Seriously?

Apparently I don't even have to be present to crunch up my pickup. Nor did I have to leave it parked in the middle of some road somewhere.

Here is a picture of my truck innocently parked all straight and proper, exactly where I left it at 9 a.m.:



Here is the front end of my truck when I returned at 6:45 p.m.:



Wait a minute. Rewind. WTF? How the hell does a vehicle parked head-in up against an embankment end up with a crunched front end? That was exactly my thought when I saw the note on my windshield and walked around the truck to see the crushed grill, bent bumper and obliterated front headlight assembly.

An errant boulder? A couple of hockey players in a parking lot brawl? Joyriding considerate thieves who decided to return the vehicle to the exact same parking space? Demonic possession? Climate change?

I called the number on the slip of paper and was greeted by something nearly as absurd.

My truck was attacked by an embankment-jumping Ford Focus that had been parked right about where that bumper from another car is poking out in the left-hand side of the first photo. Seems the person starting the Focus didn't know about that pesky quirk standard transmissions have. You know the one. It dictates that a person would be wise to take the vehicle out of first gear before starting it. One turn of the key and apparently this little Focus popped right over the curb and down the embankment, neatly lodging its tenacious self in my front grill.

Super Focus was gone when I got there this evening, a note from the driver and a crunched truck all that remained from the circus. I still have no idea how they got the damn thing dislodged. I'll have to ask the kid next time I talk to him.

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Final count

Posted today at the borough's Web site. Questioned and absentee ballots are included in this count.

Tammie Wilson--8263 (47.57 percent)
Luke Hopkins--9107 (52.43 percent)

Whew!

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Three dozen

It's after midnight and I have entered the last half of my 30s.

I'm always a bit contemplative at anniversaries of any sort. I find value in pondering the past, seeing where I have come from. And I have, but just briefly. The last year was, by most accounts, among the darkest in recent memory. I know where I was this time last year. It warrants just a glance. An acknowledgment, and little else, of how much of the present I missed then.

My teenage son woke me up this morning with "Mom, can I have $5? Oh, and happy birthday." I slipped him the cash, laughed and dozed off. My colleagues brought cake and coffee. My phone and chat window and e-mail chirped with greetings throughout the day, short, but noticed, reminders of the richness of my life.

After work, I joined some friends for dinner at a local restaurant. I looked around the table. My youngest daughter and my friend's daughter were giggling at the far end. My teenage son and daughter sat across from them, looking genuinely happy and amused at their antics. At my right was a man I adore and across the table was a woman who took time she could scarcely afford to spend a few hours with us. My dear friend, and architect of the evening, and her husband rounded out the group. And as they sang and I blushed, I wondered if any of them knew how happy I felt just to have them all there.

I arrived home to a message from my father, wishing me a happy birthday. My children scurried to their bedrooms to gather the gifts they had wrapped two days prior, the ones they bought when my parents drove 220 miles round trip to take them shopping for me. My son rummaged for candles, his voice, childlike with a man's tenor, directing me to sit down at the dining room table. They sang as they marched out carrying presents and cake, their faces bright. A flurry of paper and singing cards and "open this one next, Mom" followed, the little one wiggling with excitement and the teenagers simply themselves; cool doesn't matter.

At times in my life I have expended great amounts of energy chasing some distant happiness. And while goals are important, I hope that I can remember the value of looking, not ahead, but around. So much of what I need, I already have.

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Munkisms overheard

This is what your kid is REALLY doing instead of paying attention in class.

"I do all sorts of things when I am bored: play with pencils, stare at the zipper on my pants."

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The virtual I, resurrected

Cocktails

Looking for results? Visit the Fairbanks North Star Borough online.

Grab a beer, sit down and join us:




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Black hole

I was reminded yesterday of how truly awful people can be to each other. It is remarkable how, under the guise of some twisted idea of love, a person will hold on so tightly to another. His suffocating grip first extinguishes all joy from the life of the object of his obsession. And as this poor soul, like a kitten in the grip of a clueless toddler, tries to escape, her captor simply holds on tighter. Eventually, joy is not the only casualty. Eventually the life leaves her eyes, her ambition dies, as does every other thing that gave her worth as a human being. What's left is limp, empty, lifeless, a shadow of its former self. And still the captor clings desperately to his possession. She might be nearly dead, but she is still his.

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Fear of hose clamps

I just realized that it has been the better part of 9 months since I changed the water filter at my well head. As a result, the water is nearly at "drool" stage coming out of my shower head. The water's clean, but the water pressure is less-than-ideal, given that the filter between the pump and the house is clogged with rust.

Usually I am so good. But, confession time. I think I may have an unnatural fear of my water filter. To be more specific, I fear the hose clamps that surround the water filter. The last time I tangled with those bad boys, I ended up with this:



Lemme tell you, stitches on your knuckle are SO not fun. Neither is seeing your bone through the jagged flesh of your mangled knuckle.

But, alas, if I ever hope to take an invigorating shower again, I had best learn to get over my clamp-o-phobia, grab the strap wrench and get my scaredy ass down in the basement.

And don't even get me started on the spiders.

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Fire! Fire! Fire!

Starvation Gulch, the annual fall tradition at my alma mater:



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The aficionado

Overheard:

"I have discovered that boxed wine can be pretty fabulous because there's a lot of it in there."

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Boggles

Let me get this straight:

If someone loves you, she is naturally going to hurt you. One way to prevent this from happening is to deliberately do things that push her away or make her understand that she can't possibly REALLY love you. This goes hand-in-hand with assuming that everything she does has some ulterior and harmful motive. It's important to regularly inform her that she is trying to hurt you.

If you love someone, that very fact means that she will hurt you. The best course of action is to reject what your heart knows and pretend it doesn't exist.

Really, the safest course of action is to push away those who really love you and embrace those who don't. People who don't love you are the only ones you can be sure won't hurt you. They don't care enough to hurt you.

This, near as I can tell, is the reality for the bruised souls, the lessons they learned too early from the people who were supposed to love them the most. It's frustrating. It's heartbreaking. And, at times, I wonder if that damage can ever be repaired.

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Court-ordered abuse

I am close to two women who have children with men who were unable to communicate without using their fists. We're not talking losing their temper. We're not talking getting carried away once or twice. We're talking people who beat the crap out of the mother of their child. These individuals are manipulative, controlling and utterly without remorse. They don't have anger management problems. They have problems with the women in their life being autonomous human beings.

So when these women finally were brave enough to escape the control and violence, what did the court system, in its ultimate wisdom, do to protect them and their children? Why, it ordered 50-50 legal custody, of course.

For those of you who do not have joint custody situations, this means both parents must agree on most of the stuff that lies outside the basic day-to-day routines. Things like medical care and education and activities must be agreed upon. Sometimes, the requirements are even more specific than that. The idea, on its face, is to ensure that both parents contribute equally to the raising of the child and that they cooperate to the child's best interest. It works very, very well for lots of functional co-parenting arrangements.

When you award joint legal custody in a domestic violence situation, however, the dynamic is different. It forces the victim to continue interacting with his or her abuser. It forces the victim to ask permission for basic parenting actions. It gives the abuser a very powerful tool to continue controlling and mentally abusing his or her victim.

It amounts to court-sanctioned abuse until the child hits the age of 18, and it is utterly inexcusable.

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Perhaps I should go shopping

My 15-year-old observed this evening, "All we have in our fridge is beer and mayonnaise." The sad thing is, he's not too far off. Bad Mommy. Time to hit the store.

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An experiment

This from a friend on Facebook:

"My sources confirm that there's a rumor in wasilla that sarah palin is an extra terrestrial. sources say a small mole at the base of her neck covers the "data port" she uses to upload information about her conservative base to the mother ship, a piece of which recently crashed into the planet jupiter. (ok, now i just have to sit back and wait for the blogosphere to pick up on this)."

I am reposting for the sole purpose of watching the Web stats and seeing how many people really ARE Googling "Sarah Palin" and "extraterrestrial" in the same search. It's social research, right?

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Chilly

I could see my breath when I got home from a friend's house early this morning. It was 44 degrees. Fall in Alaska is manic, at least for me. It's as if that first chilly morning flips a switch and all of the sudden I realize the snow is coming. And that means I need to harvest the garden and pick berries and cut that firewood I have been putting off all summer long. Faster, faster, faster. Every morning is a little voice whispering, "It's coming. It's coming. Hurry."

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Soulful songs

I am lucky to have friends with diverse musical tastes. Every once in a while, I fall instantly in love. Leonard Cohen was one. Rocco DeLuca and The Burden: brilliant. This guy is another. Heard it late Friday. Bought his most recent album Sunday.

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Overheard

Not a lot to add to this one:

"All you gotta say is 'I am roasting an entire pig' and I'm there!"

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Life ring?

The list of stuff I need to do is growing as quickly as my motivation is declining. I'd like to say that it's an unusually large wave of things I'm responsible for, but that would be an incorrect metaphor. It's more like a large river: constant and over my head. No wonder I feel like I am drowning most of the time.

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Time travel

Simply looking out the window isn't enough. She needs to be higher, so she drops the tailgate, picks her way around the bicycle and camp chairs stashed in the back and crawls up to the roof of the pickup.

There. The city spreads out below, finally visible above the tops of the trees. A cigarette burns in her hand, her eyes scan the sky above, a hint of wispy clouds visible in the sky, barely light from the late summer sun. The air is cool, laced with the sound of those songs playing against the hushing wind.

She takes a long drag off the cigarette and exhales slowly, time traveling. Countless hours spent in this spot. The windows were always closed then, the music loud enough to shake the windows and dampen her cries, screams, sobs, but little else. It never mattered how loud it was, how the bass reverberated through her body, it couldn't distract from the agonizing twists and tears. Screaming was really the only option in those moments when her soul was flying apart.

Inhale.

Exhale.

Come back.

She looks up and finds quiet in her insignificance under the sky.

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Darkness descends

Yesterday afternoon, I watched from my office window as the column of smoke rose from the flats on the other side of the Tanana River. By evening, it had grown to a boiling cloud, sickly gray, visible above all the trees and buildings.

Today, the wind shifted, and the blackness rolled toward town, apocalyptic. The sun, first tinged red by the choking cloud, eventually disappeared as ash began to fall from the sky.

The world flattens when the smoke comes. The trees and hills become nothing more than silhouettes, cardboard cutouts stacked indeterminable distances away. The light is jaundiced, a symptom of air unfit to breath. And it is quiet. The birds don't sing and the ashy blanket seems to dampen every sound, save the waves of wind that fan the flames and bring more smoke.

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Mortal deity

"God is dead," the little one informed me. "He lives up in the sky and that's where dead people live."

Oh really?

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