Let me tell you about Ralphie the neighbour boy when I was six and seven and lived on Antrim Road always dressed in women’s clothing. Huge lobster, perhaps the hugest lobster ever, hung over the fireplace mantle in the playroom. Couldn’t tear my eyes offa it. It figured largely most likely to succeed probably. I feel like I am making this up. I can’t remember if he wore makeup. And another neighbour kid who later lost her arm. And her sister Kathleen … and a huge collection of Catholic memorabilia branding me for life. German last name. They drew on their genitals seems weird but it was true. I abstained. Use your arm while you got it I guess.

I don’t know how this emerged today. Stole it from a good friend and super writer five or six years ago. Stuffed it away so I wouldn’t lose it. Like this memory…

Once in Berkeley in the botanical gardens, I crossed a bridge over Strawberry Creek and there on the bank below me was a young woman with no arms gazing into a pool at a huge cray fish (Procambarus clarkii). I fixated on its claws. The irony, the contrast, was intense. The crustacean had powerful arms, huge pincer claws. The girl, I imagined she was as struck by the unfairness of it as I was, but that’s hubris. I can’t read minds, but I certainly can project.

Today in America it’s “Presidents Day.” We used to celebrate the birthdays of Washington (February 22) and Lincoln (February 12) separately, but Richard Nixon, assuredly deserving of no holiday of his own, combined the two and decreed the third Monday of February to be Presidents Day. Now we’ve diluted our heritage but we’ve added a three day weekend between the Super Bowl and March madness. That can’t be all bad.

When I saw it working that day in 1954, I felt like some latter-day Newton who’d just had an Idaho potato caromed off his skull. That night in my motel room I did a lot of heavy thinking about what I’d seen during the day. Visions of McDonald’s restaurants dotting crossroads all over the country paraded through my brain.
— Ray Kroc

Beth took me out to eat last night, a birthday celebration. We went to Ruth’s Chris in Middleton. The steaks there are ridiculously delicious, absurdly huge. Today we have half of my USDA prime New York strip nestled in the refrigerator next to the remains of Beth’s rib eye, the makings of at least one more dinner. Ruth’s Chris is an upscale chain that caters to a privileged clientele. Its regular customers are people who make at least twice as much as we do. Even so, the maitre d’s question put me off a little.

“Is this your first time at Ruth’s Chris?” he asked.

We had been talking about this in the car. It was definitely our first time at the Middleton Ruth’s Chris. It’s an odd name, “Ruth’s Chris.” We wondered about its provenance again last night. Wikipedia says,

The chain was founded by Ruth Fertel, a single mother of two, in 1965, after she bought the existing Chris Steak House in New Orleans. In buying the restaurant, Fertel had to agree that the restaurant keep the “Chris” name for a specified period of time. After the original location sustained a kitchen fire, she relocated the restaurant about one-half mile (0.9 km) to the west on Broad Street and renamed the rebuilt establishment “Ruth’s Chris.” Under the purchase agreement, the name “Chris Steak House” could not be used at any other location, and she did not want to lose customers already familiar with the Chris name. Fertel started to franchise the restaurant in the 1970s to locations throughout the United States and the world.

Ten years ago or so, Matt introduced us to the Beverly Hills location. We were baffled by the name then, thought maybe it was named after a favorite nephew or something. I’m glad Wikipedia has since emerged to resolve these bar-bet issues. Following that celebration of Matt’s graduation in Los Angeles, we didn’t find our way to another Ruth’s Chris for five years or so. That was in Kansas City, on the Plaza, another special occasion with Ben and Katie. Finally, Beth had enjoyed a night out at the King of Prussia, PA location across the mall from her hotel on a business trip a few years ago. That was the extent of our Ruth’s Chris experience.

So, yes–last night was our first visit to our local Ruth’s Chris Steak House. We had tried to eat there a few years ago, but in the welter of retail construction that is Middleton, we weren’t able to find it. I forget where we celebrated that night on the town. Later, we applied our amazing Google skillz and found the place, but it took a birthday to motivate us to make reservations.

The maitre d’s question had made me wonder if he thought he’d seen me stash my shopping cart and recyclable aluminum before we came in. Maybe he suspected me of pulling some of the longer butts from the ashtray, saving them for later. But, I was wearing a nice sweater, slacks, an overcoat, decent shoes… surely it’s a question he asks everyone he doesn’t know by sight, an icebreaker. I let it go. I enjoyed the meal, and topped it off with a delicious crème brulée, compliments of the house because it was my birthday. Ruth’s Chris: upscale franchise food, conveniently adjacent to the Verizon retail outlet, just across the boulevard from the Costco Wholesale Warehouse, and a hop, skip and a jump down the road from at least half a dozen retail cosmetic surgery clinics. Liposuction? You’ll need it after dining at Ruth’s Chris!

We’re enjoying a few days in Kansas City with Ben and Katie. Besides family, the trip is pretty much about food.

Highpoints of the feast thus far include:

• BBQ in Blue Springs: Jake and Susan gathered up the best ‘Que from all over town… remarkable for perfect greasy goodness were the Gates ribs.
• Burgers at the Westport Flea Market. Consensus is they’re the best burgers in KC. They must be. With promotion like the like the burgermobile (see above) could they be anything but fah-bulous? I enjoyed mine.
• Shop hopping from McGonigle’s to The Better Cheddar. McGonigle’s is a hoot. They have probably the best beef anywhere, but they also have gift shop kitsch, odd ball sundries (like CPAP wipes… where else can you find them?) and phoney-gourmet goodies. The Better Cheddar offers cheese tasting. Eventually you feel guilty enough that you have to buy something. At least I think that’s howit works.
• Last night we watched “The Town” at the AMC theater on main. The AMC serves dinner during the movie. My meal wasn’t that great, but the idea is a good one.

More calories and hearty heartland cholesterol today and then we head back home.

What an honor! I’m one of three people who were selected to blog the event. AARP will pick up my travel expenses, supply me with press credentials and a Flip camera, et voila! Le country boy becomes, for the weekend of September 30 through October 2, a genuine pro-blogger.

Ronni Bennett (Time Goes By), AARP’s Alejandra Owens (One Bite at a Time), and Craig Newmark (Craigslist) judged the contest. My fellow winners are Cowtown Pattie (Texas Trifles) and Mr. GoTo (Go To Retirement). I’m looking forward to meeting them in Orlando!

For those interested but unable to attend in person (people, for example, who may decide they’d rather not ride a Delta jet stuffed with parents and pre-schoolers on their way to Disney World) there’s a digital hook-up! Orlando@50+ will be streamed live! Registration is free and you can sign up now.

Here’s a brief flash presentation that describes what’s included in the digital session and how it works.

The only reason for time is so that everything doesn’t happen at once.
–Albert Einstein

The summer I was twelve years old was an idyll that seemed to stretch on forever. I remember bicycles and blue gills, sand and sunburn, row-boats, comic books, an old army blanket on the front lawn; and, when things got too hot, we retreated to a cool basement and spent the afternoon playing board games. The summer of 2024, my sixty-sixth summer, seems scarcely to have arrived and already it’s Labor Day. Who said “Time flies like an arrow?” It doesn’t matter. Groucho Marx made it funny and linguistically interesting when he added, “Fruit flies like a banana.”

For me, life has been flying like a rocket. It just keeps accelerating, and I suppose one day sooner or later the fuel will run out. I’ll let you know what happens then.

When I turned fifty, the AARP came calling. That was fifteen years ago and they sneaked into my life via junk mail. At fifty, I wasn’t really into the possibilities of AARP. For older people and our interests, AARP’s an effective lobby, sort of like ACORN before Andrew Breitbart and Fox News took them down. Still, long ago when the AARP solicitations began to appear, I did not take them seriously. Now the message is more immediate. I’m on Medicare. I’m paying attention. For most of my life the plight of people living on fixed incomes in the face of inflation was academic. Now I am one!

I’ve reached a time in my life when I can soak a fishing line from the bank of a river, sit on the back porch in the breeze and read a novel, or hang out with my cronies playing cards and talking smart. I certainly intend to do plenty of that! I’ve always been good at hanging out, and as for naps in the afternoon… no new thing. “When in doubt, get horizontal,” is for me a rule to live by. But what about the AARP? Somebody has to help steer. To the extent that AARP engages in advocacy for older people, I want my voice to be heard. To the extent that AARP takes positions on matters that matter to me–things like energy and the environment, poverty, nutrition, and social justice–I hope I can influence those positions. I’ve earned the right to participate. Of course, the quality of my participation is up to me.

AARP is looking for a few bloggers to cover their “Orlando@50+” gathering September 30 through October 2 in Orlando. They ask “What do you love about life after 50?” And I answer, “What’s not to love?” In the last few years, my dad had a stroke, my business collapsed, I had a back injury and a heart attack… if I threw in a train wreck, a prison, and a pick-up truck I’d have the makings of a great country western song. But it would just be one song among many. There are love songs in that jukebox, some blue grass, some get down rock and roll, some long-hair music too… rhapsodies, sonatas, and even a symphony or two. What I’ve been loving about this older age is the enjoyment I feel in slowing down a little. I’m glad to do some wood working, happy to tinker with the rototiller. I appreciate a shared meal, or a walk in the garden with Beth. I’m grateful too for acceptance I can now bring to bear on darker circumstances. The sun will come out tomorrow. What’s not to love?

I’m trying to blog my way to the AARP Orlando@50 conference. This blog post is an entry in their competition to find the official blogger to travel to and cover the event. Find out more about the conference here.

Like Bill, I’m an older guy, comfortable in the company of women and generally uneasy with the superficial bullshit that seems to color men’s relationships. My social life these days has narrowed to occasional gatherings with my wife and her friends (“the ladies who lunch”), a little jibber-jabber at the Saturday farmers market, and infrequent chats with the few neighbors we have on this thinly settled stretch of country road, conversations that center on the weather, or the merits of concrete versus asphalt, or perhaps the irony of herbicide use in prairie restoration. Like Bill, the man who inspired Ronni’s post, “I am a man with an active and inquisitive mind, and don’t give a rip about sports, hunting, drinking or being an Elk, Moose, etc. I can talk business and politics but ultimately….” Ultimately, what? God save me from one more fantasy football general manager’s lame observation about Brent Favray or the Green Bay Pigskins. Ultimately there must be something meaningful nearby, but I guess I won’t find it if I don’t start looking.

My problem is complicated by my alienation. My patriotism isn’t of the common type. I see America’s class structure as an impediment to resolving some of the most horrible problems mankind has ever faced. A handful of mellow guys drinking a few beers wouldn’t necessarily welcome a strident SOB like me into their company, nor would I likely be comfortable among them. I’m not a fisherman or a bowler. I find most religion appalling at best, often a refuge of emotional cripples and existential cowards, and always a tool for creating division and invidious distinctions. (How about New York’s bishop Dolan’s unctuously prayerful posturing around helping the muslim community find a way to compromise their plans for construction in lower Manhattan? What a tea bagger. Maybe they could move the community center out to White Plains? Arrogant jerk. A real crusader. Well, as they say, opinions are like anal sphincters. Even the bishop has one.)

You see my problem.

The other day I was waiting for Beth to retrieve some books on hold at the library. I parked at an angle across three parking spaces in front of the local senior center, trying to find notice of the hours it’s open (and indeed the info wasn’t posted anywhere). Am I a senior center kind of guy? A buddhist nun with a shaved head and a great tan on her bare arms smiled at me from behind the steering wheel of her Toyota. I thought maybe a diet of brown rice and vegetables would take a few pounds off and restore me to a more youthful look. Maybe I could augment that organic diet with a quiet afternoon of bridge every week or two. Do they do that at the senior center? Maybe there are some guys who would be into that. Or euchre. We’re big on alternative card games here in Wisconsin. Sheepshead. I haven’t played sheepshead for a long time. Maybe poker?

Maybe I could find one guy who plays chess as poorly as Don Harvey, someone I could beat about half the the time. We have a nice little coffee shop downtown, perfect for sucking down a latte and talking smart.

Or maybe it’s time for me to crank up the engagement level and hang out with my peeps again, the socialists and greens and pacifists. More pragmatically maybe I should put some energy into assuring Senator Feingold’s re-election and lending a hand to the Tom Barrett campaign while I’m at it. None of these things is happening in my life right now, but I’m sure there are some men around here who share my interests and concerns. How about a woodworking class at some adult education venue? You’re never too old to amputate a thumb with a power tool.

The online world is wonderfully seductive. I can spend a lot of time virtually adjacent to guys I enjoy, guys who make me laugh and guys who catalyze the flames of righteous anger in opposition to the egregious nonsense that passes for politics these days. But there’s something missing in the virtual connection, something that cyber-singularity enthusiast and champion of immortality Ray Kurzweil denies. The nuances of facial expression, the spontaneity of laughter… these and so many other gestures are missing from cyberspace and the single-minded dedication to life extension, hell they’re missing from Facebook and twitter and the single-minded dedication to wasting time. I hope Ronni’s friend Bill finds his way toward developing some rewarding mature male friendships. For me, I think it all might start with the command from some internal cop: “Sir. Step away from the keyboard.”

Nice distinction. here’s something tangential…

Instead of thinking of attention deficit as a disability or an inability to focus, we might think of it as a matter of not enough bandwidth to pay attention to everything. In kids, attention deficit may well mean a lack of parental attention leading to a disorder that presents as hyperactivity and thus brings the needed attention to the kid. I’ve long thought of attention deficit as an internal thing facing out, a personal flaw. This is the first inkling I’ve had that attention deficit works the other way too.

Another line of thinking relates to “coherence.” In this inter-webby world there are often so many tabs open in our browsers that we have difficulty pulling all our lines of attention together into something coherent. This lack of coherence can actually lead one to incoherence in the usual sense of the word. The disjointedness of the torrent of jumbled information that surrounds us, the many facets of our experience reflected at once through hyperlinks, can be the root of an inability to think or express one’s thoughts clearly.

To contextualize that comment a little bit… a lot of us don’t have to worry about emptiness because we fill it whenever things reach that scary level approaching empty. Some people fill up on hyperlinks, some people fill up on beer. There are kids who fill up on disorderly behavior, creating a mini-maelstrom in their surroundings, attracting negative attention which, to them, is better than no attention at all.

For people so affected, the challenge is to clear that space, to really empty it, and then expand into it in a positive way.

I’m heads down into my third and final day of upgrading this PC from Windows XP Media Edition (SP3) to Windows 7 Ultimate. It’s about a three hour job and–yes–I am a terrible procrastinator and foot-dragger with the flighty attention span of a carefree chickadee on a summer day, so let that disclaimer explain why I–a seasoned systems professional–continue to dither around and about a project that should have been done on a Monday morning.

I blame it on twitter. General Motors International Operations has a “social media” team. Who knew? The news makes me feel like someone slapped me in the face with a trout. It only took fifteen or twenty years to get the message out to the corporate culture that the mediating influence of this internex thing is central to global communications. Next thing you know the corporate marketing types are cluttering up the twitter stream.

GM Social Media Team member, Gluten Free, chocolate loving, shoe crazed, newlywed twenty something. Follow my global travels: annalisabluhm.posterous.com

Must one not explore the nuanced tweets of such a person? Must one not follow her on her gluten-free gastronomic adventure in the far east?

It’s easy to lose track of the data migration path from XP to the external hard drive and back to the local drive after Windows 7 Ultimate is installed. Windows 7 Ultimate sports a feature called “aero.” Ford has a van named Aerostar. I wonder if Ford marketing is as twitterfied as GM International Operations. One way to find out…

Bada bing! Hey there! ScottMonty is using twitter.

Head of social media at Ford Motor Company, husband, dad, host of http://ihearofsherlock.com, and a generally nice guy. Formerly from Boston.

Yes, Scott Monty is using twitter, has been for the last three years. In that time he’s pumped out over 18,000 tweets, befriended over 32,000 people and attracted almost 38,000 followers.

Fascinating.

This dreck can keep you thrashing about in your own head and prevent any work from getting done. So, where was I?

Photo by Jurvetson

Rootkit? Oh. I didn’t tell you. Malware forced my upgrade to Windows 7. I had a rootkit hiding somewhere, a nasty piece of code that randomly redirected my searches to searchfindsite.

Anyway, the whole upgrade process was easy as pie. The file transfers worked fine. The reinstallation of programs, while not easy as pie nor even a piece of cake, went fine. Windows loads updates and patches all the time, and eventually I hope to be caught up. Every day in every way I am getting PCier and PCier. Seriously, the OS is so feature rich I’ll have to study to take advantage of it. I’ll also be studying MS Office 2024. Since Office 2024 is out there in the hands of brave early adopters and since I didn’t really pay all that much attention to the bells and whistle on Office 2024, I figure getting up to speed on 2024 will prepare me for 2024. Really…

I think I’ll upgrade the Vaio next, and then maybe the netbook. Glutton for punishment? Masochist? Not really. It’s just that the tool set is ever changing and it pay$ to keep up.

I thought that this was a general function of aging and I accepted my decline, albeit sadly. I may have been premature. It’s possible that my flat affect and memory condition were a product of simvastatin. Of course I may be rapidly descending into a state of senile dementia and we all should ignore any of my ideas, consider them the ravings of a mad man.

Statins have been shown to improve the survival chances of atherosclerotic patients. I’m one of those. I shouldn’t mess with my meds. q.e.d.

OTOH (as the messagers using a shorthand for the common phrase “on the other hand” say), since I stopped the statins I haven’t felt quite as stupid. OTOH, I stopped taking my statins, so what does that tell you?

I’ve an appointment with the cardio guy soon. In all likelihood I’ll remember to bring this up since I’m not taking the statins. OTOH, I may not live long. Just a joke… macabre sure, but not to be taken seriously. Informed opinions abound regarding the “statin stupids,” my self-diagnosed condition. A few links:

• Do Statins Make You Stupid?
• Do Statins Make You Stupid?
• Can a Drug That Helps Hearts Be Harmful to the Brain?

Is this a compass or a map?

I think I’ve taken this quiz before and I haven’t moved much from the Gandhi/Dalai Lama quadrant. Probably haven’t made much progress walking the talk either. Thanks to Pa^2 for tweeting the link (and posting to posterous, and blogging it, and facebooking it….) Damn thing showed up everywhere this morning–meaning that Bill has got his online mindstream pretty well integrated I think.