raising goosebumps on my arms as the white stick hit slate. The silica-coated sheet of thin cardboard does the same, but only briefly. Attached to a sanding block, it's perfectly manageable as I run it across a piece of cedar, the aromatic red dust collecting on the board, smelling of memories and old blankets and a cardigan sweater. It's smooth to the touch, but I switch to a finer grit anyway, further abrading away any slight imperfections - microscopic really - and I run my fingers down the board, not just feeling and not looking, but looking with my hands, the way blind people do. Seeing with my fingertips and then the mind's eye, grinding away the high spots until there's nothing left but glass, Teflon, a pond on a windless summer day, silk.

Heartbeat

2009-01-13T10:26:00.009-06:00

Most of the time, I don't even notice it - that's because it's working correctly, more or less. Occasionally, there's a flutter, some confusion in my chest cavity, right behind my sternum, and I put my right hand to my chest, over my heart, a salute like I'm saying the Pledge or watching the flag raise while listening to the Star Spangled Banner. I can't feel it with my hand, but I can feel it inside my chest, wobbling around, a spasm. I don't know what it means, it only lasts a second and it's gone, no ill effects remain, and I pretend it isn't there, like it will go away. My dad's problem didn't go away, and eventually his valves became leaky sieves, his labored heart only pumping 10% of the blood needed by the rest of his body. He was cold and tired all the time, and finally decided to have the surgery. A crusty old veteran talked him into it - I no longer remember the guy's name, he was a golfing buddy of my dad's, probably the Korean war and a smoker, now tubed up to an oxygen tank, but had a handshake that said, "I can still kick your ass, even though I have one foot in the grave. We didn't screw around back then, men were men; you kids nowadays, you're just a bunch of pussies and pantie-waists." He came through the valve replacement surgery intact, and convinced my dad to do the same. My dad didn't make it; post-op he was drowning in his own blood, not able to hang around long enough to heal and realize the benefit of new heart valves. The heartbeats finally ran out, stopped, nice and quiet now after 67 years of relentless pounding and thumping. Done.

Milestone note: this is the 100th post to Rhubarb Ranch.

Departure

2009-01-12T09:56:00.004-06:00

I love to fly, even wanted to do it for a living for awhile. Flying is expensive, learning to fly is expensive, airplanes are expensive, fuel is expensive, travel is expensive, parking is expensive, airport food is expensive. Some would say, "overpriced." Still, I love to fly, I love the "Departure" part of the airport, now behind security, a private club available only to ticket holders, sometimes containing further mysterious private clubs available only to "VIPs" or "Admirals" - frequent flyers, folks who spend half their business week in an airport, who require and demand a quiet, paneled lounge with drinks and special smoking areas and high-speed internet ports and concierge service. Before the security lockdown, it was fun just to go to the departure gates at the Big Airport and watch the travelers on their way to exotic destinations: Tokyo, London, Singapore, Cancun. The women were always beautiful in airports - rich, thin, sexy, well-dressed and well-heeled, with no real job and nothing to do but travel and shop - the modern-day jet-set.

Vaccination

2009-01-07T15:45:00.008-06:00

I remember vaccination day when I was a kid; it wasn't unusual, back in the 60's, to be vaccinated before the school year started, or even be vaccinated at school. One of the things they vaccinated you against was Polio. The polio vaccination was still pretty new then, but I didn't know this at the time, it seemed pretty commonplace. What also seemed commonplace was an adult or child wearing arm braces connected to walking canes, but you didn't stare because you didn't want to be impolite; get caught staring by your mother and you were often the recipient of a quick forehand to the back of the head. Yes, my mother didn't want us staring at the polio victim because it was impolite, but I suspect there was a superstitious reason as well - there were still kids with arm or leg braces, still kids in iron lungs, still old-wives tales going around about how you could catch polio by sleeping next to an open window or some other innocuous act. We didn't look, our mothers made us look away, because we didn't want to be next.

Whiskey

2009-01-06T08:15:00.005-06:00

Warm molten amber coats my throat and then my stomach slow like honey, but tastes like naptha or witch hazel, except with a slightly smoky, oaken finish - my lips go numb, the lower part of my face soon follows, I can no longer feel my cheekbones. Only a Scotch will do nowadays, and an old one at that. Kentucky Straight Bourbon or Canadian no longer make the cut, unsophisticated booze for unsophisticated drinking - multiple shots of Crown with a Coors Light chaser, then a night of throwing up in a parking lot followed by a morning of headache and dehydration. Or a pint of Jack hidden in an overcoat on a cold winter's afternoon, consumed straight, in secret, in public. I breathe fire - antiseptic, sterile breath, clean, my lungs filtering and separating the foreign solvent from the hemaglobin, scented, as Vonnegut says, "...like mustard gas and roses."

Floodlight

2009-01-02T11:51:00.003-06:00

It's night, and I'm hiding. I can hear the static of a police radio nearby, and see spotlights and flashlights flickering this way and that, their beams shooting off into the darkness, illuminating a tree or a gate or a bush. I'm breathing hard, trying to keep silent, escape and evade. Mostly evade. Folks get caught because they panic, they run, they make noise. They'll catch you if they see you running, and if you run, they will see you. So I stay still in the shadows, statue still, freeze-tag still. But the breathing will give me away if they hear it, it's very loud. Thank God they don't have dogs. We were looking through the hole in the fence once, the acid just taking effect, spying on the neighbors. They hadn't seen us, but the dog at their feet was downwind. His ears stood up, his nose to the wind, and then looked straight at us, or rather, at the fence, through the fence, like x-ray vision. "The dog smelled us!" We bolted, laughing, barely able to run. It was the funniest thing I've ever heard.

Compost

2008-12-31T09:28:00.011-06:00

I'm still working on the compost pile here at the ranch. Right now, it's just a corner of the garden where we throw stuff: eggshells, coffee grounds, banana peels, cat turds, chicken shit. It isn't this finely organized lasagna-layered textbook-orderly stratum of waste by-products designed for optimum fermentation in order to produce rich organic compost; no, it's a big pile of rotting crap and trash that I'll rototill into the ground this winter and hopefully it won't contain so much ammonia that it kills everything we plant. We're novices at this gardening crap - we're just not old enough, we're not retired, we don't have endless time on our hands, and we're not British. We just like to eat. We got great zucchini last year - monstrous, mutant zucchini, as big as a man's leg. We got a bumper crop of hot peppers and tomatoes the year before. And tender yellow squash. But our potatoes and onions disappeared. Thriving one minute, dead and gone the next. I dug in the dirt in vain looking for a potato or onion, finding nothing but want.

Dry Run

2008-12-30T09:38:00.006-06:00

I don't drink anymore. (What's the old joke? "I don't drink any less, either." Rimshot.) I don't drink anymore, mostly because it doesn't agree with me. I get a headache. I can't read or play video games, they give me vertigo when I'm drinking. Mostly, all I can do is sit in the bar, and drink more. Maybe watch some T.V. Other disagreeable things happen to me as well, like finding myself arrested west of Fort Worth at 3:00 in the morning when my last memory was being in downtown Dallas at 1:30. Like getting up in the middle of the night and peeing on someone's piano. Like picking a fight in a biker bar when you're a skinny white guy in your mid-twenties. Like knowing what the jail cells look like in five different cities and four different counties. These are clues that your life isn't quite going like you planned. These are clues that maybe one should moderate his behavior and limit one's alcohol intake. Dry Run: the opposite of Beer Run.

Download

2008-12-23T08:40:00.003-06:00

There's a brief hesitation, then click! And we're off, we're downloading. The little sideways thermometer, the Progress Bar, starts moving slowly to the right from zero degrees to warmer climes, through sub-zero up to freezing, then temperate and hot and damn hot and Texas in August. Progress, shown in graphical form, like those United Way fundraising signs out in front of City Hall: "We've raised x millions toward our goal of z millions!" Progress, usually based on a simple calculation taking into consideration the size of the download and the number of actual bits received, sometimes estimating a finish time based on the rate of transfer, as ones and zeros are streamed from thousands, maybe tens or hundreds of thousands of miles away, your special set of ones and zeroes navigating a maze of fiber optic and Category 5 cables, switches, routers, satellites, copper wire, repeaters. An amazing invention, truly a Twenty-first Century Miracle Of Technology, used mostly to view pornography.

Push-Up

2008-12-19T11:16:00.008-06:00

OK, let's crack off a couple, and see where we stand: hands positioned, back straight, and one! Oh, crap, I'm out of shape. Half a push-up, the back cracks, a loud pop in several places, vertebrae clicking into position like Legos, and two! Shit! Barely lowered my fat body a few inches, and a struggle to get back to the starting position, back still straight, pain in the left shoulder reminding me of a long-ago rotator cuff injury, and three! Whew! OK, that's enough. Three. Terrible. Pitiful. They weren't even good push-ups. Marine drill instructors are laughing right now, as they crisply bust off a hundred push-ups without even sweating, each with a clap in the middle. Foreign Legion members are shaking their heads in French dismay. Special Forces men are embarassed by my excessive American sloth and gut, and will think twice the next time they are called to make great sacrifices to protect my freedom.

Tide

2008-12-15T10:16:00.004-06:00

I grew up near the beach; not on the beach, or in a beach town, but easy enough access that we spent a great deal of time there in the summer. We didn't trouble ourselves with worries of jellyfish or sharks or eels or big waves, but the damned evil Rip Tide (always spoke with capital letters, in boldface) was an object of great myth and folklore. Every summertime, kids were subjected to tall tales of hapless swimmers swept out to sea on the sneaky Rip Tide, miles offshore in the shipping lanes eaten by sharks before they even realized it, or dragged to Davy Jones' Locker, exhausted, after hopelessly trying to swim against it. Driving high on a cliff on Highway 1, you could look down and see the sons-of-bitches, the keyhole shape moving rapidly out to sea, the imaginary swimmer caught in the middle in a futile struggle against the unforgiving, unstoppable forces of nature, puny man(kind) outmatched, outclassed. We were taught to swim parallel to the shore when caught in the bastard Rip Tide - counterintuitive, yes, I know, like turning into the skid - but it was the only defense. Stupid people tried to swim straight back to shore, and were inevitiably killed, Darwinism in practice.

Rice

2008-12-12T08:41:00.004-06:00

Brown sticky starchy grains, boiling in water on the stove, reduce to a simmer, cover, steam the remaining water out until there's nothing left but brown sticky starchy grains; they should be seperate, each kernel an individual, but my rice sticks together in a collective mass and I refuse to use one of those rice-making machines; eventually I'll get this, I'll get how to make rice. I'm getting used to it being gummy asteroids, chewy. I refuse to use "Minute Rice"; rice should take an hour to cook, dammit. Minute Rice is too white, too perfect, too quick, too completely devoid of any benefit rice would normally have, the brown and the fiber and the vitamins and nutrients processed and bleached away. Rice should be dark and heavy. Rice should stick to your ribs. Rice should be like oatmeal, but fried, with vegetables and eggs in it, or combined with pasta and exotic herbs and barley; pilaf with a slab of grilled salmon on top, or dirty with beans and crawfish, or mexican with frijoles and enchiladas.