I'm Networking, Baby

A year and a half ago, my neighbor Beth helped me set up my Facebook page late at night. "I'll friend you in the morning," she said, and I gratituded her for her help. The next morning, I had a message from someone I'd known since I was two, and hadn't heard from in forty years. It was extraordinary, delightful, and thoroughly spooky. I was trolling the ocean floor with a freshly wormed hook and I'd snagged a nice shiny fish, but what else was lurking in the depths?

Fortunately, due to an acute erosion of memory, I don't worry about anything for long. I reviewed my life and found it exemplary, my every human interaction at every age marked with virtue, and I rested easy. I was ready to embrace Facebook, social networking site and the world's foremost cat-video delivery system.

I wasn't alone. In late 2008 and early 2009 all the baby boomers in the world jumped onto Facebook at the same time, causing real news sources to leap off the web in order to keep everything spinning. They stormed the site like it was a free glucosamine dispensary. Saggy gray boomer mamas dreamed of old boyfriends whose last memories of them featured bandanna halter-tops in invitingly spacious overalls; they brushed up their photo-editing skills and took the leap. I did too.

Friends showed up. Real ones, ones I had missed. You lose track of friends over the years, and it was remarkable to be able to catch up all at once. For instance, it turned out a third of my old friends were now in the Mafia, which didn't surprise me, and another third were farmers, which did. By the time I had reached sixty friends, I had already traveled cross-country to meet long-lost high school pals. I was delighted with my collection.

Then new friend-requests started popping up. Who is this person? Why does he want to be my friend? My friend collection grew in accretions, certain key components barnacling up. I had an island of show-business people, an outcrop of writer types, and a whole reef of birders. The birder reef developed side protrusions of insect experts and one dinosaur guy. Eventually I met some of my virtual friends, and then my Facebook page settled out into people I actually know, people who know people I actually know, people who don't actually know people I don't actually know, and people who I don't know who the hell they are. And one French guy who probably mistook me for a cheese.

Sometimes I see a clever comment on my page, and I'll think: how do I not know this person? Is this one an actor, a writer, or a birder? One day I got an email from someone I knew I'd never heard of. She was sorry to inform me that a mutual friend had passed away, and that there would be a celebration of life I was welcome to attend. I looked him up, found him indeed among my friends, and mourned. He was so young, so handsome in his profile pic. What a loss it was, and I had only not known him for such a short time.

Baby boomers are particularly fond of Facebook because it helps us keep our focus. Now, instead of the scattered thoughts like "I should send money to Haiti" or "where did I put my coffee cup" or "when did that crap replace real music," we are focused like a laser on "I wonder if anyone put anything interesting on Facebook in the last fifteen minutes." It settles the mind.

That's one benefit. But I also now have ready access to people who can answer all my most vexing questions. What can their skeletal morphology tell us about the relationship of velociraptors to ostriches? Or, What is that thing crawling up my leg? You'd be surprised how often those questions come up.

Bear Awareness

There's a GI Rights Hotline that soldiers can call if they suddenly discover that they are conscientious objectors and want out. These days the hotline is taking more and more calls from personnel who do not want to serve alongside (or beneath) gay soldiers. That is, the kind they know about. The threat level of becoming aware of fellow soldiers' sexuality is now surging into the orange zone since Congress has paved the way to repealing "Don't Ask, Don't Tell." As a recent worried hotline caller remarked, "If homosexuality is actually allowed, I will be housed with somebody who's sexually attracted to me." You can't buy that kind of self-esteem.

As everything does, this reminds me of working in the post office. It was a staple of workroom comedy to report on the perils of delivering mail to certain taverns in certain areas of town. In a typical monologue, a carrier would cop to a case of the willies when he would go into one of these establishments and be greeted in what he deemed an excessively friendly manner. "Whatever you do, if you're in C. C. Slaughters and drop a letter, don't bend over to pick it up!" Ha ha! The classics never fail. The comedian would bask in the roars of laughter, scratching his butt through his stained, baggy trousers, his beer-belly in full gestation and quivering with mirth.

"What exactly is it about you that you think homosexual men find so irresistible?" I always ask, causing the gentleman to stare uncertainly, mouth ajar, a tiny trickle of tobacco juice following the crusty trail to his chin. Well. He can't point to a particular thing, exactly, but he's quite confident of his magnetic qualities.

I don't blame him. Without having tested it in the wild, I'm confident I am immensely attractive to bears. If Dave and I are walking in the woods, and we come upon a grizzly bear, I know I'm going to get the worst of it. Dave will be tough and stringy, even after being tenderized by mosquitoes. I, on the other hand, look yummy. I am the original Slow Food, undoubtedly delectable with the right sauce, and as a bonus, I am likely to produce the sauce myself. Some things you just know.

So I understand that when my coworkers, or our military's finest, rattle off fag jokes at a steady clip, they are essentially carrying bear bells. They are warning the bears of their presence so as to be less vulnerable to attack. Let's review what to do if you are in danger of being attacked by a bear:

Grab hold of your bells and jingle, jangle, jingle.

Look big. Hold your hands up high above your head. (Review The Village People's "Y-M-C-A" for an example. We are looking for "Y.")

If attacked, immediately drop to a fetal position ("C"). Some sources report that a better outcome can be achieved by lying prone and straight, legs together, vital parts protected by the ground. It's up to you to decide which are your vital or most vulnerable parts, but rolling over and over while you think about it is not recommended.

Anything that you are carrying that might attract a bear should be placed up high in a tree or a bear pole. Determine your most attractive assets, sling them over that pole and rest easy.

If assaulted, play dead. (This will probably work in any scenario.)

Remember, although these steps may gain you some advantage, there are no guarantees when it comes to bears. Face it, you're a hopelessly attractive dude. It's the mullet, you big redwood, you.

Lee's Eel

It was recently reported that a 59-year-old Chinese man--let's call him Mr. Lee--died after having an eel inserted into his rectum. Naturally, I found this deeply disturbing. But upon further research, I was reassured that the variety of eel in question is not an endangered species. The Asian Swamp Eel, in fact, is an invasive species here in America, as it was in our Chinese friend. In a further parallel, it is beginning to dominate habitat in the southern states. Its method of introduction into this country is unknown. We do know the method of introduction into Mr. Lee.

The approved method of introducing an eel into the rectum is from the top end, breaded and fried, but unfortunately for Mr. Lee, the eel took a more direct route. It would not seem to be an easy trick, but my research shows that eels naturally hide in holes in the bottom of the ocean, so the hole in the bottom of Mr. Lee may not have been such a stretch. Insertion was also aided by the addition of alcohol, both into Mr. Lee (in sufficient quantities as to render him past objecting) and into several of his friends, who came up with the eel idea in a fit of hilarity. Doctors attending the suffering Mr. Lee days later discovered the eel, now deceased, had chewed up a considerable portion of bowel, and Mr. Lee died ten days later.

One wonders where people come up with these notions, but no matter how dumb an idea is, once it's introduced it's capable of spreading like wildfire. That's why there are so many young people shambling around with their pants under their butts, and also Birthers. And in the area of the world Mr. Lee inhabited, there is an abundance of swamp eels, and there had already been a well-publicized incident of a man inserting an eel into his own rectum in a bid to cure a bout of constipation. He was not only not relieved, but checked himself into a hospital with abdominal pains several days later. There the doctor, after consulting an x-ray, pointed out that he had an eel up his butt. "Oh that," the man said, admitting he had put it there, and apparently surprised that it might be the source of his problem. The eel was removed along with the constipation and the man continued on his merry way, sadly retaining the ability to procreate.

One can only guess that the intent was to use the eel as a sort of plumbing-snake to scour the intestinal tract clean, but unfortunately eels do not care for the contents of intestines, preferring to munch on the organ itself. Any of a number of other animals are known for eating feces, but for various reasons are not suitable candidates for rectal insertion (dung beetles: too creepy; Labrador Retrievers: too noisy). Rabbits are known to eat their own feces in case they missed anything the first time through, but they're notoriously jumpy. And rectal gerbiling, no matter what you may have heard, is a myth, so my research has met a dead end. However, two things can be concluded. One, the world has presented us with a rare opportunity to combat alcoholism and invasive Asian swamp eels at the same time. Two, we could all use more dietary fiber.

Credulous Critters

A terrific windstorm came up suddenly last summer, turning a calm blue day into a raging dark in a matter of seconds. We love storms like that, and hurried up to the tower to get a little closer to the action. "This is great," I told Dave, "and what makes it even better is I'm no longer a mail carrier. I used to hate having to walk up there at Main Street and King in a wind like this; I always thought I'd get flattened by an elm tree." Fifteen seconds later the phone rang.

It was Carl. He was calling from my old route. "You should see it, Murr," he said excitedly. "One of the big elms on Main and King just came down." We laughed and chatted and he continued to give me a blow-down by blow-down description. Now, was this an extraordinary and meaningful coincidence? Evidence of my powers of prophecy? Hardly. Those elms were destined to come down in a big wind. We were having a big wind. Down they came.

People are wired to maneuver through a sea of happenstance, trolling for connections, snagging events almost at random and examining them for significance. We draw lines in the stars and yank them towards us, until the universe becomes more cozy, more hospitable--anything but indifferent.

Some famous person dies and a few days later another one dies, because that's what we all do, and invariably someone will point out that "they always come in threes." Eventually someone else dies, the ghostly trio is wrapped up all tidy, and everyone quits counting until the next one, when it starts over.

A woman of our acquaintance with way more than the usual smarts surprised us one day by relating her visit to a roadside attraction. "It's called the Oregon Vortex," she said. "It's this weird place on the earth where the rules of gravity don't apply, water runs uphill, and you actually grow or shrink depending on where you're standing. Brooms stand on end. Pendulums hang crooked. It's amazing." We grinned in unison, and then, after a few beats, we realized she was serious.

"Jeez, honey, that's not real. They use optical illusions."

Our friend was undeterred. "No, really, it's a spherical force field of magnetic disturbances. The Native Americans won't go near it. Birds won't even nest there." Well, poo. Our nearest Native Americans, who live only a block away, have never dropped by, and birds won't nest in our yard, but you don't see me charging eight bucks a pop to get in. I kept going. "I saw the same thing back when I was growing up back east--Mystery Hole," I said. "I remember making Daddy pull over."

"Well, it is real," she insisted. "There may be more than one place like that on earth. They might have some sort of connection," she went on.

Dave piped up. "Yeah--Route 66," he said. (It has already been pointed out that Dave and I are no fun.)

The fact is, humans are naturally credulous critters. That's why so many people see the Virgin Mary in a bowl of oatmeal. If you're looking for the Virgin Mary, you could probably find her in one out of every ten bowls of oatmeal, given the right light source. There she'll be, but it doesn't seem like much to build a shrine around.

Dave and I run up to the roof whenever there is a thunderstorm. We love a good thunderstorm, and we go to the highest point in the neighborhood, just under our metal pig weathervane, to love it more thoroughly. It's not recommended. So if we get sliced out of the gene pool, don't read anything into it. It don't mean a thing. It's just natch'l.

Window Biology 101

Somewhere in this house there's proof that I have a biology degree, and although it is now entirely vestigial, I maintain it qualifies me to blather on about chickadees. If Glenn Beck believes having a microphone entitles him to have opinions, I think I'm on solid ground here. I've got biology all over my yard, ants and bees and pollen and slugs, and I could get all facty about any one of those, but I have a chickadee house four feet away from my writing chair and decided to train my biologist skills on that. Here is what I observed.

First thing a prospective pair of chickadees does is poke at each other a little, same as humans. They do this because they look exactly alike. If you're a chickadee and you poke at another chickadee and make it go "dee-dee-dee," you know you have another chickadee there, and not yourself. Otherwise you couldn't tell.

Mating pairs of chickadees are loyal. They stick together because if there were three of them they'd never be able to sort themselves out. We've had the same pair for two years now, and the only reason I know is that our pair have different voices; one of them is much higher pitched, "Oh, Ricky-ee-ee-ee." That's Lucy. Some boy birds court their ladies by puffing themselves up, same as humans. Ricky courts his by bringing her delicious items from the Lepidoptera order. I like Ricky.

After Lucy has consumed every proffered larva in the yard, she and Ricky start hauling in the furniture. They come up with a nice soft green mattress and set up shop in new-chickadee manufacture. After a bit the box begins peeping, and Lucy and Ricky start bringing in grubs at a rate of one a minute all day long. If they collaborated on bringing in one single grub the same mass as their daily accumulation, it would be the size of a sleeping bag. Fledging day is the day the children fly off, and I was very excited to witness this event, not knowing if the birds would appear as little balls of lint and drift to the ground, or show some athletic chops and zig off to a branch. After consulting the literature, I learned that chickadees hatch in two weeks and fledge when your sister comes to town and you have to be somewhere else.

After a certain period of inactivity around the bird box, we tossed out the mattress and scrubbed the floors and put an ad for the place on Craigslist. Before we had any applicants, some chickadees came back and went in and out of the house. I did not observe any new furniture going in. Sometimes one would go in and stay for quite a while. Sometimes one would hang out on a branch and get all fluffy and flappy and another one would pop a grub in its mouth. I was confused, and consulted my guide. Oh joy! Brand-new baby chickadees are, helpfully enough, identical to every other chickadee in every respect. I have checked this fact very thoroughly.

My friend Julie Zickefoose is so absorbent that she readily recognizes individual birds and can reel off the names of their grandchildren. They pop in every year to say howdy and thanks for the seeds, and she inquires after their health and puts a little something away for their tiny college funds. If Julie were here, she would probably point out any number of imaginary ways these chickadees do not resemble each other, and you can believe her and her fancy degree and years and years of close observation or no. I'm telling you there isn't a dime's worth of difference between them. They've got Cute nailed down and haven't seen fit to tamper with the template. It is only my rigorous scientific training, four years of it undertaken while simultaneously studying alcohol, sex and hallucinogens, that allows me to draw any conclusions about these clones.

To wit: it isn't Mom and Dad coming in to egg up. It's the kids. They've come back, they're hanging out, they've drug in a beanbag chair and a game of Twister and they're checking to see if there's anything in the fridge. They have no plans and no inkling they've worn Mom and Dad down to a nubbin and they're still asking for sandwiches. They're getting them, too. If Lucy and Ricky don't put their adorable feet down, those kids will never get a job.

Cool Beans

One wonders how some foods were discovered. Who was the first to defy the conventional wisdom that tomatoes were poisonous and say, "Death be damned, it just isn't pizza without it?" What lovesick sailor slapped a tongue on the first oyster? Whoever had the gumption to saw into the first chicken-fried steak? Well, two out of three ain't bad.

We have a pretty good idea how the first batch of Kopi luwak, or Civet Coffee, came about, however. Civet coffee is made from coffee beans that have passed through the digestive tract of a small mammal called the Asian Palm Civet. All the way through. The civet naturally prefers the very finest, sweetest beans at the very pinnacle of ripeness. Coffee bean farmers, who maintain a dicey profit margin as it is, naturally detest the civet. After attempts to interest the public in Fried-Civet-On-A-Stick fell flat, someone noticed that the coffee beans survived the trip through the mammals virtually intact, and thought: hmm. Let's brew some of this up and serve it to some obnoxious rich guy down at the hotel.

It was a hit. The coffee was proclaimed the richest and most flavorful in the world, "almost syrupy, thick, with a hint of chocolate." Some elements of the civets' digestive systems removed the bitterness from the beans and kicked in that certain something extra, which was not chocolate. "How are we going to sell this crap?" wondered the plantation owners, trailing a stick through clumps of civet poop, but that, of course, is the time-honored job of Marketing. And people were inclined to pay through the nose for the coffee. Good thing, too, because the gathering of fecally enhanced beans is very labor-intensive, as is the preparation of the beans (described as including a very, very, very thorough washing). Civet coffee sells for upwards of $99 a cup in London. Before you can say "Chock Full O' Doots," a new market was born.

Initially, only a few of the smaller coffee farmers collected the clumps of fecal matter, considering it their civet doody. Retrieval of the poop is a time-consuming process in the wild, where, according to Wikipedia, "a civet would defecate as a means to mark its territory." [Scientific aside: this is not the primary reason the civet defecates. And if the civet is fastidious enough to poop outside his living room, he is not necessarily "marking his territory," although I suppose it comes down to the same thing.] Eventually, farmers took to keeping civets on a short leash, and doot collection was simplified.

I do not know whether the coffee is as delightful as it is made out to be. I do know that there is a certain set of humans who are willing to pay $500 for something they wouldn't drop five bucks on. Somewhere in Asia today some man is forking over suitcases of cash for a vial of powdered tiger penis to get the same effect he could have gotten with a two-dollar porn video.

Fast on the heels of the genuine civet poop coffee market's success comes the effort to produce imitation civet poop coffee. "True civet-poop taste without the civet," says Marketing, and indeed there has been some success in replicating the civet's digestive enzyme complement and treating beans with it. The demand is expected to grow due to the dwindling of the civet population, brought about because most of the larger coffee producers would still rather kill civets than scoop poop. A lab in Vietnam got the jump on its competitors in producing simulated civet coffee during the Great Civet Constipation Epidemic of '98. Their efforts were the primary engine behind the proliferation of Grunt 'N' Grind franchises all over southeast Asia. Real or imitation, however, civet coffee is good to the last dropping.

Snowcone Boy

"No, I'm just--I'm just trying to explain to my son, here--I'm trying to explain to him that he can't always--"

The woman at the pool shook her head as if it were full of bugs. "I mean, no, we're not in line for the bathroom."

That was the question I'd asked her. She was so wrapped up in explaining something to her son that she didn't realize she didn't need to explain it to everybody. And it shouldn't have taken much explanation for her son. One smack upside the head should have cleared it all up.

The son really, really, really wanted a snow cone. There were snow cones available right outside. All mommy needed to do was fetch him one, and, as far as he could see, problem solved.

"You're not getting a snow cone."

But he really, really, really wanted one.

"Are you hungry?"

He really wanted a snow cone.

"Because if you're hungry, we can all go home right now. We can all of us, your sisters and you, we can just turn right around and go home. We can have some lunch and then we can all get in the car and come back here and then we can go swimming in the afternoon swim period."

This is the modern parenting paradigm. You negotiate by offering the child choices, and that way the child never has to feel the sting of utter refusal. First time I saw it in action, a young mother was begging her child to walk south down the street with her. The child had north in mind, and hard. Mommy took a few steps south, making wheedly noises, but her kid wasn't worried about being left behind. Sure enough, mommy doubled back and caught up with the northbound train. "We're going this way," she sang out, pointing south. "Would you like to walk, or would you like to skip?" Skipping really hit the spot. The little girl skipped north. Man, what a skipper! Mommy had lots of time to come up with a new choice before she caught up.

It's quite a time-consuming routine. It takes a bucket of patience. The woman at the pool was hanging onto hers by a very thin thread, and the son was sawing on it with a razor-blade whine. He was this close to a snow cone, he felt certain.

Three other children stood by anxiously watching negotiations. They had their swim suits on and were wrapped in towels. The pool was a few yards away. Would he call her bluff?

"Okay, let's go home," he said. Yes, he would!

The mother was completely at a loss. Her other three children were staring at her, waiting to see if they had to go back home and change and have lunch and come back in a few hours.

Presumably, the deal with offering choices is that the child will always feel a measure of control. Because he can choose, he will not feel it necessary to schedule a tantrum. Sure enough, Junior here had a measure of control. Actually, he had all of it. Mom was down to one choice, herself. Cave in, or murder him, which is still frowned upon when mothers do it, even in the blue states.

My parents were also into choices. I can't remember specifically the kinds of choices I was offered, but one of them was always "or else." If further explanation was required, it was done with the flat of the hand, which had the advantage of being quick and easy to understand. My older sister, who was smarter and more sensitive, was able to get the gist of the choice with a significantly raised eyebrow. Neither of us wasted any time on a tantrum, or the whiny run-up, neither of which ever bore fruit. Ever. A couple times a year I sensed that Mommy could be talked into buying a Danish at the Safeway because she wanted one too. That was about the extent of it. I didn't even try it if I didn't catch the Danish-aisle linger on the way to Dairy.

The neighbor girl used to get beaten with a switch. She had to go find the switch herself. That always had a sickening Jesus-lugging-his-own-cross aspect to it. But this wasn't considered unusual at the time. It did have the advantage of introducing the child to the concept that life isn't fair and she can't always have what she wants. The whole idea that I should get my way, just because, never entered my head. There were people in charge in my house, and they weren't me. This seemed normal and right. My mother told me later that I was spanked at least once a day for the first two or three years of my life, until I outgrew it. I remember two of the spankings. I didn't think I had them coming. Evidently, all the rest of them were right on the money. I bear no scars. And mom and dad probably never even considered murder. All in all, a fine system.

Back at the pool, Snowcone Boy sized up the situation and discovered he was at an advantage in the ongoing negotiations. Mom had made a tell-tale hesitation, as her other three children looked up in concern, lower lips quivering. Would she really take them all home again when they were this close to getting in the pool? Homeland Security would have assessed the Constrained Exasperation Alert in the red zone. Snowcone Boy almost grinned. He saw a snowcone in his immediate future, in exchange for agreeing not to return home for lunch, plus a forfeited candy bar to be named later. Life was good.

It was Dave who had the perfect intervention idea. At 6'5" and two hundred pounds, he was just the fellow to carry it out, too. Just clap a meaty hand on the boy's shoulder, spin him around and march him off, saying "All right, champ. Let's go meet your new mother. You've broken this one."

If everyone sends us one dollar, we can probably make bail.