Waltzing in Perdition | Todd Clary

Off Script

Todd Clary — Wed, 16 May 2012 20:22:20 +0000

Almost 20 years in and it’s nothing like I planned. Worse, as convention goes, I’ve failed utterly and don’t think I’m kidding.

The couples cascading around us on their upward trajectories in ever-increasing marital perfection…or imploding under the weight of their own Becoming (read: sometimes the village is burned to save the town), aren’t helping. That is, to the extent that I’m forced to acknowledge they exist as constant reminders to the extent Cute Redhead and I don’t just break the mould, we blast it to fine dust.

She’s up as much as I’m down, and we pass one another as we trade those places more than we luxuriate in any same place at the same time. I’m tuned into the Very Now and she’s on a frequency the Voyager II abandoned somewhere past Neptune. What I think is hilarious tends to tender The Eyebrow. What she thinks is Just Right often lands in me as alien to put it mildly.

And yet.

We get each other. In ways only she and I get, we get each other. Be it base familiarity or intuitiveness, it’s our Us and it has expanded and spread to every corner of our years and worked its way through the whole of the dough.

And yet.

It’s not at all looking like what I’d have scripted.

I’d have been winning the lion’s share of the bread (I’m not) (I never have), and she’d be one of those wives who spend her days looking for opportunities to tell the world how amazing I am…like how I see so many ladies do all over Facbook, recruiting effusive exclamation points to drive the point home (she’s not) (she never has). It has been, therefore, tempting to mistake what I am tempted to classify as mistakes as big mistakes. And I almost did. That is, until I stepped out the front door listening to a new arrangement of an old song I hadn’t heard in years. And, in the space between our threshold and the front walk, there cascaded over me an understanding and a vantage point I’ve been luxuriating in for the past two days: the gifts of What Really Matters come not because we do anything right. They come because we get precariously close to mistaking all our mistakes for the last word on the story of our lives so far, making them not boons but mercies.

I was this close to judging my life and deciding it lacking in enough to render a final word none too flattering.

But then the song cut into the sequestered jury inside my head where I was hanging in the balance arraigned for everything I’ve done wrong. And with a perspective I hadn’t allowed myself. Where what I’ve never done right is shown for what it really is…which is exactly what it needed to be.

Because it would have been cruel to consign her to her equal. It would have been a capsize to indict her to a man who did as she expected, or worse, what she thought she wanted.

Because what I needed was a fixed point of reference in my universe and what she’s been gifted with is ground falling out from under her feet and pushing her over the edge.

Because the last thing I am is predictable and the last thing she needs is something she can control.

Because the last thing she is is unpredictable and the last last thing I need is something I can’t depend on.

It’s Going To Be Great

Todd Clary — Mon, 14 May 2012 15:27:12 +0000

I saw a neighbor do this a few years back and I thought it made brilliant sense. See those two little guys? Well, they’re not going to be little for long. Those are pumpkins. And they’re going to be great. Great pumpkins, Charlie Brown, and I ain’t lyin’. I’ve meant to try this forever and I finally made good on the idea: planted the suckers right by the front porch so that by the time Halloween rolls around, these dudes will be big enough to roll down the street juggernaut-style.

And you there! Get to work!

Leaden

Todd Clary — Sun, 13 May 2012 23:53:07 +0000

I was picking up a kid at a soccer practice and making my way to the field when the sudden sunlight blinded me. What had been a darkening, leaden sky promising the storm suddenly surrendered the sunset. Right below the storm clouds and right before it fell behind the mountains, making the most out of a space of sky no larger than the thumb I held up to block it.

But that was all it needed to slip in and cast this ominous light.

Beautiful.

WiP Sponsors & Advertising

Todd Clary — Sun, 13 May 2012 16:26:46 +0000

More info on this coming very soon!

Hell’s Kitchen

Todd Clary — Wed, 21 Dec 2011 04:31:08 +0000

Okay, today was not enjoyable. And by ‘it sucked’ I mean it was not enjoyable.

I had to see to a few meetings during which niceties and composures listed precariously close to capsizing until, capsizing, everything turned upside down. And by ‘it sucked’ I mean it was not enjoyable.

It’s times like this I drive home from the Big Bad World thanking God in heaven I have a warm, welcoming home to come home to. And it’s thoughts of gratitude just like that one that oft-times have me calling home to let them know I’m thinking of them and will be there shortly. I like to hear the chipper giggly laughter of kids in the background and the hum of a household fairly carbonated with life and drama three-kids strong. I like to be reminded that no matter how Not Nice the world is outside these walls, there is nothing so Not Nice that the love and acceptance I find when I cross my threshold can’t be dissolved in a big giant family hug.

And then I woke up.

From the nightmare of the day, that is. Which was quite the wakeup call, all things considered. And not a phone call. Not at first, anyway. It was a text exchange with Beta Male that went like this:

“When r u coming back?”

“45 minutes. Everything okay? My meeting is going longer than I expected.”

“Yeah we made some failure banana bread and it didn’t taste right, soooooo….yeah.”

Lord.

(calls home) “Hey kiddo.”

“Hey dad.”

“Everything okay?”

“Not with the banana bread. We undercooked it and then kept on cooking it.”

“Yeah I read that part. I’ll be home in a few minutes. I hope you cleaned the kitchen up though.”

“Don’t worry, we did. We cleaned it just like you left it.”

Which was such a happy thought that last few miles on the way to house with the yellow police tape surrounding it.

Because apparently “We cleaned it just like you left it” means I left it like a murder scene.

Peregrinus

Todd Clary — Sun, 18 Dec 2011 16:42:54 +0000

I remember the day he and I met and the expression on his face. It’s the same expression I see more often than not and always looks like he’s got something off-the-beaten-path interesting to talk about, just the two of us, in some corner while others make superficial observations about everything else. And, trust me, he usually does. And we usually do. Talk alone in some corner, that is. And with complete disregard for other conversations.

He’s got a renaissance tack into life that has surrendered the number of times I can count on one hand when the words, “I don’t know” came out of his mouth. Which is not to say he’s a know-it-all. At all. Because he’s not. For as broad as his experiences are, for as voracious a reader he is, for as muti-talented a human he happens to be…he keeps a disproportionately vulnerable posture to the world around him. And in the best way. Meaning he seems to live in a state of perpetual discovery and openness to creation. Or evolution. Or design. Or writing. Or politically volatile topics. Or what men in their ignorance call magic. Or what he and I both bat back and both like cats playing with a mouse before getting bored (that’d be what the world deems ‘religious’) — and one of the most conversational relationships with God I’ve ever known. In that regard, he reminds me of Edith Schaeffer, the wife of the late Francis Schaeffer. She could participate in a conversation with eighty people (I’ve seen it), without breaking stride once over the course of five hours (seen that too), meandering into, through, around, and over a vast array of seemingly unrelated thoughts and ideas—until it was just she and the last person talking long into the night (one of the best conversations I’ve ever had). And following Kendall’s range of topic is not unlike Edith’s. Which means you’re better off enjoying the scenery instead of trying to place your foot in exactly the same spot on the trail.

That’s just a little bit about Kendall Ruth. Here’s a little bit more:

1. I know you journal. A lot. If you turned one year back, would you say things have changed a little or a lot? One would only hope things changed. Damn the man who fears change. We are organic, so if we aren’t changing we are dead. Are there things that seem to rear their heads that I’d rather just lop off and be done with them? Of course. One of the bigger changes is how I perceive my past, my story. More than ever I am persistently pushed to look beyond regrets or shames, drop perceived failures by the way side, shift my position in the room to see the work of art from an angle that the Artist intended.

2. What is the one thing you cannot live without? Silence …and Coffee, but then that’s two things. Granted one helps the other happen.3. Music: live mediocre or recorded brilliant? A great live performance can’t be beat.I still remember the lighting, the sound, the sense of the sacred watching U2 on the Joshua Tree Tour or sitting front row at Midnight Oil or catching Dizzy Gillespie in a small jazz venue a year or two before he died. But mediocre live isn’t worth the time. Recorded Brilliance is a rarity…kind of like a great live performance. Daniel Lanois has the might be the best at producing recorded brilliance.

4. What’s the nicest thing anyone ever said about you? “You saved my life”

5. Now what’s the most inaccurate thing anyone ever said about you? ”You saved my life”

6. It is twenty years in the future. Supreme World Chancellor Newt Gingrich has banned the works of J.R.R. Tolkien. The one remaining volume is trapped in a burning building. You can either save it or rescue your fiancee trapped in an adjoining room. Which do you save? Don’t be silly. Sauron would never ban Tolkien, and what was Kit doing in a burning building in the first place, a building where they kept the only remaining copy of LOTR? She obviously was reading it so there would be no problem saving both.7. Are you the type of person who can travel a foreign country alone? I have. A few times. So yes.

8. How does God speak into you most often? Speak into, as opposed to “with” or simply “to”? Hmm…numerous different and creative ways – in a grove of Aspens with the wind blowing to clap their leaves like a thousand little hands; or like the other day standing before Clifford Still’s “PH 235″ painted at the end of World War II, seeing brilliant yellow tearing through the canvas of black tar and thick texture as if to speak of hope UNDER the darkness; in moments with my soon-to-be wife as she shares her joys, her sorrows; and most consistently in the silence of mornings over the past 28 or so years that I ‘ve been listening.

9. Ocean or mountains or desert? Mountains that roll into Oceans, with good surf. Oh wait that’s called New Zealand and my time there wasn’t long enough.

10. If you spent a few hours with any person in the world to give them advice (and they have to listen), who would it be and what would you tell them? It’d be my kid(s), if I get to have one or more. Advice? Regardless of everyone’s perceptions trust your gut/spirit and you will have a much more enjoyable, generative life than if you play it safe listening to your head all the time. That said, start discovering early and regularly what is your gut/spirit and what is not. The stuff you didn’t have words for as a child yet you couldn’t help live out of? That’s closer to Reality than anything you will learn in school, read in a book, watch on a screen. People are not out to get you. Nobody is giving much time worrying about what you are doing with your life because they are just as self-centered as you are, but you won’t “get” this until you in the winter of your years. Abundance is the default of the Universe, not scarcity. Find out where the boundary lines are, because there is enormous freedom within them. And, yet, the boundary lines are much much further out than you or anybody else are comfortable with, so you have to get out of the sandbox and explore the Playground.

And finally, the only certifiable guaranteed certainty you have is that you will be dead someday…everything else is a possibility.

11. Describe your perfect day. I’ve had quite a few, so there is such a thing as more than one. Most involve some kind of adventure (many with a surfboard and an ocean), good drink, and maybe a cigar and a view.

12. Now describe the day you proposed to your fiancee. (that is if she survived the burning room thing). It was a Saturday in May. I called her dad in the morning to ask his blessing. I am not even sure he actually gave it as he was up in a tree with a chainsaw and he seemed more nervous than I was in asking. I intended to ask her the following day, but as time went on I decided to make a go of it that evening. Skipping ahead to the actual event, I said we should go for a walk as it was a perfect spring evening in Boulder. I had in mind to ask her on a playground – sensing that I’d prefer to have that metaphor as bases for our marriage. As we walked, I was leading towards a playground I had in mind – me jingling the ring in my pocket. I turned the corner to see a giant backhoe and piles of dirt where the playground used to be. It was a rather sad sight – jungle gyms turned over, swing sets on a slant. I was crushed. I kept trying to find another playground, but we eventually walked up a path that ended appropriately enough at an overlook with a bench called “Lovers Hill” – it looks out over the whole of Boulder Valley and up to the Flatirons. I hardly even recall what I said other than asking her to be my wife. Afterwards, we walked down the street each calling our parents, swinging by a friends so she could share the news. I was starving, so we walked to Pizzeria Locale and they know us well—it was like being with family as we celebrated over a glass of wine and some of their amazing pizza.

13. Time to plug yourself: tell us about your web site, your writing, that Inkling thing up north and anything else you’d like to. Give us some links, too. Go. Image + Word. I tend to regularly move between the written and the visual, one informing the other. It’s more a summary portfolio that came about when I did a showing here in Boulder, and FoxNews Business decided to broadcast for the day from the location. My photography became part of the scene setting for various interviews. For about seven years I have written blog called The Ink. It started as a practice in writing for an audience of whom I did not know and had no control over the outcomes, a getting out the door of sorts. Though, now I contribute regularly to The Curator many of the kinds of writing I once did on the blog.

“That Inkling thing up north” is The Kindlings. I am not exactly sure how I stumbled into the Kindlings. What caught my attention is the conversation, without pretensions, that is happening about thought, the arts, faith, life, culture and more at an intelligent and generative level. From my own experience in relationships with these friends, who happen to be extraordinary artists & thinkers, (not to mention a good taste in drink) I am challenged to engage my own life and other’s with a wider scope. For instance, once while on the road with Nigel and Dick, they were asking me about the areas in which I create as an artist while inquiring about my background and what led me to where I am. I spoke of how only recently – the last 5 or so years – have I felt a compelling to live out of the artistic natures with which I was made; to accept that I am, and have always been, a Writer, a storyteller – thus the Photographer in me. That said, I have quite a few years under my belt of helping other’s start their businesses. This has given me a diverse background in the business arena. I have always wrestled with these two arenas, and had the sense that I was supposed to be in the artistic but keep finding myself in the business. I have seen this as a fault. As I shared this, it was clear they thought my sense of fault was absurd. It was pointed out that most artist don’t understand how to run a business and that many business-oriented people are lost when it comes to the artistic, the abstract and the need for these elements in a business realm. I was pushed to consider the unique space I occupy as I have experience in both realms and am able to move between them with a confident fluidity…if only I would give my self a chance. In short, these are professionals that raise the bar for me, inviting me to step up and out of small living on all fronts, and not just for my own benefit, but on a larger scale.

As for plugs, I am currently selling a bunch of 18×12 gallery quality prints over at my Etsy store, with $20 of every sell to going to either International Justice Mission or Blood:Water Mission. As much as it’s to help pay my bills, I am more excited to be able to help these organizations. Art by its nature is generous and generative. So I’d much rather sell a piece that also helps fight human trafficking, or HIV or provides something as simple as clean water than simply to make a buck or two.

14. e-reader or organic book? Defend your choice. So far organic is still my go-to. I am still adjusting to ipad reading, but there is a limited space that comes with a book. I make too many notes in the margins of my favorite books and though you have the option in a digital realm, it’s lacking tactile feedback. Plus, you can’t dog ear a screen. It’s a singular thing that requires full attention when it’s a physical book and I have enough shiny objects in life to….15. Anyone you’d like to hit? Anyone who takes themselves too seriously.

16. Your dog gets really sick. The vet says he needs an operation which will completely cure him but will cost $10,000. Gonna pay? What if it’s your cat? No pet is getting ten grand unless it’s a monkey that can write like Shakespeare.

17. Have you ever seen insanity where you later saw creativity? Wasn’t that how this all started? “And the Spirit moved across the waters…” I suspect most of us could say Life feels very much like this. I mean, what person has not thought their life is a mess – an act of insanity – only to discover with time that something creative beyond their own imagination was actually taking place?

18. Barry Manilow or pour hot tar in your ears? (had to ask) Tar, unless it’s Live Manilow and you are on your fifth ga..um, er..greyhound.

19. Here it comes: the super power question. And I’m taking Flying out of your choices. Everyone picks flying. Impress me. Something along the lines of Nightcralwer’s, without the blue skin and tattoos or tail. Teleportation with invisibility in the shadows could make for all kinds of fun. Plus, you’d save a fortune on air travel.

20. Last one: if Happiness was currency, what kind of work would make you rich? Far too many people of faith lack an honest, charitable engagement with ideas or faith that they don’t understand or agree with, with the Arts, with much of anything that might feel like a threat. This dumbfounds me. And there are plenty of intelligent people of no faith that carry the same threat posture, if not condescending pretension.

O Christmas Tree, O Christm—dammit.

Todd Clary — Mon, 12 Dec 2011 20:51:24 +0000

The season, the snow, the happiness filling every hoping heart; the quick dashes out into the festive shops to grab a few surprises and dart back home in time to—sonofabitch.

God Loves Me And Wants Me To Be Happy

Todd Clary — Mon, 12 Dec 2011 17:07:15 +0000

This might seem like a product endorsement but it’s not. And though the product in the photo up top is quite worth an endorsement, believe me, that’s not what I’m all amped up about.

So yesterday we decided to go to (brace yourselves) church. As a family. As in together. As in there was a time I wondered if ever doing that again was wise considering the time we went to Las Vegas. As a family. As in together. As in I’ve been half-expecting the next time we all walk into church at the same time will be the day “Family Bursts Into Flames” is tweeted all over Twitter.

And, more to the point, though I love the idea of church of a Sunday morning…the typical packaging? Not so much.

But somewhere in the recent months something stirred inside that found me (brace yourselves again) actually wanting to suffer through the act of getting the family up and moving and out the door and not killing each other and not fighting over who sits in the middle back seat this time and not regretting that there isn’t a cash bar at the church when families get there (go ahead and laugh…they’d make a fortune). All so we can then stand and sing songs we’re all acting like we love dearly when that is SO NOT TRUE.

Which I know is blasphemous to even suggest but I really don’t care. Most (not all, but most, sorry) songs sung on a Protestant Sunday have this one feature in them I’ve never been able to square with and can no longer keep inside. And it’s this: If it was a Tuesday afternoon and these songs came over the radio and they were the last songs on earth, we’d reach for the radio to turn it off so fast we’d careen into the guard rail and go flying over the edge of the interstate. Which would be better than suffering Lame Songs That Are Lame And Lamely Sung But We Can’t Ever Say That Because Someone Put A Fish On Them.

[end rant]

Except that the music was great. And done well. In fact, more than well. I’d actually have survived that drive down the interstate if it were Tuesday afternoon instead of Sunday morning.

And the teaching wasn’t just good. It was brilliant in so many facets…and so refreshing to hear my pastor (also a friend) speaking from his whole heart with his real voice…that I couldn’t resist emailing him right then and there to tell him so. Our pastor happens to be the very person who stirred in me a deep love (and very high expectation ever since) of rigorous excavation of Scripture. And he didn’t disappoint. So much so that I found myself (brace yourself again) picking up my little leather-bound Bible I had with me…so that…I could…

EMAIL HIM FROM THE PEW! HA!

Which would normally get me The Look from Cute Redhead. But I was willing to risk it because I was in that good a mood. So I risked it.

After the service Awesome Pastor Friend saw me and (I promise I’m not making this up) got down on his knees in authentic wonder that “Todd Clary should grace us all and darken the door of the sanctuary!”

“Har har, smart ass.” He laughed. So did I.

“You actually came?!”

“Ha ha yeah. Can you believe it?”

“No. You lost? And we’re you Tweeting during the service?”

“Ha! NO! Geez. But I did send you an email during it!”

“Oh. Well I wish someone would Tweet during the service.”

*blinks* ”Um. What?”

“Yeah…I really wish someone would. I wish someone would be doing the real social networking thing and putting the word out, commenting on the service and everything else. But I can’t find anyone to do it. I can’t find anyone who can actually pay attention and be on their phone at the same time.”

*blinks again*

[.•.*•Time Travel 1981 Flashback Sequence•*.•.]

Me: *draw draw draw

Teacher: “…and perhaps Mr. Clary would be so kind as to tell us what we just covered in chapter six. That is unless his very important drawing on the desk — again — has taken up too much of his precious time.”

Me: *perfect regurgitation of chapter six demonstrating Freak Brain’s Ability To Compartmentalize And Multi-task.

Teacher: *Owned. And not happy about it.

[.•.*•Return to 2011•*.•.]

“Let me get this straight: you want someone to actually be on their phone doing the whole social network twitter-facebook-viral thing.”

“Yes. But I can’t get anyone to do it.”

“Hold on one second. (to Cute Redhead) Honey, come here a second. Awesome Pastor Friend, would you say to her exactly what you just said to me?”

Which he does. Which was when heaven split the sky open so that angels and archangels and cherubim and seraphim and the Denver Broncos Quarterback could cascade one after another and, in front of God and everybody, announce to everyone from every roof top, world without end, that God loves me and wants me to be happy. Also that Steve Jobs is the Fourth Person of the Trinity (I made that up).

Now. A closer look at my very cool little leather-bound Bible. Ready?

Here we go:

Ha! It’s NOT a Bible SUCKAH. It just looks like one. Which comes in handy when you’re in church and realize you need to kick your Words With Friends opponent’s bony rear end to the curb (which I did because they are so cheating and I can tell and cheaters go straight to Hell and I would know BECAUSE-I’M-IN-CHURCH)…

…or swipe*click*swipe on over to Facebook Land and see who’s poking who…

…ooOOOOOORRRrrrr, swipe*click*swipe on over to the flock on Twitter and tweet-chirp-twit on the latest goings on…

…ooOOOOOORRRrrrr even check in on Luke chapter 1. Which, believe it or not, I was. Without missing a beat.

As in following along. As in at church. With my family. As in together.

Which may be the last time that ever happens again because I’ve been anointed and officially (self-)ordained as the Chosen High Priest of Social Networking Of The Most High. Amen.

[Updated: So help me, Todd, if I show up next Sunday and you all have blown my super-secret, James Bond, hush-hush NotReallyABible cover, we're going to have words. Or a fake Bible Study in the back pews which is actually going to be some sort of Angry Bird Tweeting Words With Friends-athon. And I will so kick your bony rear ends. In the meantime, pick up your BookBook here.]

Demanding

Todd Clary — Sun, 11 Dec 2011 14:00:59 +0000

This second publishing lap around the track has brought with it a few processes and Live And Learns, not least which is the ever-expanding world of print-on-demand publishing.

I sat with a printer I’ve known for ages, discussing a whole other project not at all involving the Waltzing In Perdition Chronicles. When I discovered his ability to work as closely with me as I prefer in publishing a book, I decided right then and there to migrate everything I’ve been working on elsewhere to working with him locally (great). Which means a hands-on and much more personal way of dealing with things (non-negotiable).

Which is ToddSpeak™ for I Will Have Total Control Or Kill You All Trying.

I’m very excited about the second book in the series because, with it, I’m able to start shaping a more visible (to me) path. A Beautiful Hell was really a book I never intended. That is, every story (save two) was written years prior with no plan whatsoever to one day be published. When it turned into a book, my biggest frustration was that I never wrote anything progressively or with any continuity in mind.

That bothered me then and bothers me still.

But with On Flying Blind I’ve been able to form a direction I intend to consummate in the third book. And that excites me almost as much as getting to work with a local printer.

Excuse me while I go chain myself to the keyboard and finish this sucker…

Making Not Taking

Todd Clary — Sat, 10 Dec 2011 17:42:45 +0000

I’ve been asked to do this so many times and I’m finally (starting) to make good on all my Yeah I’ll Get To It I Promise. Except that I haven’t completely pulled back the curtain to show what it is I think everyone’s been asking for. That is, exactly how I’m creating certain photos. Which is because I never think about it.

That photo up top is, of course, the AfterWork. I took it on Thanksgiving day at the farm. You’re looking at what’s been called The Bottom for eons, and it’s a section of the land Cute Redhead and her family grew up playing in. We’ve quite continued weaving that fabric into the lives of the spawn and their cousins, and Thanksgiving day just isn’t Thanksgiving day without a walk to it.

A few words on how I photograph: first of all, every photo in this post was taken with the iPhone 4S. No flash (I never use the flash. ever.) (Ever.) I have a Canon Rebel XSi, which I consider a brilliant camera for certain work. But the ease and quick access of the iPhone, as well as the image editing apps I use mean that most of what catches my eye also catches me reaching for it…which is always in my pocket.

A few words on what I photograph and why: I have no idea what to tell you lol. Being asked to slow down and think out loud about what happens to capture my eye and interest to where I trip-wire into I Have To Photograph That is like stopping me on the dance floor to analyze how I’m dancing…which only makes me look at my feet. Which makes me mess up. Which is a pain and a bucket of cold water thrown over me. Which I also hate.

Nevertheless, it’s not like I don’t know how I’m doing what I’m doing. It’s just that when I do it, I’m honestly not thinking about how I’m doing. Just doing it. Just giving my soul over to what I have to capture, tilt, angle, stop and backup and checkout that shadow again…never questioning it. Ever. I mean ever. (Who does that??) I can’t even tell you why something captures my eye. Rather, I’m not going to waste time articulating every aspect of every moving part, inside and out, only to demonstrate that I could talk for a day about it and still fail to sum it up.

So it’s not taking a photo. It’s making a photo. And if I have to explain that, trust me…I can’t. And you wouldn’t understand anyway. And neither would I.

The light through the trees and the spreading shadow of the pine trees was nothing more than an obvious composition. *iPhone*point*shoot*done* Cute Redhead is used to me lagging behind, constantly stopping, long ago gave up her Hurry-upping, and left me to start messing with the image to force into the digital what I actually saw in my head when I took it. Which, come to think of it, is me using photography to sculpt, excavate, unearth, or prove in the final piece what I saw in my head.

Which is the real reality (prove that one, left-brainers! ha!)

I used several image editing apps but can’t tell you exactly which ones or in what order or in what combination of filters and effects. It never occurred to me to confine myself to one app or effect any more than I’d confine myself to what pen or paintbrush. So edit here, save the image, open another app, play around there, save it again, turn it upside down, get mad, open another, try this try that, get mad again, remember something about a weird red I remember in something else, love it, apply it, decide I hate it all over again, change my mind, burn that, contrast that corner, straighten it, turn it…and basically keep on Not Thinking until I see finally what I saw in the first place.

Which is the very top photo.

Here are a few other photos I took that day employing the same processes, right down to looking up and wondering where everyone went and how long I’d been standing there in full-on artistic Time Out Of Mind.

And one last Before-And-After I took just this morning when I decided I needed fresh-ground coffee. I slammed the door shut on the car and noticed how the frost looked like trees. I liked the blue I saw inside my head so, naturally, everything had to stop for a few minutes.

And, lastly, here is just one of the apps I use. I promise next time my mind trip-wires into Must.Capture.That, I’ll stop Not Thinking enough to note how I’m doing what I have No Idea How I’m Doing.

Right On The Button

Todd Clary — Mon, 28 Nov 2011 16:40:46 +0000

So I have this love affair with appliances.

I mean, I kind of love them. And by ‘kind of’ I mean that ever since I stared at the agitator doing the Charleston in my mom’s washing machine back in the early 70′s, I’ve been subservient to this part of my brain that sort of tripe-wires anytime a washing machine goes by. And though washing machines aren’t typically wont to ‘go by,’ ours sort of did. Which means that the drive belt started whipping the drum off its base in some mad, passionate effort to get our clothes launched into the stratosphere while simultaneously leaking enough water to make you wonder how much was actually involved in the rinse cycle (answer: none). And then the washing machine did the Charleston. Which is what my mom, in her signature timid good humor, use to chirp whenever our old washing machine got all uppity and spin-danced-bounced itself around the laundry room. And by all of that I mean that my mom has no such thing as timid good humor and never chirped. She cussed like a marine and it was an education in Catholic profanity that invented new words like ‘criminently,’ (don’t ask because I don’t know). I just know that every now and then I’ll recruit that very same word in timid good humor.

Which I was completely lacking when our washing machine died. The night before we left town for the week. Which meant that for the duration of our travels I counted down the days I had to find a new one and hit the household ground running. Which went like this: research, research, research, Consumer Report, consult-consult-consult, think-think-think, research some more, agitate (ha ha), and then chit-chat with chirpy Sears Saleslady Person back home:

Me: Our washing machine died.
Sears Saleslady Person: Oh dear. And how’re we doing?

Me: …not well.

SSP: Need a hug?

Me: I need a Kenmore.

SSP: Same thing. Let’s have church. This one’s on sale. It has This and That and can do That Too and when you press These right over here All Of This happens. There’s a special dispense—

Me: I’ll take it.

SSP: That was fast.

Me: Not really. I’ve been looking since 1977.

SSP: Excuse me?

Me: Star Wars, hlewwww.

SSP: Help me out here.

Me: 1977. That’s when Star Wars came out. Ever since Star Wars, it’s been all about the buttons. And if they light up and beep, I don’t care what the damn thing does, I want it.

SSP: A ha. All guys like this?

Me: If we tell you different, we’re lying.

SSP: Do you want the matching dryer?

Me: Do you want to get married?

And that was that. I came back and woke up Cute Redhead with the good news.

Me: Well, I got a great deal an very highly rated high-efficiency washing machine. The construction is excellent quality and the measure of water conversation is eclipsed only by the six months interest-free purchase. A fine 3.9 liter addition to our household which, I must admit, begs the question: “Can anyone really survive without a front-loading washing machine, Jane? Can they?” What’s more, the price of deterge—

Cute Redhead: “—so it had a lot of buttons, huh?”

Me: *squeal-claps* OMG you should see them!! LetsGoRunALoadOfDarkC’mon!!

To alpha male from Alpha Male

Todd Clary — Sun, 13 Nov 2011 18:17:13 +0000

See those eyes?

Good.

They’re on you. All the time.

They were the first eyes you looked into the day you were born, and they’re the eyes that step into your room in the middle of the night, fifteen years later, just to make sure that’s you under the covers and not some pillows you’ve propped up to make it look like you’re there when you’re not.

Not that you ever would.

Not that I ever did either.

Do you see the way those eyes are set — that makes it hard to know whether it’s a fierce love or a fierce discipline? Or both?

Good. Because they’re on you all the time too.

They were there the first time you stepped too far away from me and into something necessary like preschool, or kindergarten, or anything else Life has prepared to grow you.

See how that fur bristles and the back is haunched? And the way the whole body is poised, looking relaxed but belying an instantaneous and lightening-quick ability to get to you should you fall too hard…or something too overwhelming befall you?

Good. You would do well to never mistake the aspect in those eyes:

…that often believe in you more than you believe in yourself, and so have engineered experiences and tests to help you learn that you are more than you think you are…and less than you think you are.

…that would tear apart anything that threatened you.

…that would tear you a new one should you ever fail to conduct yourself as the Good, Happy, Believing, Musical, Adventurous, Insanely Ridiculous, Daring, Respectful and Courageous heart God set in you.

They’re on you, boy.

All the time.

Got it?

Good.

Double Edge

Todd Clary — Fri, 04 Nov 2011 18:22:36 +0000

When three people, completely unbeknownst to one another, try to pry out of me the very same answer, I realize I’m cornered and need to weigh in with what’s been going on and why I’ve been so blatantly negligent to writing on all fronts. I’m going to write unedited. Which I hate doing. Though I’m going to write somewhat generally, my aim isn’t to not say something in particular. It’s to get out of the way and touch on something else. And this is as close to any explanation you’re going to get, so if you fancy yourself the sleuth, knock yourself out. Failing that, a tavern, strong drink, and uninterrupted time is the required fare to get me to talk in detail.

I have a very solitary side, for better or worse.

At its worst, it’s the side of me that spreads a very dark canopy of distrust over relationships and, sadly, pushes far too much through that lens and ends up convinced that the dark canopy is a fitting canvas (it’s not). For better or worse.

At its best, it’s the side of me that gets all the best energy from being alone, and finds a greater energy by spending myself on behalf of all others. For better or worse.

At its best worst, it’s the side of me that, thanks to some years, has learned to distrust the judge and jury inside my head. Those are the moments I’m intentionally interrupting my desire to close off and shut out everyone and everything and make Olympic skill out of brooding.

At it’s worst best, it’s the side of me which ignores something better left Not Ignored. As my friend Veronique in New Zealand told me yesterday, “I have a character fault that I am working on bringing into balance. The fault is that I tend to only see the good things about people. And ignore the rest.” A very base fact and a very human reality. When I’m recovering from such a coil, as I currently am, I can’t help but count on one hand the times I’ve had to unclench my fist around friendship and let go what chose to let go of me first. I don’t like it.

Vague, I know.

It’s been a very hard year. For minor proof, look no further than the last time I paused and let what I enjoyed about life make its way onto the Waltz (June) (and before that, January). I have this part of me which, in only a few situations, will agree to suspension in the face of things that need to get done. Meaning that very few things will get me putting one foot in front of the other when all I really want to do is dig in my heels and work on that brooding I can do so well.

Since mid-Spring I’ve been involved in a variety of great works and a few great friendships that have devolved into situations I’m wishing I never spent precious time and energy on. That is, some things and some friends have gone so far south I’m thinking even friendly visits are out of the question. That is, I can spend more than the necessary time brooding on what didn’t work out and what’s cut than on the deeper truth tucked safely inside what Richard Rhor calls ‘deeper time.’ That is, the truth behind the truth inside the disaster under the mystery of the real journey. Which just so happens to be a (very necessary) descent into things going wrong. Which is wholly counter-intuitive. And if you’re one of those people confident in your ability and willingness to die gloriously to your self-centered heart (I used to be), then trust me: you don’t get it (and I didn’t either). It happens to be something you don’t even get to pretend you understand until you’re into your forties (sorry, kids). If you’re listening.

Or if you experience some of the loss and destruction and ending He seems to have coded into deeper time for the purpose of deeper Life. If you’re lucky.

I’ve titled this piece Double Edge because I’m alluding (only alluding) to the end of something that pains me a great deal (that’s the cut) because the end of it seems like the death and loss of a twin (that’s the Double). But this comes off as far more sadness than I intend or even feel. I’ve kept my brooding a private thing, obvious only by my exile from writing at all. Except, that is, for the Not Talking Because I Don’t WANT To Talk About It! that Cute Redhead has made me talk about. As well as done a pretty good job of leaving me alone when what needed to come to the light could only do that by finding its way through the dark. But that’s over now. I knew that when I noticed the subtle disturbing of my heart’s hardened soil, I’d know that something new would be coming. And in the same way, knew enough to trust the part of me that has learned not to trust the brooded conclusions.

As I read this I’m dead-center within a tension: recognizing the Very Unclear in what I’m writing and very tempted to take pains to articulate…and the strange comfort I’ve come to know in not understanding things I may never, ever come to understand. On one hand I despise publishing anything as disconnected and unfinished as this. On the other hand…it’s the true state of my soul these days and I’ve come to see that the balancing act, the wielding the device that Life seems to sometimes be, has a safe side and a dangerous side.

A part designed to bind together.

And a side with no apparent function save sunder.

A double edge.

Way Up West, Part III

Todd Clary — Wed, 01 Jun 2011 12:00:56 +0000

“Way Up West,” not “Way Out West,” which is intentionally counter-intuitive as goes the common vernacular.

I had turned and looked West to the mountains but found myself able to stare directly into the sunlight above because it was mercifully shrouded in veil enough to prevent blinding me. So. Way Up West.

Have you ever noticed how maddening it is to insert into someone’s head or ear or mind’s eye whatever it is that washes over you? That is, without rival, one of my biggest frustrations with how God made things. That is, that everything from our musings to our madness to our inspirations to our visions are so anchored within our own experience such that they openly defy a perfect expression. This has got to be the largest part of what fuels the artists across all mediums: the unquenchable need to get someone, something, somewhere in the world to see or hear what we’re held by or singing to. And I don’t care what anyone says…the need to create is less an altruist gifting than it is the secret cry of the heart in a desperation to be known—which doesn’t implode under its own weight simply because it is more than a little counter-balanced by the genuine animation in which the soul luxuriates by living out loud.

In other words, the straight jacket we right-brainers wear isn’t for our safety. It’s for yours ha ha.

Where was I.

Ah.

So I put it on Facebook before I lost my nerve. I was leaving. Not going dark (which I do about once a year and on purpose). And not mad at anyone. Just missing substance and weight and recognizing that I’d gotten scared away from writing certain things and in certain ways.

I’m working on several books but had avoided working on them at all because, quite frankly, it wasn’t fun any more. Since January of this year, a lot has transpired and very little of it has been funny. We’ve a teenager in the house who is becoming more young man than I think I ever could have been at his age in my wildest dreams. I couldn’t be more proud. Or more convinced in His genius for writing into the plot the journey of a teenager and how it mirrors all too uncomfortably the exodus through desert full to the brim with forty years of lesson.

That’s one thing.

Marriage is in what I call the ‘rooting underground’ season. Augustine said it something like the season in marriage fraught with life’s wind and sun and rain and storm where the blossoms fade and the timber roughens. For all accounts and purposes it appears things are fading, to put it nicely. And in some ways they are. They really are. And none of us were told this at the altar.

But it’s okay. Because while things seem to be fading above ground (they’re really not), your roots are growing toward one another under the convulsing earth…and threading themselves safely, safely, safely together (and they really are).

That’s a second thing.

The final thing is that enough had happened to insulate me from the live-wire tension I find in the act of writing. Meaning that the work of staying in what I’m trying to write can be as cathartic as it can be anxious. I find it even more demanding than drawing has ever been. It doesn’t take everything to break down in order to rob me of the inclination to write. I almost wish it did. That way I’d have an easy explanation no one would hold against me. Such as it is, though, the writing can often be discomforting enough to get me to chicken out for the smallest reason. Which is cowardly. And stupid. Because, as I said, for as anxious as it can make me, there is little else as cathartic. It was shameful for me to forget that.

But I said forces were lined up to be sure I remembered something I was supposed to forget: that the fears are smoke screens. Mere one-dimensional Hollywood sets designed to give the illusion of fact enough to convince you things are what they seem.

Which they’re not.

I know better. I should have remembered to forget that and written anyway.

Which I’m going to.

And here’s a visual representation of why. Remember that sun way up west? Here’s what you see when I pull the camera back…

(I know.) (wait for it.)

Can you believe this? I’ve been schooling you the whole time. With the photo, not the content. That beautiful image was a screen saver. And though Colorado can more than provide the very same and then some in real life, it seemed fitting to use the photo as it lives on my laptop. I wanted to convey the rude facsimile of what can’t be duplicated electronically.

Because that’s what I felt like I’d devolved to with writing. That’s why I decided Facebook, though little more than the Virtual Water Cooler, had hijacked my better work. Which I’m returning to but without pulling the plug on how fun it really can be (and it can) to stop by the water cooler and catch up.

So…here’s to comin’ out of the shadows, Juna (shut up, Jeff) and living and writing a bit more out loud. Here’s to excavating a bit more and bringing a bit more pause to the table…not in replacement of the Facebook bits and pieces…but in addition to them.

Here’s to merely using the electronic as vehicle to the real.

Way Up West, Part II

Todd Clary — Mon, 30 May 2011 12:00:51 +0000

Keep an eye on that photo above. It’s the same photo from the other day, just reversed and rendered in sepia tone. At the end of this story, I’ll pull the camera back and show you what resides outside the frame and what landed right between my eyes.

There are about half a dozen of you around the world who, unbeknownst to one another, contacted me within twenty-four hours. With apologies. Were it not for sheer shock at your words I’d have laughed my self senseless because you apologized — several of you with an effusive lament quite betraying the posture you maintain in public (but I won’t betray you). Each worried they’d done, said, or written something making me pull the plug and turn my back on Facebook altogether. If I didn’t know better, I’d swear you were in league with one another. But I’m convinced otherwise because no one did a thing to make me decide to do what I did. What’s more, I idle (so I’m told) at Crosses The Line in word and in person, so the idea that I’d been pushed over it by someone else (forgive me) made me laugh.

And while several apologized, quite a few more had aneurysms. Only one made it clear I was off-script with four very unnerving words: “We’ll discuss this later.” Oh wonderful. I’d roused the one man who considers the freedom to get in my kitchen and cook on my stove the sole office of his friendship with me. And, for better or worse, it is. His name is Jeff Graves, just so we’re clear.

What seemed sudden had in fact begun with my friend John Eldredge who’s words lay before me held fast in my hands in spite of the wind seeking purchase and the letter for a plaything. This is what he wrote:

“…and as I looked at his life again one of the things I was most struck by was Jesus’ ability to navigate praise, then hatred, false flattery, then adoring crowds, vicious slander and then people who simply don’t care — all with grace and a sense of self that was simply stunning. Here is one grounded man. Which brought our lack of groundedness back into stark clarity when compared to his deep, deep sense of self, identity, and substance.

“Years ago when Brent and I were writing The Sacred Romance, one of the thoughts we were most deeply struck by was how our souls in this post-modern world have grown so thin, so ‘light,’ so in-substantive and therefore so vulnerable to every passing wind. We called it the lack of ‘ontological density.’ The lack of groundedness of being.”

Damn.

When I read it I found myself cornered and staring into and between every word. Everything came into focus and I realized I’d been seduced away from the place where I live better. And I knew better, which really angered me. But, like those clouds, the anger shifted and the light changed and I let that go so I could get down to whatever the anger was protecting—because anger always exists in service to the two things it covers…Fear, directly under it. And then Pain—that most heavily defended core fact of ourselves, whatever it may be.

This isn’t a therapy session so I’ll spare you the internal ramblings and cut to the chase:

I wasn’t writing deeply anymore. The blog had gone dormant since January (January!) and I’d devolved to a hit-and-run contributing possessed of a subtle yet very lethal agent. That is, Substance. All of the No Unspoken Thought I post on Facebook is genuine, trust me. But in light of John’s words I felt embarrassed. Shamed.

Because they were too safe. Meaning I’d let them take over and replace the deeper excavation I’m wired for. Which is not the end of the world, I know. And definitely appears reactionary, I realize. But I couldn’t escape it. Worse, when I decided to blame everything on Facebook and execute a fitting punishment by turning my back and never looking back, my first feeling was fear.

Not unlike addiction.

And that didn’t anger me.

It enraged me.

(to be continued)

Way Up West, Part I

Todd Clary — Sun, 29 May 2011 12:00:17 +0000

I’m back. And here comes Where I’ve Been in this a small dose, that is, to make a bit more digestible a rather circuitous wandering.

One week ago, on a day where Spring had more legitimate right than courage to assert herself, I pulled a wanting jacket and set my face toward a soccer field overrun with boys still in the embryonic spring of their lives. But only for a moment before some kind of Weight shifted, turning my attention toward the mountains.

They won the game—no thanks to the parental weak link I was since I recall nothing more than the obligatory, “Go give ‘em hell, kid.”

As divine appointments go, I’m irresistibly intrigued at His economy of scale and why it is the smallest, most benign of matters should amount to axis-shifting moments for God-knows-why. And though I long ago gave up the need to decipher, I nonetheless remain fascinated by the precision of days over hours over moments over impossible ends breaking through to the darkest before the dawn.

Except that it wasn’t dawn. It was dusk.

Or…far from dusk if we’re to deign to the Talmud and the argument that such isn’t such until three stars debut. But the only star was our own, as you see it in the photograph up top, resigning itself to working with the cloud-game instead of against it, and affording all of us on the soccer field a display bordering arrogance.

Except that I was the only one looking.

And the excess of rain unearthed the earth with a redolence which the sacred Spring alone adorns, and reminded me again that I forgot to remember…

…that in spite of the proliferate digitizing of everything in our world, there is no way to make binary the organic. And the smell of the rain leaving with a blast of unseasonably cold wind does an outstanding job of side-stepping every opening argument and silencing the gallery to utter shame and vexation.

[Translation]: I looked at the sunset and, in the space of two heart beats, realized I’d spread myself too thin and taken in too much technology not unlike too much fast-food.

As it were.

And never one to ponder overmuch what the heart proclaims in small slices of time, I resolved then and there to wrest from my preoccupied mind an accomplice: Facebook.

If memory serves, I posted something like this: “I’m signing off of Facebook. For good…and returning to a far less virtual wandering and pondering. Back to the blog, back to writing the books.” I think I even ended it with “Blessing, all.” Which was gracious of me considering the public and private vitriol I provoked by my audacity.

Several things happened concurrent to the decision. Firstly, the Exhale.

There is no replacing pulling the trigger, pulling the tooth, tearing off the band-aid, or jumping off the cliff. It wasn’t easy to do, but I did it, taking into account no one besides myself and the voice inside…now indignant after so much neglect. Neglect of writing, that is.

It was nothing more than recognizing that though I was writing frequently, I wasn’t writing deeply.

And that had to change. Quick. Because forces were aligning themselves to see to it I remembered something I was supposed to forget.

(to be continued)

Just In Case You Wondered

Todd Clary — Mon, 10 Jan 2011 13:00:29 +0000

Remember the other day when you thought to yourself, “Geez! That poor little Emma is a helpless victim! Her brothers are always picking on her!”

Yeah, well you can stop it now.

Luminal

Todd Clary — Sun, 09 Jan 2011 17:38:10 +0000

Below is a paragraph I wrote about six years ago. I don’t recall what made me write it, but I’m guessing it came through me one afternoon in my backyard while I watched the gloaming. I have a lot of unanchored pieces — which is what I call them: odd bursts of writing that come through me and never from me. They make no rational sense and yet all the sense in the world. I can never tell if they’re bubbling up from the past or slipping sideways and one step over from something upcoming.

I was bothered by this paragraph because it felt like it begged a whole story around it. When I wrote it down, it came out like an opening piece at the beginning of book. Except that I don’t know what the book is about.

I imagine my friend Betsy nodding in full understanding, because I’ve seen her sing and play her piano. I’ve watched Music come through her, in full measure and small washes, both impossible to catch or contain.

I share this small wash, therefore, in the WiP Journal as I prepare to return to several writing projects.

Oh, and I include up top a rendering of the home where I grew up which faced the St. Clair River. Which is also unanchored, in that it has nothing rational to do with any of this. Still, I love that rendering because it looks like one of the days when the wind off the water made for a gusty summer day. Which makes me sort of laugh because, to this day, I love windy days. Really agitating, boisterous, squallish days—except they have to be sunny. They remind me of the wind off the water that the lake people know.

“It was where they’d sit in the deep of the warm

afternoons in the luminal moments, after the last hard

light relaxed into longer shadows. From a distance, you

could hear them before you could hear what they might be

talking about—because they seemed to always be talking.

And the sound of them felt like the memories of our good

fathers…the ones who filled our heads with white t-shirts

and slacks, common cologne and cigarette smoke, short

trimmed haircuts and approving lines in their faces when

they smiled at us from behind sunglasses.

That’s what they sounded like.”

Yes

Todd Clary — Sat, 08 Jan 2011 13:00:39 +0000

Bear with me for a moment.

Bailey, The Golden Recliner needs to be taken to the groomer. Bad. I mean…bad. It’s not like I can’t leash him into the walk-in shower and lather up the big fat hairy 9,000 volt battery that he is. It’s that I don’t want to come out covered in blood. Which I would. Because his toenails (paw nails?) look and sound like a charging elephant just came through the back door and rollerskate-skidded across the wood floors wearing acrylic stilletos.

Which is my way of telling you all that, last night, life around here sort of looked like a charging elephant just came through the back door and rollerskate-skidded across the wood floors wearing acrylic stilletos.

Meaning it was not peaceful.

Meaning Cute Redhead and I had a “frank exchange of ideas.”

Which looks like this…

Which is my cartoon version of what it’s like to have a “frank exchange of ideas” with Cute Redhead. Which isn’t entirely fair because if she had the mic today (and. she. doesn’t.) she’d tell you that I was the horse’s ass (and. I. was.)

For part of it anyway. The part coming, that is.

We’d stolen away to my studio to discuss how to further make our teenage son’s life a petri dish of angst and rebellion. And, wouldn’t you know it, we disagreed on exactly HOW to torture him. And shocking as it will seem, our discussion devolved into strong will vs. strong emotion vs. OhYouDidNOTJustSayThat vs. Okay Mr. Lawyer Wanna Be I’ll CHANGE My Word Are You Happy Now vs. Hey Why Are We Killing Each Other?? Let’s Kill Him!!

And so we did.

But not before that charging elephant came through the house with Beta Male and Charlie Girl on its back beating the living hell out each other.

At least that’s what it sounded like, and which gave us momentary pause enough to charge out of the studio like two elephants and Lay! Down! The! Law!

Which was a train wreck of accusations and false witness bearing and baring of fangs and He’s Lying! and one glaring look of I May Be Obeying You (barely) On The Outside But My Inside Is (not publishable).

Which One Dad To Rule Them All (me) does not warm to. Tendering a charming volley of opinion between myself and the one woman in the house who can get as IN.YOUR.FACE. as me.

Which is not the orange train pictured right up there, just so you know.

It’s Miss Girl.

And boy did we let each other have it. And boy was that stupid.

Tears, fists all clenched up, seething through teeth, red-faced, little jaw all Trying To Stand Its Ground and (I’m sorry to say) not a little trembling.

And she wasn’t doing too well either.

I really hate losing it like that. And, yes, my intensity certainly was displaced, because Cute Redhead and I were still a good hour from that transition from I So Know Where To Hide Your Body to Well That’s Actually A Great Point OkayILoveYouAgainOkayBye.

On our way to that bright new dawn, as I sat at my desk and Cute Redhead sat on the floor (not at ALL to be mistaken for a position of submission) (lolololololololololololololol ‘submission’ lololololololololololo ‘ow ow it hurts’ lolololololololol), a note came winging under the door.

Cute Redhead picked it up. (I knew it was coming because I know this baby girl). She read it silently then made her signature Aw Precious face which meant I was about to get my big stupid head kicked in.

Which I did.

With this…

Which broke my heart, but which also warmed it. Because I can be a horse’s ass. And I’ve been that ass enough times to have enough experience with what being a horse’s ass garners you, as a parent. If you’re lucky. That is, asking for forgiveness when you screw up.

I’ve been wildly lucky around here.

Which afforded me space and heart enough to reply to Charlie Girl.

With this…

Okay, the dorky Do You Want To Be Friends part was just too irresistible to pass up and don’t even pretend you aren’t tempted to write stuff just like it on notes just like that.

And the PS part? Well she did write back.

See that YES checked off?

Well you’re not going to for long. Because I’m tucking this one away. Hiding it inside my heart, hoping to God I eventually get it right. Also hiding it in my collection of The Things I Can’t Get Rid Of. Ever. Like the one last shredded bit of baby blanket Recalcitrant Teenager would, right now in front of God and everybody, deny ever crying over were he without it (he did)…a pair of teeny tiny little girl socks that don’t even fit on my thumb but still manage to wrap my heart around one tiny little finger…a Christmas ornament falling apart…

…you know the collection. If you’re a parent, you have your own.

Or at least I hope you do.

But whether you do or not, I hope that at the end of the day you have…I hope we all have…contact enough with our children (read: NOT being seduced by the damaging lie that we’re here to be their best friends) (thank you Becky Montgomery Graves), such that they write a big fat check mark in the big fat box where you wonder if they still love you.

You know…for being a horse’s ass.

(which. I. was.)

Romeo and Juliet…and Chris Mundell is Rad

Todd Clary — Fri, 07 Jan 2011 19:30:48 +0000

Several years ago I was introduced (read: traumatized) to a naked guy riding a pillow and playing giddy-up down the hallway. After I poured bleach in my eyes (read: who am I kidding—this is genius!), I acquainted myself with what I consider one of the most unique wits and original talent on the web today. Ladies and gentlemen, I give you the one and only Chris Mundell…

1. How many times were you suspended in school for riding a pillow naked down the hallway playing giddy-up? And exactly where can the rest of the world find this video so they don’t think I’m making it up?

Well I never had cause to pillow ride in school, but I did first hear about it then. It was explained to me as a room-mate prank. A few years ago, when my buddy took his family on vacation for 2 weeks, some friends and I shot our first little short film (2 Weeks) at his house, as a surprise. They LOVED the video. I have a video of them watching it. That made it all worth it.

2. Lots of people think they’re funny. Lots of people aren’t. YOU’RE funny! If you could dump your 9-to-5 RIGHT. NOW. and choose between hosting your own late-night or take a shot at stand-up, which would it be?

I have been thinking about stand-up a lot lately. I’ve never done it. I think the late night show idea is more appealing since there is a bigger variety of directions.

3. Can you dance?

I’ll go out on the dance floor with my wife at the occasional wedding, but the whole time I’m thinking “PLEASE GOD NO VIDEO CAMERAS!”

4. No, I don’t mean White People Dance. I mean DANCE?

Back in the early 90′s I loved me some Hip Hop. I will admit to wearing Hammer pants, once. To answer your question: NO, I can not dance.

5. How long have you been married?

Over 12 years. Many of them wonderful!

6. How long did it take for your wife to get over the novelty of you playing giddy-up naked up and down the hallway?

She’s had to accept a great many of my, um, choices. She’s a pretty good sport.

7. Anyone you want to push in front of an oncoming bus right now?

The voice in my head that tells me no. How do you kill a voice? I will ask Bjork.

8. Weirdest thing you’ve ever eaten.

Boogers?

9. Favorite Disney-Pixar movie (extra points if it’s the same as mine) and why?

I freaking LOVE Disney-Pixar movies!! My favorite is The Incredibles. I think it’s because I identify so much with Bob Parr. I wonder if my best days are behind me, etc. Also, when Dash is finally free to use his gifts, it’s so inspiring.

10. Any alter-egos we should know about?

I have a character called Pastor The Reverend Karl (wwjd.pastorthereverendkarl.com). I need to shoot more videos!

11. Super powers or all Batman’s toys? Go.

Super powers, easy.

12. Any signature dishes you prepare to shame Rachel Ray?

I am useless in the kitchen. My wife has been kind enough to handle that. I could beat Rachel Ray at hoops though.

13. Tell me how you decided to start blogging and about ChrisMundell.com

Many years ago, my best friend, Matt Steele, was a web designer. Back then, companies had websites, but not regular people. So we thought it would be funny to make a website featuring a nobody. Our tag line: A Colossal Waste of Talent and Technology

Matt passed away a couple years ago (effing cancer) and I had to move to more of a blog layout. The whole blog/social media thing brought the “featuring a nobody” to EVERYBODY. The challenge now is to decide how to elevate what I’m doing so it’s still engaging people and making them laugh.

It’s bittersweet now. I miss Matt and yet I feel compelled to continue.

14. Favorite book when you were 12.

Television

15. We see you on Facebook. Um. A LOT. But not just you — we see your friends. So…what makes a good friend Chris Mundell-style?

Well, I’m a pop-off, a smart arse. Some of my friends are as well. The whole status/comment thing lends itself to popping off. It’s an immediate audience. I have to remind myself to focus on the blog because its easy to just goof around with the couple hundred Facebook friends.

16. Describe for me the perfect vacation.

One of those Lord of the Rings tours of New Zealand. Dressed as Boba Fett.

17. Ooh! Curve ball! Now tell us something — all jokes aside — that honestly and truly moves your heart. If it helps, act like there’s a big ol’ jug of Chianti between us and we’ve talked long into the night. Hit me.

Grace. God’s Grace for us. Our Grace for each other. There are so many reasons for us to be alone and angry. The peace of Christ is a grace to me. I’m actually close to finishing a worship music project. I know. I don’t get it either.

18. It is twenty years in the future. World Chancellor Newt Gingrich has banned the works of Shakespeare. The one remaining copy is trapped in a burning building. You can either save it or rescue a young woman trapped in an adjoining room. Which do you save?

The woman. She would write a compelling play about my heroic efforts called “Romeo & Juliet & Chris Mundell is Rad”.

19. You get to punch the worst actor in Hollywood. Who’s the unlucky hack?

Brace yourself, Miley Cyrus!

20. Name a time when you got into big trouble with your parents.

Unfortunately, my folks got in more trouble than I did. I come from a family of fairly committed Heroin addicts.

21. Not trying to embarrass you, but, do you have an embarrassing guilty pleasure? (please don’t say anything with ‘giddy-up’ in it).

I read this blog called Waltzing In Perdition. At first I went there to sign my wife and me up for dance lessons, but now I go there to show her a husband and father more nuts than me.

22. You wouldn’t be caught dead, where?

On TBN

23. Two things you consider yourself to be very good at.

Funny & Songwriting, I guess.

24. Last one: What are you passionate about?

Things like music and comedy stay at the top of my list often. I love to make people laugh and I’m getting more comfortable with more serious music side of my brain.

(Photo by: Greg Lawler)

I Sleep With Books

Todd Clary — Wed, 05 Jan 2011 13:00:14 +0000

I don’t know what your bedtime routine is but I know mine, and it goes like this: ”Get out of my way, I’ve lost all my good humor. I don’t care if the house is hit by a freight train I’M GOING TO BED.”

And then I go to bed.

And then I read.

It might be for three minutes it might be for three hours, but I’ll read.

I might grab one from this…

Or grab this and stare lovingly into it…

while Cute Redhead stares lovingly at me and says, “…you really are a loser, you know that?” (because I’m staring at the iPhone again, not because I read) :)

Moving Parts

Todd Clary — Tue, 04 Jan 2011 13:00:04 +0000

I was asked about my work space and the tools I use to get things done. If you ask me, none of it is anything particularly interesting; I’ve used it all for years without thinking much about it. The photo up top is just a container of some of the paints I’ve used when putting cartoons to canvas. They’ve often been seized all Public Domain-like by Miss Child and her pals as evidenced below.

After all, if you’re garage band (The Clackers) (I have no idea either) is going to take the milk and the paper towel rolls and all manner of all kinds of other What Cute Redheads Recycles (I don’t) and turn them into instruments…well. You certainly can’t do any of that without your dad’s paints, right? Right.

Those are called ‘chips.’ Pantone Matching System chips, to be exact. Or PMS colors, to be hilarious. Sometimes I’m tickled PMS 493 ha ha! Get it?

(I know it was lame shut up)

There used to be a big dry eraser board on that wall, directly across from my desk. It bore the Have To’s and the Urgent in a variety of color-coordinated days and priorities. It liked to think it ruled my creative processes. So I had it destroyed and replaced it with things I liked. A photo of the day Beta threw off the training wheels and Became A Man…the 2011 Rockies schedule….a bunch of Baby Girl’s art work…shells from Hawaii…a newspaper clipping of a cabin I’d like to one day build up in the mountains far away from Far Away. Oh, and see the black vertical thing at the lower right? Ha ha…that’s just the size of the cartoons I’ve started posting on WiP. I place that under the sheet I’m sketching on so I know I’m drawing within the space we creative types call the ‘live area.’

Stupid Cat was watching me take these photographs and was Not Amused.

I drew this the other day while I was on the phone talking to I Have No Memory Of Who I Was Talking To. My teachers used to hate it when I did this. And I did it all the time. That is, draw while they spoke to the class. It appeared for all the world that I wasn’t listening by virtue of the Very Intense Illustrating with which I was much more interested. Then they’d do that signature reprimand where they go, “Perhaps Mr. Clary can tell the rest of the class what we’re discussing.”

And then Mr. Clary would. Word for word.

And then Mr. Teacher would get royally ticked off because it wasn’t supposed to happen that way ha ha.

Some of the new WiP cartoons I’m working on and putting up on the home page. They’ll go on a new interior paged called The Drawing Board or something stupid like that.

A closer-up of the first one I did. You can, I think, see some of the pencil lines under the ink. Also, my own notes on the copy (that’s CreativeSpeak for ‘the words’) up top as well as the pixel dimensions I need to work within in order for the final to be properly (more CreativeSpeak coming here) ‘stage’ properly on the main page.

(please be as impressed with me as I am)

Okay, those two babies are my babies.

Do not touch them.

Ever.

The one on the right is my pen tool. I don’t use a mouse. Mortals use a mouse.

I do not use a mouse.

Brushing or drawing (I never ‘draw’ on the computer, by the way) in Photoshop or what have you with a mouse is like painting with a bar of soap.

I though this was hilarious. Just some of the wires coming into the studio from the outside world to connect me to the internet and radiate the signal throughout the rest of the place. That yellow wire? Powers the Pac-Man game on the International Space Station. Swear.

That little device is a micro-cell. It takes the phone signal coming into the house and then amplifies into enough bandwidth to power the Pac-Man game on the International Space Station.

Swear.

The Year of the Cat

Todd Clary — Mon, 03 Jan 2011 13:00:56 +0000

That is the stupidest cat on planet earth.

That cat will not drink water from the water dish unless she’s standing in it.

STANDING.

IN.

IT.

Stupid.

That cat will scarf down a bowl of Stupid Kitty Kitty Chow and (I am not making this up, you can even ask Cute Redhead) TEN MINUTES LATER will be right back at the EMPTY Stupid Kitty Kitty Chow TROUGH lamenting like the stupid thing hasn’t seen food in ten days.

Stupid.

This cat will come into my studio, jump up on the window sill and lament like the stupid thing hasn’t seen the outdoors in ten years. Until I open the window and let it out. Just like I did ten minutes ago (thank you stupid dog door which Golden Recliner won’t even use).

Stupid.

That cat will then KittyKat Tip Toe through the snow like this…

And then this stupid cat will sit at the window

AND

CREEP

OUT.

Because this stupid cat just stares at me until I can’t stand feeling her Creepy Kitty Al Queda Countenance all over my back and open up the window again and let her right back in. Which I did, but not before taking her picture to prove it.

Which I thought was pretty funny ha ha.

But which she did not. I know this for a fact because I returned to working on a cartoon until I couldn’t stand it anymore. And looked up just in time to capture on film what it looks like to have Satan sitting on your light table wondering where to hide your body.

Stupid cat.

How To Avoid Your Own World War

Todd Clary — Sun, 02 Jan 2011 13:00:00 +0000

Adapted from and inspired by The War of Art, by Steven Pressfield

That, my friends, is a clean sheet of paper.

A fresh new start.

Untainted, unstained, and bearing no evidence of anything before the moment you pulled it from the ream.

Here is where you get to write the next chapter. The next step. The next paragraph. The new goal. The sketch. The plan.

Here is where you get to begin threading together the Inside and the Out. That is, your two lives. The life you live, and the unlived life within you. Between them rests that piece of paper, waiting for your action.

Got an illustration inside you? A painting?

What about a book?

Ever wanted to be a teacher? An advocate for those in need?

What about being a dad? Or a mom?

What about the late nights, staring at the ceiling when you allow the vision of the person you might be?

Scare you?

You’re not alone.

It’s hard to pick up the pen—proverbially or as a writer. It’s hard to pick up the brush. It’s very hard…and very frightening…to take action.

And did you know Hitler wanted to be an artist? True story. At the fresh, hopeful age of eighteen he took his inheritance and moved to Vienna in pursuit of the dream. He applied to the Academy of fine Arts and later to the School of Architecture.

Ever see one of his paintings?

Yeah, me neither.

Call me crazy, but it seems to me it was easier for Hitler to start World War II than it was for him to face a blank sheet of sketch paper.

(Now, if you’ll excuse me I have some obstacles to kick to the curb.)

Happy 2011!

Todd Clary — Sat, 01 Jan 2011 21:11:38 +0000

The new year held high expectations for me. Waking to a phone call from the bar letting me know they had my pants and “…what do you want us to do with all this body glitter?” was not among them.

Kidding.

I’ve never been one for celebrating New Year’s Eve. At all. I like cocktails with friends, sure, but if we’re up at midnight at some club it better be because we’re cataloging stories that make our mothers sprint to confession on our behalf.

So it was a few movies with Alpha and Beta (Cute Redhead and The Princess of Space, Time, and Dimension are traveling), and off to bed well before the striking of any clock.

And then up early enough to see the sun peak over the hill and announce itself on the peak next door (not an interesting photo at all, granted). After which I thought I’d go in and peak on the boys…all curled up and still fast asleep with their teddy bears.

…wait. That’s not a teddy bear.

Passing Cars, Passing Out

Todd Clary — Wed, 15 Dec 2010 19:00:11 +0000

[Disclaimer #1: I have no idea what she's doing with her hands in that photo. That all by itself should put the fear of God in any of you, should you ever decide to road trip with this woman.]

[Disclaimer #2: I mean, seriously what in the HELL is she doing?!"]

Tell me if you’ve ever driven cross-country to visit the in-laws.

Tell me if you’ve tag-teamed the driving with your beloved wife.

Tell me if you’ve whittled away the hours with conversation, or comfortable silence, or Very Uncomfortable Arguing.

Tell me if you’ve watched fruited plain pass by your window, or worked double-time to withstand the hypnotic infinity of road stretched straight in front of you into horizon.

Tell me if you’ve ever sat in the passenger seat and read or napped or prayed to God in Heaven you lived to see another day because she thinks there’s nothing wrong with playing SUV Enema and barreling down on the poor Honda Civic…and theeeeennnnn stepping on the break…and theeeeennnnn changing lanes….and theeeeennnnn watching her husband peel his face off the dash.

Then when it’s all over…the holiday, the in-laws, the drive back home, the unpacking and the contracting back into your normal life and your normal spaces…

…tell me if you’ve ever had this conversation with your wife.

“…you know. When I was driving on our trip. And when I felt like I couldn’t breathe? And I thought I was going to pass out?”

“Um. Excuse me…what?”

“Yeah, don’t you remember that?”

*blinks

*blinks again

“You’re serious, right?”

“Yeah, I’m sure I told you abo—”

“OH I’M QUITE SURE YOU DIDN’T ‘TELL ME’ ABOUT ANY OF THAT BECAUSE LET ME TELL YOU, BABY DOLL, I’D HAVE GRABBED THE WHEEL AND PULLED THE DAMN THING OV—ARE YOU OUT OF YOUR FLIPPIN’ MIND?!?!? WHAT DO YOU MEAN YOU COULDN’T BREATHE AND THOUGHT YOU WERE GOING TO PASS OUT?!!”

“Yeah, didn’t I tell you about that?”

“No. No, you didn’t tell me about that.”

“Yes. Well. It’s good to be home.”

“Yes. Well. It’s good not to be smeared on some deserted stretch of road in west Texas too.”

“Same thing.”

The Farm – Part II

Todd Clary — Wed, 15 Dec 2010 13:00:29 +0000

I really do like that photograph. Here are a few more from our Thanksgiving stay…

Yet another corner of the expansive place. Couldn’t tell you exactly where this is. Cute Redhead could though.

Alright, I admit it…the filter on this photograph makes it look a little like something out of Willy Wonka. Sue me.

“Auntie Em!” (ha ha could resist). I do like this one a lot, though…very brooding.

There are more old antiques and treasures than you’d believe in this place. Had to get one of the saddle I found.

That’s Old Tom Trail and runs directly in front of the farm house.

Okay, this field I know. I know it because it’s right next to the farm house.

This is where the ax murderer tore the screen and came in to kill us all.

(kidding)

Ew.

That’s all from that trip, folks :)

The Farm – Part I

Todd Clary — Tue, 14 Dec 2010 13:00:54 +0000

Way down south in the land of cotton…

…there’s this farm. And this farm has been in Cute Redhead’s family for well over a hundred years. In fact, her father and her aunt were born and raised on it. So when Thanksgiving saw us on the road and on our way, I had plans to capture some of the scenery and share it here.

That’s what they call ‘the bottom,’ which is a lower portion of some field down by some creek. I have a terrible sense of direction and in 18 years of visits, I still can’t find my way back alone (so if I ever go missing, I’d like to recommend looking for me in the bottom) (ha ha I kill me).

Original wood railing on the porch of the old homestead.

Down at Fair River.

I love how this one turned out. The kids ride an old three-wheeler all over the many fields and trails…more open space than they know what to do with.

Alpha Male and I explored an old barn behind the older barn and spied this bit of handiwork. If you look closely you might be able to make out that it’s not wood…it’s a spider web.

The Old Kees Motor Company truck, resigned and consigned to some very eye-catching color, if you asked me.

And there it is again. The farm. Fair River Farm, to be exact. We’ve spent a lot of hours there and it remains a refuge and a retreat away from just about everything. Including internet. Which tends to have me feeling like it also lacks oxygen.

Tomorrow I’ll post a few more :)

O Tree

Todd Clary — Mon, 13 Dec 2010 17:41:27 +0000

Here’s how you get that face right up there:

If you start with one fourteen-year old boy who tries for all the world to Be Cool, yet now and then breaches the recalcitrant layers with the Little Lunatic You Remember…

…and add one younger Beta Male and all his culinary misgivings about the perfect S’more…

…plus one Little Miss Everything, demonstrating way more comfort and panache in front of a camera than her daddy is comfortable with…

…stir in a few of the ladies from the gang from the neighborhood from the finest of the finest Moms anywhere (and, yes, those are Bloody Mary’s)…

…mix in one or two GetTheCameraOffMe’s…

…wait a few minutes to see Cute Redhead demonstrate her complete inability to WAIT. FOR. ANYTHING. even after I said “Hold on, I’ll be right there and cut down the sequoia you picked out…”

…this is what you’ll get:

Merry Christmas Is Coming, everyone.

Forgive Me

Todd Clary — Mon, 13 Dec 2010 17:22:36 +0000

I hate to do this to you…but, well…it’s Christmastime and I don’t see why we get to be all merry-merry about some things but hold off on others. And since Constraint and Restraint are swear words in my house, share the wealth I say! I mean, what with the running around, the buying, the lists, the budgets, the What’sABudget?, the insanity…don’t you want something to look forward to at the end of the 12 Days of Christmas? Something to kick back and unwind?

Enter a variation on a concoction I was introduced to a few years back. It has a name but not a name I’ve ever warmed to so I’m leaving out the name. Besides, since I’ve adjusted the original recipe, it begs a new name altogether. Which I’ve come up with but which I’m not putting here either :) And if you ever got enough of these in mean to loosen my inhibitions and spill the beans, you’d know why.

In the meantime, mix 1 part Butterscotch Schnapps (I know, right?)

and

1 part Bailey’s (wait for it) CARAMEL Irish Cream

Then call me and sing my praises, because trust me: you’re going to.

It Will Never Be Enough

Todd Clary — Thu, 11 Nov 2010 15:25:40 +0000

I hope your work today was interrupted with yet One More Thing you had to rearrange in order to get to yet One More School Thing.

I hope you were irritated and a little bit annoyed. Even if you kept it to yourself. Which we all do, because these are the kids we’re talking about, and, in spite of all the little things that get in the way (or so it seems from where we sometimes stand), this is the stuff their little lives are made of.

I hope you got to the school just in time to find out you should have arrived about 45 minutes earlier because the place is packed to the gills.

With kids.

And their parents.

And camcorders.

And grandparents.

And every neighbor in the neighborhood.

And I hope you were sardined shoulder-to-shoulder and polite and gracious when cameras came out, at the ready, to get a shot of each child with a line to read.

I hope you had to have this conversation with your boy today, “Um, no Alex. You will please tuck in that uniform shirt right now. The men and women you’re honoring today need it perfect. Your great-grandfather needs it perfect.”

“Dad…his name is Roland. And he’s dead.”

“His name just so happens to be Roland Owen Garland, and I don’t care if he’s been dead a thousand years. If he saw that uniform shirt not tucked in he’d come through the woodwork and string me up. Tuck it in. It’s Veteran’s Day. And it matters. Go.”

And I hope that when you saw the little hellion come in carrying the colors, you worked hard to hold it together because you realized you’re looking at what may just be, unfortunately, and also fortunately, a room full of our future defenders.

And I hope you had to push from your mind the unthinkable likelihood that someday, some of these babies will make the ultimate sacrifice. For us.

I hope that when all this young Perfect stood up and sang Grand Old Flag, and recited poems, and speeches…

…each one hardly knowing they have no idea what it is they’re really speaking into…

…or why all their parents’ eyes are brimming…

…that you stood up too and decided whatever meeting, phone call, or project was waiting for you because of this little interruption, could just wait till Hell froze over for all you care.

And when the young Perfect sang each branch’s theme song, I hope you turned around and saw this gentleman…

Who rose to lend his voice to the halls of Montezuma…

…who was helped up by his wife…

…with whom he’s been with since before the war…

…and who was shaking as he stood, because he’s been around that long and gets to shake if he wants to, and don’t you forget it. Plus, oxygen tanks are cumbersome…

…and who stood their trying to sing but couldn’t because he was crying…

…because though we couldn’t help but look at him (a photo of the moment would have been disrespectful, to put it mildly), we watched him watch the kids.

Singing.

To him.

And saluting hope. And courage. And You Do What Has To Be Done Because It Has To Be Done, thanking him. Even though all the thanks in the world will never be enough.

It will never be enough.

And I hope that after the program ends and you turn your head graciously so that your neighbors can wipe their tears while you wipe yours, you muster the courage to walk up to that Old Guard and tell him, “…my grandfather was in the war, sir. He’s no longer with us. But when I saw you, I kind of see him. And I really miss that sonofabitch. So. Thanks.”

And I hope that when he puts his older hand on your younger shoulder and smiles, you carry it with you for the rest of the day.

And I damn sure hope your shirt is tucked in.

There Is No Justice (Yet)

Todd Clary — Mon, 01 Nov 2010 16:36:32 +0000

Okay, here’s one for the record books.

And there are so many moving parts I don’t even know where to begin or if I’ll be able to wade in, sift through, and succeed in putting it down in a way having it read back to me in court won’t see the end of my days in some third-world prison.

We begin this one with Halloween costume parties. Which I hate — HATE — and which always seems to surprise everyone who knows me. Being the animated one and all, that is. They apparently expect I have a closet full of clown wigs, latex masks, and Hollywood makeup and spend my free time bouncing around the house in character.

Yeah no. (like I need a costume for that).

So. Halloween. Not a fan. Don’t know why, but I’m guessing it has something to do with what most get out of Halloween which they’re never afforded the other 364 days of the year. That is, being in public, without lasting repercussion, who or what they might be in private. Lol. Well. Let’s just posit the idea that I have no category for that delineation and you’ll begin to appreciate why I just don’t get what the big deal is.

Cute Redhead, on the other hand, loves — LOVES — this holiday. Which means I suffer it because her life’s worth, purpose, and goal pivots annually on dressing up like (I’m sorry to say) Dog The Bounty Hunter’s wife. Meaning there is a photograph somewhere of me dressed up as (you guessed it) Dog. It was an instant hit, we won the unofficial Best Costume Award, bleah bleah bleah. Still not a fan. Would still rather enjoy the cocktails, the fine food, and the conversation without the dressing up like something the Disney Channel barfed up.

This year I almost got out of going to the Halloween party altogether. Granted, for reasons unimportant to the rest of the story…but I was THIS close. I’d made it clear early in the week that I really didn’t want to go. So I’m not going. Right there in front of God and everybody, I asserted my This Man Don’t Do A DAMN Thang He Don’t Wanna! and you can just take that to the bank, doll.

“That’s fine.”

Okay, there is nothing worse than grabbing yourself by the bootstraps and laying down the law and getting a response like that. Because unless you’re the biggest buffoon to come down the pike, you know that means something like, “YeahWhateverYouHaveToTellYourselfDork.”

Fast forward to the night of the party.

Her: “That party is tonight.”

Me: “I’m not going. We’ve been over this.”

Her: “Okay.”

Me: “And I am not getting talked into it.”

Her: “No problem.”

Me: “I mean it, honey.”

Her: “Alright.”

Me: “I suppose a cocktail and hor dourves would be kinda nice, huh?”

Her: “Well, I thi—”

Me: “OKAY FINE GAWD!”

And then we started fighting about last-minute costume ideas like the fate of the free world depended on how our marriage navigated that scorpion-infested mine field.

Lord.

I went from I. AM. NOT. GOING. to Okay I’ll Go But (hee hee hee) I’m dressing up as [This].

“Um. No.”

“What do you mean, ‘um…no’??”

“I mean that’s foul and inappropriate.”

“IT IS NOT!”

“Yes. It is. And I don’t want to be embarrassed.”

“Okay…you have met me, right? Fine. Okay, then I’m going as (hee hee hee) [This].”

“Perhaps I wasn’t clear. What I’m trying to say is that if you step out of this house dressed like [That] or [That] I will kick your butt all the way to the divorce lawyer.”

“You’re not very much fun, you know that?”

Okay. Now. That last little bit was a bit embellished. But only on the ha-ha side. The fact of the matter is we had a Knock Down Drag Out over it. And not about [That] costume idea, or [That] one. It was deeper than that. It went right past Hilarious Costume (I’m still not letting it go) and wedged itself right in the epicenter of one of our biggest ongoing marital issues. Which has something to do with My-Feelings-Don’t-Matter-To-You-Oh-Yeah-Well-How-Come-I-Have-To -Always-Do-What-YOU-Want-and-whine-whine-whine-whine-posture-posture-jockey-for-position-yeah-whatever-shut-the-hell-up-both-of-you-and-realize-each-of-you-are-your-own-problem.

There were tears (hers), there was hair pulled out and left on the floor (mine) there was this, there was that, and it was STOOPID. In the end, though, I decided to let go of dressing up as [That] or [That], and instead went as [Lame]. (Read: if the first one to apologize and man up is the winner, then I won) (not that we’re keeping score.)

(But I won.)

So. We go to the Halloween party. And walk in. And see a person who is going Very Unnamed wearing nothing but a nude body suit with strategically placed black cardboard pieces covering her real life television-type censored pseudo-nudy nudiness.

With her husband.

Who had only one strategically placed black cardboard piece covering his *whistles*.

And I took one look at Cute Redhead and said, “…if I live to be a hundred, I will never forgive you for this.”

And she laughed.

Because it was funny.

And I laughed.

Because she has no idea that there are only 364 days until next Halloween.

Tethered

Todd Clary — Thu, 28 Oct 2010 23:42:56 +0000

Two things.

First Thing: my parents can’t do anything right.

Three weeks before that photo was taken they announced they were calling it quits after thirty-some odd years of perfect marital bliss. They were throwing in the towel, throwing down the gauntlet, and throwing it all away. Which was apparently easier than throwing each other through the living room window. And what impeccable timing. Three weeks before that photo. Three weeks before the day Cute Redhead and I would vow I Perfectly Promise Forever And Always.

But my parents, God love them to high heaven, can’t do anything right. And Can’t Do Anything Right looked like this:

“Oh yeah!? Well [not publishable] [not publishable] and you and your God-forsaken [so. not. publishable.] can just [Lord, the language that woman can employ]!!”

“Oh and you think I haven’t suffered in this freak circus side-show you call a relationship?! Ha! I’m outta here!”

*slam!

“Fine! I’m outta here too you rat-bastard waste of gravity! My mom was right about you!”

*slam!

And then they were outta there. They got in separate cars and got outta there. They screamed their piece, slammed their doors, floored it, and got! outta! there! taking their Outta Here in separate directions. Dad went one way and mom went the other. And if I know that man, he pursed his lips, hooded his eyes and brooded in a skilled silence and drove and brooded and drove and brood brood brood.

Mom, on other hand, if I know that woman (and I do) cussed a blue streak from here to deepest, darkest, Africa which, if written down would sear through paper, melt the table under it and burn a whole in the floor. The woman is nothing if not gifted in verbal metaphor. More, she’s Catholic. More than that, she’s a professional Catholic. Which means that if she has decided you aren’t right with God, The Holy Ghost, The Mother of God, all the angels and saints, their cousins on both sides, the old ladies who clean the pews with Murphy’s Oil Soap, and every Pope straight back to Peter (except the ones that annoy her)…you are flat going to Hell and she gets to throw the switch. It’s in her contract. Sorry.

That’s what was going on in her car while he brooded in his. Brood. Cuss. Brood. Cuss. BroodCussBroodCussBroodBroodBroodCussCussCuss.

And then dad’s cell phone rang.

“Where are you?”

“Just driving. Where are you?”

“Just driving.”

“I’m hungry.”

“Me too. Wanna meet me at The Little Bar? They have that meatloaf thing tonight I think.”

*thinks “Hm. That actually sounds good. Okay I’ll see you there.”

“Okay, I’ll see you there.”

“Oh and I hate you.”

“I hate you too. I’ll order your drink for you.”

And that’s how well and how far my parents got with divorce. Three weeks later, at our wedding, they were there holding it together. And eighteen years later into ours, and a billion and a half into theirs…they’re still holding it together. They’re still dancing. Slower. But they’re dancing.

And I am eternally grateful they can’t do anything right. That’s the first thing.

Second Thing: my wife and I can’t do anything right.

When I look at that photo I see that I remember that I didn’t know I didn’t know what was coming. I remember thinking I heard every word at premarital counseling and understood everything I’d read about ~~the adventure,~~ ~~the horrors,~~ ~~the surgery~~ the waltz through marriage.

But it takes years of undoing and doing it right, falling uphill, and tearing through layer after layer of False Self to come to see that you saw nothing then. And if you’re honest, sort of see even less now. I’m of the opinion lately that the failing eyesight of those of us who have waltzed past 40 can mean more than just laugh lines and gray hair at the temples. It can also mean that we’ve matured enough to live just as well (if not better) no longer needing to see perfectly. And that makes me smile because admitting you can’t see as clearly as you used to is counter-intuitive to a culture intoxicated with staying young.

In our house things are reversed. Cute Redhead does more of the heavy-lifting as provider than I do. I play the role of traditional mom more than she might. It’s just how our dance has played itself out. For the most part, we’re good with it. It can be an odd melody and a strange tune, but it’s our music and after the fog of diapers and Up All Nights lifted, we realized we’d learned the steps and it just fit.

But.

Sometimes neither of us like our roles, chosen or bestowed.

About a week ago I moved through a day telling nobody about how inadequate I felt as husband and father and a provider. Won’t bore you with How or Why. It’s not important and it’s probably nothing you can’t imagine all by yourself. But it was a hard couple of days and I kept it to myself. I got them up, made their breakfasts, packed their lunches, kissed her goodbye as she left on a business trip, dropped them off, and navigated the rest of the day until the chaos leveled itself again after school let out.

And the song played on. And I danced.

When Cute Redhead came home the next day there was a hand-off because I had a late meeting leaving her with what had become my typical effort: dinner. I don’t recall what she made. I do, however, recall that the kids and she let fly with no shortage of jokes about who does dinner better? Mom or dad? (Dad.)

And it was a good night. Redhead and I shared a bottle of wine, homework got fought over, Alpha Male got put in his place no less than three times for God-Knows-What-This-Time, the dinner was enjoyed for a grand total of six and a half minutes at the table and general good humor lasted right through to bed time.

At which time, I, spent, lay on my side in the bed glad that we’ve a warm roof over our heads. In spite of how inadequate I often feel at holding it up. After which, Cute Redhead, spent, laid down next to me and said, “…I feel like such a non-traditional mother. I can’t do anything right.” The nine-to-five and the rat race and the racing home and microwaving supper didn’t help.

“You’re not a traditional mother. But I’m not a traditional father either. And I can’t do anything right.”

Then we turned out the light and turned the page on another day of Normal Around Here. Which seemed right.

I fell asleep thinking about how I can’t do anything right. I thought about how my parents couldn’t either. I thought about the ways Cute Redhead and I still don’t understand each other. I thought about how, for “better or worse, I am tethered to you.” I thought about marriage and fighting and loving and getting it right and all the Getting It Oh So Wrong.

I thought about dancing. I thought about the many kinds of dances: the ones that require a passionate embrace to bring the music out of the song. The ones where man and the woman fly apart, past fingertips, barely holding on, having nothing more than a wild spinning of the room to throw them back together. I thought of the fast ones, the slow ones, and the ones you swear you’re never going to get to dance again. Until one day when you hear the song in the frozen food aisle, on speakers giving off more static than tune, and in your heart you’re dancing all over again.

I thought about how important it is to keep dancing. To keep looking. And to keep it together.

Chorded in love or tethered in the “tangle that’s bruising us blue…it’s a beautiful knot that we just can’t undo.”

Jill Does Life

Todd Clary — Thu, 07 Oct 2010 17:15:42 +0000

When you meet someone and immediately click because your humor and whacked out propensity to speak in third-person is just like theirs, you know you’ve met greatness. Or a clone. Or a cell mate in the asylum. Well, that’s my pal Jill. We met almost three years ago and have been a daily dose of hilarity and Hang In There for each other ever since. She’s a champion for a lot of reasons but one in particular we’ll get into in a little bit. For now, everyone: meet Jill Lopez.

1) Let’s get this bad boy started: I know you. You know you. But pretend no one else around these parts has any idea who you are. You want a stranger to know one thing above all others? What would it be? That I am uber hawt! Ha, just kidding! Well, that is me I guess: I love to laugh and have fun. But not just any fun, I mean roll on the ground, blow milk through your nose, need stitches fun.

2) Can’t aruge that one. Alright, how about this: you tie up and gag the Glee character of your choice AND take over their role. Which one and why? Oh for sure it would be that Rachel girl, the main one. When she gets to the climax of a song she does this thing with her voice at the end of each line. I just want to say, ‘Um…honey, take it down a notch, it’s not working for ya.’ And she gets to see the hot teacher everyday. He was way cute on the Britney/Briitany episode.

3) Now that you’ve sung your way into America’s heart, how about a little heart-to-heart with our leaders. Anything you want to tell the folks in Washington? You know when I was in college I interned at Entertainment Tonight cause I thought I wanted to be an entertainment journalist and my boss asked me what my major was. It was actually Political Science. When I told him what it was he stopped for a second and said, “You know what? Politics is just like Hollywood with ugly people.” Since then, I never really took it too serious. Its all a show, but I do think it’s pretty awesome how far we have come. I’d just like to see a Latina Woman in office next. Maybe J Lo or Rosie Perez will run next. Could you imagine?

4) Enough of the politics. Let’s lighten things up and keep it real. So you and Jesus are shopping and you come upon a pack of zombies. But they’re not your run-of-the-mill zombies. No. They’re White People Zombies. And Jill? They’re dancing. White People Dancing. You and Jesus talk it over. What do you do? Todd? Seriously? You know the last thing Jesus and I would be doing if we were hanging out would be shopping? We would so be working out at the gym

5) Very Cool. House cleaning or a trip to the dentist? Dentist hands down, I love getting my teeth cleaned…scrubbing toilets….um ya, not so much.

6) Any phobias? Ok, dont make fun of me, but I am seriously scared of birds. Well, not scared…I just dont like them close to me. My sister had a cockatoo when I was about 8 years old. I had on a pink Barry Gibb shirt and the thing flew across the room and started pecking at the shirt, at me. My sister had to run in and save me. So no, I dont like birds to come near me. In the sky great, from afar beautiful…but you wont catch me in one of those bird cages where they land on your head and all that. No thanks. Oooh, and fish! I dont want them touching me. Ill stay out here you stay in your tank or lake or whatever. Sharks, holy crap, so fun to watch on TV but, please God, don’t ever let me see one swimming next to me. Snakes, um ya….freaky! Oh and lastly motorcycles. I won’t ever go on one. My dad almost died in an accident when I was a kid so I always saw them as bad. I won’t even date a guy who has one. Other than that Im not really scared of anything…worry? Now thats another story.

Just a bundle of courage all around, arntcha lol? Shut up Todd.

7) Mountains or ocean? Ooh…I’d have to go with ocean.

8) Tell us something about you nobody knows. Ah ha! Well Todd, as it turns out, I am a singer, but I haven’t sung in a while. It’s always been a great outlet for me to sing. Ill need to get back to that.

9) Night out or a good book? Can I say a good movie?

You can say good movie.

10) Backstage pass to Aerosmith wrapped in cellophane holding a liter of Cuervo or a five gallon drum of wesson oil, a tarp, and John Mayer? Wait, am I rolling around covered with wesson oil on a tarp with John Mayer? Yes please!

(That was a no-brainer.)

11) Now that you’re going to burn in hell for eternity, let’s take a look at how you’ve lived your life and see if there’s anything here we can redeem, hm? Have you ever done something Pay It Forward or all Good Samaritan you’ve never told anyone about? Yes, when i was about 18 or 19 my friend’s younger brother got a girl pregnant. She was about 16 years old. She was not going to have it but I talked with her for hours and hours and she ended up deciding to give it up for adoption. The little girl was adopted by an amazing family in San Francisco and they still get pictures to this day. I never really told anyone about that.

Pretty much ruined that whole ‘but never told anyone about it part.’ Sorry.

12) Seriously, that is outstanding. Okay, something I really do want the WiP readers to hear about: your journey. The one you’ve started to blog about, what got you here and where you’re headed. What do you want the world to know about Jill Does Life? Oh boy, now for the serious stuff. I have struggled with a weight problem all my life. Every diet you can imagine, I’ve done it. Thousands and thousands of dollars spent, and no success. I have probably gained and lost hundreds and hundreds of pounds but just came back plus some. 2009 just hit me really hard and I fell deeper into depression. Using food as my drug of choice and wasting my life on the couch. I lacked the motivation and drive to do anything. Everyone just kind of tip toed around me and just tells me they love me the way I am. But the truth is I haven’t been living. I have just been existing. I have an amazing man in my life, a great job, wonderful friends, and family. But it all just kind of exists around me. Im tired of it. I want to participate in my life.

So all this time I have been looking for inspiration, some kind of spark. On Monday I woke up and i was dragging butt like i usually do. I like to check my Facebook and Twitter in the a.m. before work. This time was different. One of my role models, Jamie Eason, had a link to this video of a guy who had lost 120 pounds. At the end it said ‘check out my blog.’ So I did — and I spent the entire day sifting through his posts and his journey. What touched me the most was, he didn’t do any name brand diet. He didn’t really count calories or weight train. His whole drive was “I was unhappy, I started running, i lost weight, and now I am happy.”

I was just in awe. How easy this could be. No more spinning my wheels all I have to do is close the gap between happy and unhappy. And it was then that I decided, I am going to start my own blog called Jill Does Life, it ain’t gonna be pretty but its my journey and I know its gonna be amazing.

And the blog address? www.JillDoesLife.com. It’s just started yesterday but stop on by. I’ll be updating it regularly and hope I get to hear from others as I do this.

13) Love that. So what’s your biggest dream about this? You know Todd, I just want to finally be free of the sadness and the darkness. I just want to feel better. Oh and look smoking’ hot naked…ha seriously. (at least in a thong.)

14) Lol attagirl. And your biggest obstacle? I think the biggest obstacle for me is going to be keeping accountable and being honest. This is something that has always been something I have dealt with alone. I mean seriously—it’s not like I can hide that I am obese, but hey, I sure can act like i’m perfect. I think its time to quit putting on a show and put it all out there and be honest. Even though this will be my biggest obstacle it will be one of my greatest wins.

15) You’ll get there. I’ve never doubted it. Any big plans for when you Get There? Well first off, there is going to be a big party: paparazzi, red velvet rope, you know how we do it—woo woo! The other big thing is I really want to get certified as a personal trainer and pay it forward. I know when this is further along, I want to get a job somewhere in fitness and nutrition and wellness.

16) Hm. I like that. So…how ’bout this: one day in the not too distant future, you’re There…and you come across a woman Who’s Not. You’ve been where she’s at and can see into what she’s trying to live with. What do you want to say to her? The first thing I would ask her is if she was happy? 9 times out of 10 we usually are not. It’s not about the food. It’s never about the food. Its what we use the food to numb. The feelings we stuff down. Then, I would tell her that she can choose a better life and re-write the story. It’s never to late to change. And then I’d take her by the hand and we’d go find her happy.

17) Alright, time for a little Jill Time. You have a weekend all to yourself. The world is your oyster. And you have a $10,000 VISA gift card. Hit me. Oooh I know, I know: I would hire Jillian and Bob from Biggest Loser to kick our butts for 3 days straight. That should about cover the bill.

18) Okay, what’s this ‘we’ stuff? And here it comes: the superpowers question. Which one and why? I don’t remember which superhero has this one, but the power to heal wounds, broken legs, cancer…stuff like that. I’d just go through the world laying hands on people and fixing them it would be awesome! Oh ya, it was Jesus…that’s who that was.

19) *rolls eyes* lol nut. If you could change one thing about the way the world works (or doesn’t) what would you change? You know Todd, I wouldn’t change a thing. This world has taught me a lot and i’m ready to learn more. Bring it world. I got this.

Yeah. You got this :) Last one…

20) Sitting on the porch across from God. What do you want to ask Her? Oh I like this one Todd. I would just want to hold Her hand and sit in the silence for a while. And then I’d probably ask why did You give me such a big butt and small boobs?

Reads That Moved

Todd Clary — Tue, 05 Oct 2010 21:00:49 +0000

I’ve gotten pretty sick and tired of myself lately, and, believe it or not, that realization is precisely what motivated me to write about reading.

I spend a lot of time on writing, or blogging, or working on one of the books in process. There’s the whole social networking fact of life and business anymore and, truly, I have a very love-hate relationship with all of it. But I don’t think that makes me unique at all.

It’s an easy mistake, on my part that is, to spend too much time here at WiP or any other place with a constant Myself as the topic of conversation. And whether what I write has anything to do with me specifically, it’s Me involved at all that sort of has started getting on my nerves lately. The days lately have been spent strategizing on new books, social media as a tool and not a god, a few other web sites I’m working on and, to be quite frank, making it profitable without losing my own soul in the process. The Grand Struggle.

So here I sat, working, but taking a break from the screen. I let my mind quit the present task and noticed the bit of rearranging I’d recently done in the studio: books. My work space is on the sparse side which I prefer. Not a lot of nick-nacks and I’m actually winnowing things in my effort to surround myself only with the things that inspire.

The other morning I went around the house gathered the books I like most and brought them into closer quarters. I like seeing them. And since I like mine as much as I’m sure you like yours, a quick word or two on some of them (pictured above) how I came to them (or how they found me, which is more likely the case), and who I have to thank for it. At the end of this, if you care to comment, I’d love to hear two things:

1) What are you reading right now and why

and

2) Name for us a book that has moved your soul or mind profoundly (and I should warn you…I’m in a book-buying mood).

Here are a few of my most notables:

The Pendragon Cycle, by Stephen Lawhead. A friend of mine, Dr. Bob Beltz, mentioned this work way back in 1989. I have this odd and very deep need to read anything Bob ever suggests, and this series came into my life at such a critical time, informing so much I can’t put into words, that it has become a literary pillar in my own story.

Back To The Sources – Reading the Classic Jewish Texts, Edited by Barry W. Holtz. My buddy Kendall Ruth waved this tome right in my face about three years ago and I’m not sure I’ll ever forgive him for it. We almost tore the book in half in a brief tug-of-war. Meaning I have this rule that if I’m interested in your book, I get to have it. Right then, right there. It’s sort of My Rule. Well…Kendall didn’t quite come around to my way of thinking so I was reduced to actually ordering and (brace yourselves) waiting for a book to arrive. And though it was hell, it was a hell quite worth the wait. This book, all by itself, has done more to inform my spiritual journey and thoroughly arrest everything I thought I understood about God. It’s not for the faint of heart, trust me. And, no, it’s nothing new. Three years into it and I still haven’t finished it. It’s that amazing.

The Mary Russell Series, by Laurie R. King. My friend Kristy Armstrong badgered me for years to read the first of this series (The Beekeeper’s Apprentice). When finally I cracked it opened, it was love at first sentence. And I mean that literally. The very first sentence came off the page in the most lyrical cadence I’ve ever encountered in any other author before or since. Her work is, without rival, the most eloquent-without-being-forced weaving of word and tempo I have ever enjoyed. I’ve learned no less than twenty-five words I’ve never heard of from each book. If you’re a fan you know what I’m talking about. If you’re not and get hooked, you have the advantage of ten books already completed in which to lose yourself. And, trust me, have a dictionary at the ready.

The Ender Series, Orson Scott Card. My pal Tim Keel turned me on to these. Ethical dilemma set in the construct of science-fiction. Brilliant work.

The Shadow of the Wind, Carlos Ruiz Zafón. My neighbor and friend Nancy had some explaining to do the night I leafed through this one while at a dinner party at her home. Explaining, because she had the audacity to not let me steal it. Yet again, had to order and WAIT for a book. And also worth the wait. The richness of this reading experience is in a league all its own. The ability of Zafón to set up and deliver every one of the finer points of human relationship, from tone and tenor to mood and idiosyncrasy — but with an economy of words is amazing. I lose myself in his precision while still finding myself transported into the story. A must read.

So. There are a few of mine. Now…who’s reading what?

Masks

Todd Clary — Tue, 05 Oct 2010 12:00:34 +0000

“They’re not dishonest…they’re just young.”

And then my memory stepped sideways one pace to cross twenty-some odd years ago to a drive through the mountains of Colorado.

We were making our way back from a weekend with friends and were several hours past everything we could think to talk about. Some fell asleep to pass the time while others fell to watching sunlight and shadow take turns passing over our windows. I just laid my head back and let the brightness of the sun and the low vibration of the engine affect a meditation.

Then quietly, to himself, my friend David muttered, “…so much beauty in the cycle of death.” My dropping eyelids snapped open wide and I looked not at him, but at the aspen trees flying past the windshield.

I loved what he said, how he saw it, and that he said nothing more. Nor did I.

Nothing else to say.

I’ve never forgotten that moment for the combination of speed and color and comment. And every Autumn, every single Autumn, I tell it to myself again, as invocation, and let go the summer in order to embrace the coming death of winter.

But not before the truth comes to the fore.

Did you know the Autumn colors are the true colors? The green is the mask. Sameness with just a little variation, which at first is fine. But it’s only at the threshold of death and relinquishing and leavetaking that the true colors come forward. So much brilliance and diversity right before they, exhausted, release themselves.

And fall.

If it’s true that it’s always darkest before the dawn, then it’s equally true that it’s always brightest before the dusk. Late September and early October has always been an invigorating but sort of bitter stretch for me. Invigorating because the colors…the skies, the leaves, the grasses, the flower—even the smells…deepen. A super-saturation in every sense. One last burst of Self and the whole landscape looks almost fake. And then, the young green leaves have done all they can do. Bold but expended, their essence wanes and bleeds to show the verdure for what it is. That is, a mask covering authentic nature.

And bitter because it’s this final exhale of life that ushers in the coming cold and the incubation of deep winter. In order to cycle onward to the hope of spring. Living, always dying…dying, ever birthing.

Beta Male looked at the trees as I explained the science of it with a bit of Life-Lesson to keep him wondering.

“So…what you’re saying is that the trees aren’t showing what they really are.”

“That’s right.”

“So they’re dishonest.”

Smile.

“They’re not dishonest…they’re just young.”

Hot Tomato Heaven

Todd Clary — Sun, 03 Oct 2010 19:51:54 +0000

You’d be surprised how much flack a person gets just because they happen to mention they’re going to make a hot tomato pie ~~almost~~ from scratch. And it’s a crying shame too. There you are, working your fingers to the bone…day in and day out, pushing the boulder uphill, only to be mocked outright for partaking in one of life’s simple pleasures.

Okay, none of that actually happened, except for the part where Alpha Male got a bit uppity about the whole thing, on Facebook no less, and said ‘it’s not that good, trust me haha.’

Um.

What?

“It’s not that good, trust me?!” Yeah I don’t think so, pal.

And Anna? Trust me — you should be on the edge of your seat. It’s that good.

Jody? Cooking With Buff Todd® would be censored after one episode, let’s not kid ourselves.

Paula? You have no idea what you’re missing. But in your defense, neither did I the first time the dish was put in front of me by Cute Redhead’s mom (aka Mother Jane) (who could cook all of us under the table, trust me).

Carl, I knew you’d dig the whole idea, so here’s to you, Master Gardener.

And lastly, Juan? I want a full report on you cooking one of these for yourself because the recipe just so happens to be one of the easiest reasons to justify planting vegetable garden in the first place, and takes no more than this:

a frozen pie crust (defrosted at room temperature for about ten minutes, for the novices among you)…

a single layer or two (but no more) of your garden’s crown jewels…

a bit of olive oil drizzled (and I mean drizzled, don’t get crazy)…

some salt and pepper, and…

some mozzarella cheese.

Pop that sucker in a 400˚ oven for as long is it takes to come out looking like this:

And then…

when Recalcitrant Teenager emerges from his den of iniquity whining for something to eat (he can muster enough attitude to smart off but not enough to manage a sandwich, how shocking), which he did…you whine right back with something like, “oh pumpkin buddy sweetheart child of mine: yeah sucks to be you. I just ate the whole thing.”

Which I did too.

Put Down The Drill and Step Away From the Project

Todd Clary — Fri, 01 Oct 2010 22:07:27 +0000

Like all visits to the emergency room for compound fractures and multiple stitches, today’s cascade into a New Dimension Of Pissed Off began with the installation of the pet door.

Tools required: 3/8” drill bit, a saw I don’t know the exact name of but which I have, a level which I consider a tool for sissies and refuse to use, a screwdriver which thrilled me because what are jobs around the house if not made that much more fun with cocktails, and a few other tools I only know by sight because all my dad ever yelled was “NOT THAT THING! THE OTHER THING!”

First, we hold up the actual dog-door frame, noting where on the door this portal from God Forbid, A Dog Should Ever Be Outside into Ha! Said The Burglar, I Can Fit Through THAT! should be cut. So, I draw my lines, note the holes so that I can very shortly drill with all the precision of a surgeon, and remember with disdain the checkout person at the pet store.

Who was “chirpy.”

I don’t like chirpy. When I’m doing man things, like installing pet doors, the last thing I want is “chirpy.” I also don’t like it when my wife, who I love, hovers. And watches. I don’t know why this bothers me. All I know is that if my buddy were to go, “…you know I think you have the wrong size drill bit there,” I’d be all, “ha ha! you are THE BEST FRIEND IN THE WORLD ILOVEYOUMAN!” and the next thing you know, we’d be stumbling drunk down the street bar-hopping with our arms around each other’s neck looking for fights just to prove how tight we were and how we just GET each other, right? But when my wife goes, “…you know I think you have the wrong size drill bit there,” all I hear is “…I love watching you do things around the house. It’s like watching my girlfriends. You’re a wuss and I think you could wear high heels.” Much to her credit, however, she left me alone to the project as soon as she heard what we’ve come to know in our family as The Tone. (She has The Look. I have The Tone. It works for us.)

So I grab the saw…I think it’s called a jig saw and I like that name because it makes me think of merry little dances with characters from my favorite childhood books. Books with titles like, “Johnny Severs A Limb,” and “Are You My Plastic Surgeon?”

This thing is a lethal weapon and should be banned in all fifty states because it is alive and has a mind of its own. And that little red laser super-straight beam of light it emits ensuring you keep your wits about you and keep a straight line throughout the sawing process? Yeah, no. My cuts looked like I thought it would be less useful to cut a square and more interesting to show the world that, yes, you can actually cut out what looks like a plate of spaghetti noodles.

And then this damn door’s nine thousand different beveled sections decided to get structurally attitudinal. And fall apart. Like a real life set of Tetris blocks or something. So, there I am with Additional Problem Number Six and now I have to somehow secure these beveled pieces back into the rest of the door. Which I actually do. And which we’re not going to actually explain. We’re just going to assume it all works out just fine. And it does.

Because I tell myself big fat lies. Lies like, “Bailey, the 110 pound and beloved Golden Recliner, will delicately step through this brand new doggie door with the quiet subtlety of a church mouse.”

Actual Truth: “Bailey has all the deftness of a wounded rhinoceros and the first time he comes barreling through this stupid thing, I fully expect the entire back half of the house to come down around my ears.” At which point my wife will turn to me and go, “…nice work. Can I borrow your new blouse?”

For manly men who can walk down the aisles of Home Depot with that practiced look of bored expertise: I hate you. By the end of this project, it looked like I took every tool Craftsman ever dreamed up, put them into a canon and shot them at the door.

But it works. And by “works,” I mean that I might as well have stapled posters around the neighborhood announcing to would-be prowlers that there’s no need to worry about that irritating snag of a dead bolt in the front when you can slip your fat ass through this dog door right around back.

So, yes, there is an actual opening in this door. And, yes, there is an actual flip-floppy plastic thing that swings to-and-fro fairly begging any animal to come hither and bask in the dry warmth of the laundry room and then bounce off the walls like I know every squirrel in a ten mile radius is going to do. But, alas, the dog still won’t use the stupid dog door I spent half a day installing. Apparently, Super Dog thinks it’s covered in doggie Kryptonite and he can’t get near it.

And, yes, I am drinking screwdrivers.

This Is Going To Sting

Todd Clary — Fri, 01 Oct 2010 00:43:22 +0000

You better sit down for this one, people.

In fact, you better get whatever it is you get when you need to find your Happy Place and believe that, no matter what, everything is going to be okay. Also, I would like to suggest a liter or two of Jack Daniels.

Okay, so you know how the economic downturn has resulted in the gross national product and the unemployment bleah bleah BLEAH YeahIDon’tActuallyListenEither. But, the whole knotted up mess has trickled down to MY WORLD enough that it seemed prudent to tighten the ol’ belt around here, right? Cut back on this, pare down on that, etc., etc. We can do without the live-in maid, the cook, the nanny, and the two RV’s. We’ll live without the yacht and the Gulfstream. Times are tough, but we’ll manage.

And by ‘manage’ I mean there’s going to be a ~~homicide~~ suburban uprising. It seeeEEEEEeeems that Man Skills (that’s my new self-awarded nickname) and Cute Redhead (that’s hers, although we’re considering changing that to WaitYouDidWhat?) had a (brace yourselves) miscommunication. How in the world, after eighteen years of matrimonial bliss THAT could happen, we’ll never puzzle out but…well. There it is.

A month or two ago, in our very responsible and mature conversation regarding whether or not to sell the kids, I mentioned that, all things considered they really don’t need the DVR downstairs. I mean, honestly—how many episodes of [any show on the Disney channel] does it take to find their dad trying to flip through to the recording of [any show he recorded] and, not finding it, decide to throw the damned remote at the wall?

Now, as I recall it I indicted their DVR. The one downstairs. THEIRS.

Which, again, is fine. In the interest of turning this financial Titanic around and heading back to safer shores, one less DVR in the house and the bit of cash it saves is not such a bad thing.

This, however, was:

Cute Redhead: “Hey guess WHAT?”

Man Skills: “What??”

Her: “I just got off the phone with [cable provider aka Cable Rapist] and managed to shave off [unimportant amount] a month off our bill! Yay!”

Me: “Yay!”

Her: “I know, right?!”

Me: “I know! Ha ha! We’re frugal! And ha ha! Heck! The kids won’t miss it anyway! Ha ha! Yay for us! I love that we’re saving [unimportant amount] each month! Yay! But…well. That’s okay! Because they don’t need it anyway, right??”

Her: “I got rid of ours too.”

Me: “. . .

. . .

Um. What?”

Her: “Well, I thought that’s what you said.”

Me: “You’re kidding me right? You THOUGHT I said rip my only 30 – 60 minute break from the insanity and GET RID OF THE ONLY THING PREVENTING JIHAD AROUND HERE?!”

Her: “Well. Yes. Yes, it will be okay. You’ll see. I think you can handle it.”

(Additional comments we don’t publish regarding what can and cannot be handled around here.)

Me: [after 'handing it'] *sigh “Okay.”

Her: “Oh one more thing. You have to drive the DVRs to the cable store tomorrow and return them.”

Me: “You hate me, don’t you?”

Beautiful

Todd Clary — Wed, 29 Sep 2010 21:45:59 +0000

Now and then, Cute Redhead’s work will require some travel, leaving me to fend for myself and ponder the age-old question: “can three kids puzzle out where to hide their dad’s body and make it look like an accident?”

I think I’m a pretty average husband where Listening is concerned. Meaning, I suck at it. She could lecture, show slides, and graph the whole conversation. I’d come back one hour later with something brilliant like, “…that talking you were just doing there? Was that to me?”

Which actually went off something like this: (taps sleeping wife on shoulder) “Jane, what time is your flight again?”
“…it’s at eight.”

“A ha. Which means you’re up and gone by six.”

“Yes.”

“I see. So, in other words, I’m waking up to seven children all by myself.”

“Yes.”

“A ha. And this doesn’t bother you? I mean, you can live with yourself?”

(Wife snoring) (read: “Yes, I can live with myself, wuss.”)

Seven children. Not three. Seven. Alpha Male successfully negotiated a friend (2) for a sleep over. Which cascaded into Beta Male successfully campaigning for two of his little hoodlum pals to also sleep over (plus 3), which dominoed into Charlie Girl (aka The Mistress Of Light and Splendor) successfully bargaining to include her little confederate in said sleep over (equals 7).

So, Wife is up and gone and wheels-up before I’ve even rolled over and realized it fell to me to make the coffee. And then turn into Short Order Cook and crank out pancakes, eggs, bacon, and orange juice for the Demonic Horde (which was actually a lot of fun because it turned into a food prep free-for-all complete with Aerosmith lending their very loud talents and encouraging us all to Cook! This! Way!)

And the next four days unfolded or unraveled, depending on whether you think three square meals a day at three different drive-thrus is a crooked and dark. The laundry didn’t get touched, the dishes actually did, and the kids were accounted for at the end of each day, with bumps and bruises well within acceptable norms. So, all in all, a wild success, this particular solo flight.

It’s not a stretch to say I let the spawn more or less run wild too. And run wild they did. Our house somehow transubstantiated into Ground Zero with No Adult Supervision, attracting every child in five surrounding counties. There are rumors of water balloons in the bathroom (mild), the cat being not at all compliant to testing the suction power of the shop vac (very powerful and not at all mild), and bikes on the roof (even I don’t want to know the details of that one).

I just know that on the afternoon of the first day, I was in the kitchen knocking out a masterful impression of an octopus, putting:

…one Band-Aid on skinned knee (for neighbor kid)

…one plate of leftover pizza in the microwave (for me)

…one recalcitrant pre-teenage boy in his place for burying his little brother in the sofa bed (it’s NOT a sofa bed)

…one thirty-five pound bag of dog food back into the bag because, call me old-fashioned, but I just think dog food stores better in the bag and not under the dining room table (not making that up).

…one driver side window up even though the sudden rain storm had already come and gone rendering that one moot.

Now, all that happened pretty much simultaneously and in the space of a Parent Half Hour, which in Mortal Time is two and a half minutes.

And you should be amazed. Amazed and awestruck. Inspired, even. You should be all these things and more. And you would be…

…because there’s one thing in that two and a half minute onslaught you don’t know about. You don’t know about it because I left it out…because even if I did include it in that siege, you would have missed it.

Just like I did.

In the midst of blood, accusations, denials, lunch, rain storms, dog food, threats, pizza and microwave buzzers going off, you would have missed little miss Little Girl seeking purchase in the gaps in the hysteria with, “Daddy?”

Which took no less than half a dozen “Daddy’s!” to register, but when they finally did breach Male Limbic Brain (now covered in blood and dog food crumbs), it went like this:

“…baby, what is it, honey, Daddy’s kind of busy wi—”

“Can you write “What is your name?’”

“—with all of you all needing to—can I write what?”

“Can you write “What is your name?’”

And she’s tiny, right? She’s tiny. She weighs about two and a half cents soaking wet, and she’s freckled and smiling and hopeful and she’s holding up a pencil and a piece of paper.

I don’t even pause to smile. I don’t suspend the sentencing I’m about to reign down on big brother for stuffing little brother (again) inside the sofa bed (it’s NOT a sofa bed). I don’t luxuriate in Life wanting to get all cute and Hallmarky with me and this precious, hopeful, tiny little freckled thing asking me for help.

I didn’t wipe the blood from the neighbor kid’s skinned knee from my hands, and I think I was cussing because I had just swallowed a bite of pizza and set my esophagus on fire with the cheesy, white bubbling napalm.

(Sighs) (grabs pencil) (grabs paper) (writes down “What is your name?”) “Here you go, sweethea—August, so help me God, I am going to bring you within an inch of your life you litt—”

“Thank you, daddy.”

“—you’re welcome, honey, go play now and be carefu—ALEX, for the last *&*#! time put down the butcher knife!”

Okay, all that? Normal. That’s life as a parent, and not at all unusual when one’s spouse is away and it’s All Hands On Deck. Not at all strange. So, if any of it makes you laugh, great. I wasn’t laughing. Honestly, though, I’d be lying if I claimed I was losing my mind. I mean, I was, yes. But so what? So were about one billion other parents on the planet at that very moment.

This. Is. Life.

The rest of the day contributed no shortage of comparable goings on. All the way up to that Most Holy of Redemptions: bed time, which had me considering duct tape and fishing line if it would keep the two boys in their own damned beds.

It wasn’t until the fourth threat to introduce them to their other brothers (now long forgotten and buried under the back porch), that I leveled enough seriousness to produce obedience. At which point I mussed the hair on their respective Hell-spawned heads and bid them, “Sleep tight, you nutjobs.”

So that I could tuck in my little girl. Who was already under her comforter, nothing but happy little eyes peeping out.

“Hey, pumpkin.”

“Hi, daddy. Daddy, is it sometimes hard to be a parent?” (I promise she actually asked me this.)

Tired. Smile. “Sometimes, baby. But it’s okay.” Kiss. “Good night, baby girl.”

“Good night, daddy.” Light out.

“Daddy?”

Sigh. “Yes, honey.”

“Have you ever seen her?”

“Seen who, sweetheart?”

“The Tooth Fairy. Have you ever seen her?”

“Ah.” (pinching that fold of skin between the eyes) “Well…once I thought I did. She’s very fast, Emma, and I couldn’t tell for sure. Now, night-night, baby.”

“Night-night.”

And then I collapsed on my own bed and wondered how much loose change the furniture would surrender.

Tooth Fairy.

Emma lost a tooth and I don’t think I need to waste anytime explaining to anyone how momentous a lost tooth is. To say nothing for the expected currency the sprite trades for missing dental work.

I laid there intending to gather strength and resolve enough to make sure that when the sun rose, her heart didn’t crash. This was risky because the house was quiet and my back was killing me and the mattress was doing something like a siren call, tempting me to the depths of uninterrupted sleep. But I remembered her little face and the bright, believing eyes and I can’t help but agree that this innocence is, surely, worth a few bucks.

So, with the skill one acquires from years of fluency in the sounds of a sleeping house, I crept into her room to find exactly what I expected: my baby girl, curled up on her side…just like she does; little mouth open still looking like baby breath…just like she does; hands tucked under her cheek…just like she does.

Just like I expected.

And then something I didn’t expect: there, on the pillow beside her, written in her own first-grade hand, a note:

“What is your name?”

I just stared. Then I sat on the bed with no worry that I would wake her, because little girls sleep the sleep of the righteous.

I’ve known the Tooth Fairy to leave a lot of cash at our house. I’ve done my level best to field all kinds of questions about her job, what she does with all those teeth, and “does she know the Easter Bunny?” (answer: Yes, they were in grade school together.) I’m a parent so, naturally, I’m partial to a lot of Privileged Information when it comes to Magic, Surprises, Santa’s Phone Number, How Long Can You Ground Someone (answer: Forever), How To Rock A Baby, How To Cut A Sandwich Right, What Do Reindeer Do All Summer, and Daddy, How Long Will You Love Me (answer: Forever).

But in all this knowledge…in all this Repository of Things Only Mommies and Daddies Know, I’ve never come across the answer to “What is your name?” Let alone the question.

But there it was. Written on a piece of paper. Perfectly imperfect and believing and all slanted wrong.

Come morning, and before she was half awake, Emma would reach a small hand under a small pillow and find a small jackpot. And on the pillow she’d find, written in blue-green sparkly-swirly Fairyscript something very few little girls in the world ever know: that the Tooth Fairy does have a name (it’s “Dentina Luna Faireena”).

All that would come in the morning.

At the moment, though, I sat, worn out, bone-tired, yelled out, cussed out, bloodied and staring at four more days until Mom came home. And yeah, guys (the ladies already know), I got all teared up when I read her note.

“Daddy, is it sometimes hard to be a parent?”

Yeah, honey. Sometimes it’s Hell.

But it’s beautiful.

Yellow Into Green – Part II

Todd Clary — Sun, 26 Sep 2010 12:00:47 +0000

Yellow Into Green – Part I

And then Life happens…

…to love ruining everything.

And you grow up and through and over and outward and in spite of. You learn there are deeper reasons and higher costs and mysteries wrapped in riddle. You taste failure, get stung by death (small d, and note that), fall in love only to learn that falling in love happens to be Love’s greatest, cruelest trick: the one that starts you down the adventure where you find out what it really is (and it’s not in the brochure, trust us).

There are schedules to keep, politics to vote on, issues to decide now matter. Bills to pay, things to defend, repairs to be made. Add to this the fact that, for a very long period in the beginning — while you’re family is sprouting, I mean — you’re bone tired. But not only if you’re raising small children, mind you. Because there is no shortage of other mediums in Life’s palette with which to bring you to the end of yourself. Like careers or adventure or crisis or great fortune.

You might let go of loving a spotless house and settle for finding a top to the sippy cup and calling it a clear win. You can lean into, like it or not, the long, slow drag toward a Responsibility you begrudgingly admit is entirely bereft of the wonder of your younger vantages. However it happens, happen it will. The ruination of What You Thought It Was.

That’s what I mean by Life, by God, ruining everything. Any by everything I sort of mean the construct of Innocence with which we come into this and which, I firmly believe, must be ruined in order to be salvaged. The whole ‘the city must be destroyed in order to be saved’ thing woven in the human experience.

There is a period, too, where you forget you remembered any of this. And I think that’s a critical period. Until you come to the place where you confess (not boast…confess) (because boasting shows you’ve confessed nothing) (and you can’t confess boastfully) You Don’t Know. And Not Knowing is only a good thing when you come through it. In the midst of it, in the midst of the cloud, disorientation plays tricks on sight and sound and, I don’t care who you are, if you call that fun, you’re not in it. You’re in the idea of it. The theory.

Being in the cloud and unknowing is what it is, because of what it is. That is, the only thing in our physical universe where cloud descends and touches earth: fog.

Fog doesn’t last forever, though. It doesn’t need to. It can’t, in fact. It needs to be burned off by enough light and time so that orientation can reassert itself and order and understanding and insight and Exactly Where You Are can show itself. It’s relieving.

It can also be bled of wonder.

Back to the window.

I was thinking of photosynthesis and chemicals rushing through minute corridors throughout leaves big and small, and though I didn’t think I had strayed too far from appreciating the Handiwork, I had apparently over-sterilyzed things and earned myself a few Words:

“I love yellow into green.”

I had to laugh.

No matter how correct understanding is, and there is untold worth in understanding, it can, was, and should be brought back around to what I knew years earlier and had shelved as Too Innocent because I didn’t know I didn’t know that what I thought was Truth was actually just theory. Because I hadn’t had my life ruined enough or with the precision only Nature can orchestrate, inside and out.

And I still love precision in its myriad forms.

But, more, always more, I love how He loves yellow into green.

Yellow Into Green – Part I

Todd Clary — Sat, 25 Sep 2010 15:17:25 +0000

I remember once, a long time ago, standing at a window watching light filter through trees and grass and saturate the changing colors. I remember the wind made things move in the same way hair moves underwater, undulating and in slow motion. If there is one thing, above all, about Nature I am intrigued by it’s her precision. The seemingly infinite code-within-pattern-inside-purpose-wrapped-in-kin—and the interdependence and machinery embodied in so many wildly beautiful expressions of Life.

But at that moment all I could think about was photosynthesis and what I learned in fifth grade. The right mixture of heat and time and light and chemical enough to absorb the momentum of the ultraviolet and translate that particular portion of the spectrum into nourishment for a leaf lucky enough to have found itself upturned toward the sky.

But then fifth grade turned into higher grades and photosynthesis got analyzed even more. There was chemistry, physics, biology, geometry and calculus; trigonometry and biogeophysiochemical cycles. And if any of those come across your memory like they do mine, I certainly hope they don’t, with them, convey to you any notion that I possessed a command of any of those subjects. Because trust me, I didn’t. Though I love the sciences, I was no honor student.

Back to the window.

By that time in my life I’d managed to come through the academics (unimpressive a student as I was) with a heart still intact. Meaning, if there were an honor roll for those who could calculate calculations and graph graphs, or measure shapes and chart atoms and protons, yet still find all of the dialects wanting compared to the way a kindergartener might see them? Well. If that were the standard trust me, I scored perfect marks.

And then Life happened.

And came growing into adulthood (technically)…

And vowing Forever (relationally)…

And changing the diapers (infinitely)…

And struggling to make it in the world (still working on this one).

And, over time, Life ruined everything.

Everything.

I’m laughing as I type this because, as I type this I’m sitting on our bed and occasionally glancing out the window to the yard. I think I intended another direction when I began this piece, but as I got to ‘And, over time, Life…,’ I happened to look up and out the window while still typing. And my fingers, no longer governed by my conscious mind, were hijacked by my heart. And married the sunlight and deepest saturation of early Autumn color with what I really believe Life (and I mean God) did. And on purpose.

Ruin everything.

That is, over time and as dependably as the constancy of a tide, wear down the magic and wrest from the simplest of things the simplest of joys. Which sounds a great deal more doleful than I mean. From where I stand now, that is…looking at the colors again and remembering that long-ago day at the window when I watched the very same.

You start life as a child and you experience most of everything with all and only the faculties of child. It is Innocence. It is The Garden. Though there is vast knowledge of good and evil all around, you do not know (nor need to know) any of it. There is color and sound and taste and all the rest. Things are very base and very simple.

And then Life happens…

(Part II)

Weight of Care

Todd Clary — Mon, 13 Sep 2010 17:03:23 +0000

It transformed from a minor To Do into a major Must. But I couldn’t say exactly why. I just knew that when I woke Sunday morning, building a set of steps for the Tree Fortress had somehow, in the night, secured itself between incidental and critical. I just wasn’t sure why.

What I was sure of, however, was that the meaning would surrender itself one way or another, but not until I set myself to it. So the trip to the hardware store for the few things I needed took as little time as I expected and found me back in the yard, saw horses set up and tools set out. And I began building steps.

And I remembered that when we built this thing several summers back, it was at Alpha Male’s insistence that we not build steps — but instead forced any who might enter to find their way to the trap door in the floor. How can you say no to an idea the Pan himself would have approved? And, much to the dismay of the youngers, the steps were erased from the plans forcing their tender limbs and sinews seek purchase on whatever they could grasp and ascend the full four feet.

But that was just a few summers back and our Alpha Male has loosened his iron grip on the manor’s lordship. His little brother and sister, more and more inclined to make use of the structure with their playmates, found me wanting to make getting up and down a bit easier. To say nothing for my being sick and tired of hefting myself up onto the balcony, jumping back down onto the yard, and thanking all the angels and saints that my lower back survived each time.

So. Steps.

But backburner that for a moment and let me fill you in on the deep summer and what hasn’t been going well…that is, as best I can as deftly as I should. Meaning that though details would fill in gaps, they would also eclipse the few things I’m trying to zero in on.

There are seasons in any marriage that openly challenge every idea you ever had about marriage. And, doing precisely what it’s designed to do, brings you within an inch of your convictions and upends your conceptions. Precisely, I believe, as it’s designed to do. I should mention here that, no matter how mature I might come across right now: trust me, I’m not. Or, rather, haven’t been. And whatever solid ground I land on today has been rather on the expensive side, costing me one concession after another and no small amount of Letting Go.

And I have hated it.

I’ve written much less than I’ve wanted to. The problem has been life happening. And the more life has happened this summer, the less I’ve laughed. Not my typical modus, to say the least. Come and gone, the period I unconsciously allow myself awaiting inspiration and, with it, the comfort I’ve come to trust in Life’s ability to show her more hilarious side if only we wait a few moments.

She has been not at all liberal of late. Worse, She has been considerably morose and sobering to a degree I find not at all inspiring. So no funny waltzes.

I think it was the fruition in our garden that threw me off the scent. That is, that the tomatoes and the beans and the carrots and the lettuce and the cucumbers and the onions, plentiful all, deceived me perfectly enough to overlook that even in deep summer, Life can effect a winter’s freeze and hide what must know a dormancy if it is to ever know the light of day.

Children are beautiful. They are also hard.

Marriage is beautiful. It too is hard.

And they’re each — they have been each — more than enough to carve out more wrinkles, sprout more gray hairs, and bruise more knees (prayer) than usual.

Again, details are, I think, unnecessary. And no one is on the ledge. And nothing hangs by a thread. And, truly, all in all…all is well.

So I built steps.

And I’m no master craftsman. I mean, at all. I enjoy the simple projects but more often than not, nurse a growing anxiety inside when I stand before something I’ve never done before. Like raise a teenager, or navigate the winter of aging parents, or wonder all over again exactly how what I thought I vowed and what He seems to mean by ‘marriage’ could be worlds apart.

My cuts are…sufficient, but not perfect. The wood splits in several places, but it’ll hold. I wouldn’t call the angle plumb nor the space between the footfalls accurate…or professional. But they got me to the top. They’ll make it easier for others to climb.

Then I stood back, pulled out my camera, took that shot and heard Him say, “…pray for your enemies.”

And I collapsed on the inside.

Because lately I have a lot of enemies. The adage “keep your friends close and your enemies even closer” broke over my mind with a newness I had to appreciate and an offensiveness from which I foolishly thought myself exempt. Yet before self-condemnation could gain a foothold, He reminded me of a favorite part of a favored poem:

I falter where I firmly trod,
And falling with my weight of cares
Upon the great world’s altar-stairs
That slope thro’ darkness up to God,

I stretch lame hands of faith, and grope,
And gather dust and chaff, and call
To what I feel is Lord of all,
And faintly trust the larger hope.

– In Memoriam, Lord Alfred Tennyson

It encourages though I’m not going to take time to explain exactly why.

And summer is ending as summers do…

while…

Autumn is falling with a weight of care.

Happy

Todd Clary — Sun, 22 Aug 2010 16:05:25 +0000

She took it all in and said, “I guess in the grand scheme of things, it could have been a lot worse.”

So I reached across the restaurant table and held her hand, matching my devil-may-care grin with her Don’t Even Think About It smile.

“Well?”

“Well what?”

“…Please.”

“What?”

“Really, honey? Really? After eighteen years, you really don’t know how this goes? What I’m about to ask?”

[chuckling] “Oh.”

“Or would you prefer I came over there and got on one kne—”

“DON’T. YOU. DARE.”

Which of course meant that, before she finished the “DON’T” and was halfway into the “YOU,” I was already up out of my chair in front of the entire restaurant and down on one knee, holding her hand (very firmly because she was trying to yank it away). She was laughing. I was laughing harder. But I would have satisfaction and her hilarious embarrassment only made it all the sweeter.

“Will you marry me all over again?”

That’s the question I ask, the question I have to ask on every anniversary. I don’t know how I came up with it but it’s something like Contract Renegotiations, and it’s asked only after we’ve had enough adult beverages in us to glow a bit so we laugh more than we cry at the last leg of the journey. That is, the last year since our last anniversary. And there was din enough in the restaurant such that my explosive laughter at her answer (a Very Loud NO! lol) only added to the high spirits all around.

I sat back down, still laughing at her still laughing and noticed several smiling women in my line of sight trying to make sense of Did He Just Do Is What I Think He Just Did.

It was a great night. It was just between she and I. That is, the deeper conversation and the Honeymoon Is Quite Over And The Novelty Of You Wore Off Eons Ago…But Call Me Crazy, I Still Love Being Alone With You. (Or what I call Home.)

Go figure.

And the sweetness of all that is only fully appreciated if you pull back the camera and rewind several hours into our Saturday when we were cleaning the garage and wanted to kill each other outright.

I don’t know what it is in your marriage, but in ours? It’s the garage. If I had a nickel for every single time I went to clean the garage and it devolved into WWIII, IV, V, VI, VII, VIII, VIX and X, I wouldn’t be rich…I’d be paying someone else to clean it for me so I could avoid it altogether.

But God in His infinite wisdom (somewhere in heaven I think I hear a Voice going, “Oh get a load of this one. Nutjob’s pawning it off on Me.”) has so engineered the deeper lessons we need into the shape of a 30′ x 30′ arena, fitted with a million bikes, spilled paint, a drum set, a freezer and an extra fridge, a tool bench that looks like it sustained a direct hit and enough camping equipment for an army.

I won’t go into the details of how the argument started, how it peaked, how it exploded, imploded or resolved (but it did). I will, however, go into how, after it had simmered down, Cute Redhead poked her head into the garage, risking a whole other round, and said, “Could you come here? I really do need your help on something.”

So I drop what I was doing, head inside and follow the sound of, “…down here,” which was the laundry room. Which decided to imitate Niagara Falls in the form of a flow of water coming out from under the washing machine.

Which wasn’t even on.

It took Male Limbic Brain .087 seconds to register all of this and just .00000087 seconds to turn around and just walk out.

Unable to Make It Just Go Away, I maneuvered the washer and the dryer out of their positions to see what was Not Going Right and discovered something neither Cute Redhead or myself knew: that there was an actual working faucet with functioning hot and a cold handles…going full blast and dousing the entire wall behind both, the floor, the sides, the top, the splash splash splash [expletive expletive Very Bad expletive].

In a moment we realized that the leaking we’d been noticing over the last year or so was not an eventual and upcoming disintegration of internal parts requiring a new machine (which bums me out because we want a new set but can’t exactly justify it now), but Hidden Faucet getting turned on every single time Whirlpool decided to do the Charleston and dance across the floor because the spinning drum had all subtlety of an afflicted water buffalo delivering triplets.

Faucet off. Crisis averted. Mystery solved.

And then we looked down and saw where all the socks actually went and what Nature spends time concocting under laundry machines. Not pretty.

“You need to take a picture of that,” She said.

“What we need is to tie a chain to the back of this room and yank the whole thing into the street.”

“Well…I guess in the grand scheme of things, it could have been a lot worse.”

I looked at her.

I thought of the garage, the fight, the argument, and the eighteen years so far.

I had to laugh.

Happy Anniversary, honey :)

Molding

Todd Clary — Fri, 20 Aug 2010 13:50:37 +0000

“Then was I like a child that cries, but crying, knows his father near: And what I am beheld again—what is, and no man understands; and out of darkness came the Hands that reach through nature, molding men.”

That’s from my favorite poem, In Memoriam by Alfred, Lord Tennyson and it was written in 1849 as a requiem for the poet’s Cambridge friend Arthur Henry Hallam. It took him seventeen years to complete.

I realize it lands a bit on the morbid side but there are parts enough that I think articulate perfectly some things about the photo up top and the ones coming after.

See those logs? There was, at least, two dozen broken, jagged limbs smoothed and razor-tipped by eons spent floating in that lake. Which meant they could, any one of them, impale the careless and bleed them out like a stuck pig.

Which, of course, meant the boys were irresistibly drawn to the danger and yelling for rope.

Rope.

How else are you going to tie together the water-logged timber to build the raft and cross the lake, hleewwww?

See the big guy in the back? That’s Professor. That’s what I call him because he’s the only kid I’ve ever met with whom I can talk tech with and who not only gets it, he…well…actually, I think he’s solved the mystery of cold fusion but isn’t going to share it with anyone because we’re mortal and he’s not. Anyway, Professor, like the rest of the guys came out of the proverbial woodwork and set themselves to the task of constructing the raft. A sight to behold because it took no explanation among them. Which might shock some of the ladies reading this, but won’t even register with a single man. Rope. Logs. Lake. You do the math.

This is Konnor.

And I don’t mean just in the photograph. I mean in what the photograph captured: an intention he seems rarely to be without. This raft was going to cross the Atlantic if he had anything to say about it.

Confederates. Compatriots. Camarades, all.

Don’t let the charming smiles fool you.

Nor the look of kind disdain. These mindless monkeys were in heaven. I couldn’t get enough of their fun or their built-in ability to tackle the task because it encouraged me all the more that they have, built-in, what it takes to tackle life.

Without a cell phone.

Or an iPod.

Or a Blackberry.

Or an Xbox.

When they walked they were looking up. Not down. Not scrolling down to check for a message, an email, or what William Powers in his book Hamlet’s Blackberry calls “a love pellet. I thought of you. How are you? This will make you laugh. Don’t break this chain. FYI, because you’re part of the team, the endeavor, the group, my life. Meet your new nephew—here’s the sonogram. You will like this YouTube clip. You will like this joke. You are alive.”

They were free.

And on their way to the other side of the Atlantic, guided by the Hands that reach through nature, molding men.”

Go, boy.

He Flipped Pt. II

Todd Clary — Fri, 13 Aug 2010 18:50:38 +0000

He Flipped Pt. I

[text] “Is Pastor Jeff in?”

And by that, our own version of talking in shorthand to let him know I needed help. Now.

[text] “What’d you do now??”

When the phone rang I was still chuckling because regardless of what I had on my mind, big or small, he has this knack for coming up along side me to laugh me out of Too Serious or sober me up into Not Enough.

“Here’s the deal: you have two sons further into the Vortex of Adolescence. I’m wagering you’ve been where I am right now, and I…well…I’m not sure what I need. But let me just bring you up to speed, and you tell me what you hear.”

“Got it. Go.”

And he got it. So I went, ending with, “…so. There it is. I turned around and came back because I just need to be sure. I’m standing outside the place right now and wondering whether I go in. He’s already really ticked off. So. That’s it.”

“OF COURSE YOU GO IN!” (he practically jumped through the phone) “And when he sees you he isn’t going to just be mad—he’s going to go ballistic. And when he goes off, you look right at him and say, ‘Look, kid…it’s my job to keep you ALIVE. And you’ve got another three or four years of exactly this, so I suggest you get used to it.’ And then you leave.”

I laughed with the portion of my mind not already occupied with trying not to reveal the lump in my throat. Just the sturdy rail I needed when I needed it most.

“Thanks. I needed to hear that. I think I knew that…but…well. This is new territory. I think I needed to hear it out loud from someone else.”

“You’re doing fine, Todd.”

“Thanks. One more thing?”

“Yeah?”

“If you ever tell anyone I called anyone for advice I swear to God in heaven I’ll openly deny ever knowing you.”

“Lol bye.”

Inside the rec center I find the young lady at the front desk and learn that there is in fact a drop-in that evening. It wasn’t the first time she’d fielded the concern of a parent remembering their own 14 years young, so the smile and the “of course” directed me down the hall and to the right to…you know, just take a peek and make sure.

And on the way back to the gymnastics area, I see a little boy about the same age as Beta Male. And he’s sitting alone in front of a television. But he’s not watching it. He’s not reading a book. He’s not doing anything. He’s just sitting there. Alone. And my mind, clearly beating my brains out to get my heart on the same page, remembers the Time I Don’t Have Alex, Sorry when, earlier in the day, I found myself not at all wanting to give what needed giving in the form of another little boy wanting nothing more than to be with me. And for a moment I was moved, space out of time, and sent spinning, again, as I found myself with a whole new set of emotional plates to spin.

But not for long, because the condemnation going on inside my own head was interrupted by the sound of laughter. I crept over to the door of the gymnastics room praying every step of the way, God please let him be here. Please let me be overreacting.

And he was there. And so were his pals.

They jumped and they laughed and they dared and they risked life and limb, throwing themselves (I think) into They Have No Idea What’s Coming (Good. They shouldn’t know yet anyway.)

They bounced off walls and fell into foam pits. They swung on ropes and balanced on bars.

For a suspended luminal few moments they weren’t fourteen years. They were fourteen months and my throat and eyes joined forces with every intention of seeing I had trouble seeing at all.

He was there.

He jumped, soaring through the air like he was born to fly.

I watched him.

And he flipped.

* * *

I left, unseen and drove home, unhinged, careening between the pain of one boy who wanted desperately to be away from me and another who wanted nothing more than to hang out, but who found nothing more than a dad far too busy to go get ice cream.

Pulling in. “Dad!”

“Hey, boy. You busy?”

All smiles. “No! Why?”

“Let’s go get ice cream, kid.”

And he flipped.

On the way I marked the trail with the aid of a full moon and a falling star. If the heavenlies were leaning close to encourage, it was overture more or less lost on me, I’m sorry to say.

I was a mess.

All I knew was that the kids are growing up too fast and the wider world is doing a poor job convincing me that setting them loose is a good idea. I sat with Beta Male and ate our ice cream together while he pontificated, entirely unaware of anything besides himself and his hero.

We watched a batch of teenagers pose and jockey with one another. I smiled at their perfect and complete lack of consciousness. I wanted to insulate them, and my own, from so much.

And then I remembered how, at the same age, my parents wanted to do the very same thing. So, smiling now at what I didn’t know then, I put my arm around Alex and responded to his observation with, “No, buddy lol. I’m sure they’re all good kids. They’re doing exactly what they should be doing. And exactly what you’re going to do…and exactly what I did.”

“Well. I just know I wouldn’t trust them.”

“Lol duly noted, kid. Let’s go home.”

The One And Only

Todd Clary — Fri, 13 Aug 2010 14:21:15 +0000

Waltzing in Perdition is about to bring something new to the table. Something I’ve been trying not to bring, in fact.

I used to sneak my dad’s Koh-I-Noor Rapidograph pens and draw cartoons. It used to drive him stark raving mad, being more the artist than I was and father to five kids with no sense of boundary line and no shame when it came to pilfering his favored tools of the trade. I suppose it was the professional precision in the pens themselves, the exactness of each line, the perfect pitch black of the india ink. Or perhaps the special casing in which they resided and displayed like some set of rare jewels. Whatever it was, I couldn’t keep my hands off the forbidden fruit and the only solution to keep him from locking them (or me) away permanently was to get me my own set.

Which he did, which I loved, and with which I proudly drew my cartoons with gusto. That is, until the day, many years later, I misplaced my entire collection never to find them again. Which happened to be the same day I found myself on a phone call needing to occupy my mind by doodling. Which found me reaching instinctively for a pen and grasping that pen you see up top. And commandeering the paper on the desk I happened to be sitting at—a very cheap copy paper. Into which the ink from this pen bled in a way that can only be described as conversational (let it go).

All that nonsense to say that, after having access to the best pens and the best papers, and demanding as much with no forgivenss, my world was rearranged in the space of five minutes and the pedestal on which everything enjoyed unchallenged status fell over with no ceremony and no effort. And all that nonsense to say that there is soon coming to WiP cartoons to accompany certain stories, perhaps (brace yourselves, those of you who have been asking me for decades for this one) an actual comic strip.

I’m still thinking about that one.

So. That pen up top? The company who makes them actually stopped making them several years back, and the only place I could find them was on eBay. Fine. Just last evening, while on the phone with the best WordPress coder on planet earth, it was suggested I bring to the blog my own illustrations. I met the idea with something embarrassingly close to a whine because I could no longer find my pen even on eBay. Tendering from him a perfectly aimed reprimand (one artist to another) (allowed) resulting in my scouring the internet to discover (joy of joys) that the company which manufactured the pen has brought them back into production. Something about a certain cartoonist out west stringing up the board of directors or something like that IForgetOkayThanksBye.

So I ordered a dozen.

Stay tuned for a return to the drawing board, folks.

He Flipped Pt. I

Todd Clary — Wed, 11 Aug 2010 22:33:55 +0000

So our neighborhood pool hosts a family dinner every Thursday evening throughout the summer, and it’s always a great time to catch up with friends. The lawn chairs come out, the kids run off, the late afternoon stretches long shadows across green grass and we forget, for awhile, that it’s exactly these evenings we pine for in the dead of winter when the pool is covered and everyone has gone into hibernation.

As I mentioned yesterday, it’s been an odd summer as the kids, particularly Alpha Male, has expanded his horizons headlong into the teen years with not a little chomping at the bit for more and more freedom. Cute Redhead and I had not anticipated the lessons would come with no warning—and even less instruction; thrown in, sink or swim, all of us. But come they did.

I watched him carry on with several of his pals over by the diving board and smiled to myself long enough to appreciate the friendships he’s had since they were all barely out of diapers…only to feel the smile slide off my face with the slithering (and I mean slithering) entrance of a few young acquaintances I’ll kindly refer to as I Don’t Like Those Kids, which is DadSpeak™ for You Know Where Most Parents Will Restrain Themselves And Avoid A Lawsuit? Yeah I’m Not One Of Them.

I saw trouble. I saw fourteen years old. I saw myself.

*beep-beep-beep on the phone to his: “Come here.” Nothing like conveying That Tone even with the latest technology.

“Yeah?”

“Hey bud, listen. You see that kid over there? The one with the bandana and the hair from That 70′s Show?”

“Yeah.”

“Yeah, well I don’t like him.”

“Lol okay.”

“Ha ha yeah. Well, when you go back over there…I want you to point back to me. And then I want you to tell that kid, “See that man over there with the biceps? He doesn’t like you.”

(And then he did it which wasn’t exactly what I had planned but more on that later)

And (this will shock and amaze you, I’m sure) Bad Apples suddenly made themselves scarce. But. A little too quickly and efficiently for my tastes. And then Alpha Male bounced on over all happy happy excited and intoxicated on Summer’s Freedom Nectar with, “Hey dad we’re going to to the drop-in at the rec center to play on the gymnastic equipment, okay?”

“A ha. Who’s taking you there?”

“Annie.”

“You mean Mrs. Smith?” (*approved)

“No, Annie Surname Indicating Teenager Not Adult.” (*not approved)

In half a heart beat my mind flew way back to my own Magic Summer (the one between Jr. High and High School, for the layman), and mentally ticked off all the things me and my confederates did and got away with.

So, “Lol um yeah no.”

He, of course, protested and pressed, so I went straight for the kill with, “Hey, actually buddy…I have to drive up to the store for something and ha ha! wouldn’t you know it?? I’M. GOING. RIGHT. BY. THERE! How cool is that?? I’ll drop you off, kid.”

*sad trombone

It had, obviously, all the marking of Tell Your Parents We’re Going HERE And Then We’ll All Get In My Car And Go THERE.

I think not.

The boy was not happy. At all.

In fact, he flipped.

And on the way to the rec center I scraped and clawed inside my head for the right way to start the conversation and address the discontent.

“Buddy…I’m not trying to be a jerk about this. It’s just tha—”

“—Look dad. You can not like anyone you want, that’s fine. But don’t ask me to tell someone you hate them!”

Two Things:

1) Impressed that he cut me off and asserted himself. Don’t want to encourage it, but I can’t deny the security to do so arrested my attention. Fine.

2) “Whoa. I never said ‘hate,’ kid. You’re right though…I shouldn’t have told you to do that. Honestly, I was sort of joking between you and me knowing you’d get my point. I didn’t expect you to walk over to him and actually do it. Still, I was wrong.”

And then

“…and for what it’s worth, though I don’t hate the kid…I don’t like him, I don’t trust him and I’m just fine with him realizing that I’m on the other side of the Crap he’s several times pulled at other people’s homes. Holding a very big stick.”

And though I thought I best be as firm in my parenting as I was humble in my error, he nevertheless bristled still from the embarrassment in front of his friends as well as being carted off by (horror) His Dad when everyone else got in the other car.

Arrived.

“See you kid.”

Door closes (a bit too loudly). Kid sulks off.

And I drove off. And out the parking lot. And onto the main road. And down the street toward home.

AaaaaAAAAAaaand then turned around and drove right back to sit, unseen, in the parking lot stuck between trying to learn how to figure out what trusting a teenager looks like and every fibre in me wondering why in the hell I wasn’t going inside to make sure he was really there and not already halfway to Mexico hopped up on crystal meth.

In tomorrow’s portion of this one, I’ll actually share with you all something I never share with anyone:

The phone call I actually made. To someone else.

For advice.

(shut up, Jeff.)

He Flipped Pt. II

The Only Pain

Todd Clary — Tue, 10 Aug 2010 21:04:45 +0000

Since I can no longer feign ignorance at what I’ve been avoiding, I might as well get it over with. And since it’s very much the stuff life is made of, I might also do well to open-palm what I’d sell my soul to white-knuckle…and let it go.

It’s been an odd summer around here. One of new challenges and new territory as the kids fly through the house and out the doors on their way to their friends, dawn to dusk. And past dusk. Just as it should be.

I usually love the summer vacation for its absence of morning schedule and routines. A chance to breathe deeper and let the days unfold as they will without a heavy-handed regimen breathing down anyone’s neck. And though, by summer vacation’s closing act, I’m more than welcoming the return to routine and rhythm…

…this year, I’m less so.

There’s been something gnawing at me for about a week but it took the slow saturation of a certain song to wedge its way into my heart and mind, without me realizing it. But successfully…so that what needed to be lanced, could be excised and (they say) healed.

Next Monday, my eldest goes to high school.

And I’m ready.

And I’ve been looking forward to this watershed day almost as much as he has.

And I couldn’t be happier for him.

And I feel nothing but pride and joy and anticipation for him.

And for me.

And all of this is Me Lying In Front Of God And Everybody.

My son is going to high school?

I just changed his diaper.

How the hell did this happen.

* * *

I haven’t written much on WiP by way of funny stories this last month. But don’t worry. There’s been no recession in the hysteria and I’ve been keeping notes.

The reason I haven’t pushed through and written things out is because, to be quite frank, very little felt funny to me in the midst of several rough situations demanding our attention. And it’s taken a while for things to settle inside me and surrender a different vantage than the first time around.

There are stories coming. And the second book is late (I know) but underway. And every bit as difficult to write as I expected it. It being written more from the season we’re in now where…

…we’re no longer bone-tired

…and they’re a long time out of diapers

…and they can actually make their own lunch

…and it’s no longer strange to grab the keys and run to the store without making sure everyone and everything is secure, watched, taken care of and safe

…and they grow more self-dependent every day

…and they’ve minds of their own

…and friends all over the place

…and fun things to do

…

…and it really was easier when they were babies. And the grownups ahead of me, a bit further down the road, were right when they smiled at us years ago with, “…this is the easy time.”

* * *

The only pain you can avoid in life is the pain that comes from avoiding pain.

So…on Monday?

I’ll wake him like I always have.

And make him breakfast like I always do.

And watch him go to

high school

And try not to think of his first day of kindergarten and how the backpack was bigger than him.

* * *

I hate this.

Beef. It’s What’s For Dinner.

Todd Clary — Sun, 08 Aug 2010 14:28:25 +0000

Well, the Romas certainly won that race. Perhaps it could be argued they had less to heft to the finish line than their older brothers, the Beefsteak Tomatoes.

And to tell you the truth, I’m as disappointed as I am impatient about this. Because though Cute Redhead doesn’t (sit down for this one) even like tomatoes, she does have in her illustrious repertoire a recipe from Mother Jane.

That’s Mother Jane right there. As southern a belle as they make them, and I’m not kidding.

And if you mean to say it right (“Muthah JaAYan,” that is) you have to recruit a very Southern drawl. Failing that, you better have some sort of peace offering at the ready. And when it comes to Mother Jane (who happens to be a Master Gardener and experienced enough to have had something to do with deciding where to plant the Tree of The Knowledge of Good and Evil, if you ask me), nothing arrests her attention like a good recipe.

Ever hear of Hot Tomato Pie?

Oh. Man.

You take a frozen pie crust and drizzle olive oil. Then you slice up home-grown tomatoes and let them overlap to your heart’s content; but don’t stack them so high as though you’re making an apple pie. You’re not. The thrown on some basil, some Mozzarella cheese and a bit of salt and pepper. Throw it in the oven at something like 375˚F or whatever seems to make sense to you as far as baking a pie goes. When it looks right (don’t ask because I don’t know), pull it out and dig in.

If there’s a better summer dish to accompany whatever else it is you’ve prepared for your brood…I don’t know what it is.

I love this recipe. I love Mother Jane.

But I’d run over her with a locomotive, right in front of God and everybody, to get to a plate of this.

There Will Be BLTs

Todd Clary — Sat, 07 Aug 2010 16:43:25 +0000

But not just any BLT’s mind you.

I’ve a recipe that will change your life. And these little Romas, presented to me just now by Beta Male (with no small measure of pride), will most definitely be involved.

And so will the basil.

So…if you’re finding the urge to head to your local farmer’s market or Whole Foods, or wherever you like to take a second mortgage out on your home, and if lunch is order, try this. You’ll thank me later:

Ingredients

2 1/4- to 1/2-inch-thick slices of artisan levain or sourdough bread
2 tablespoons Basil Aioli*
3 pieces applewood-smoked thick-cut bacon, cooked
1 ripe medium tomato, sliced
1/3 cup loosely packed arugula leaves
2 ounces fresh mozzarella, sliced
Salt and pepper

Basil Aioli Ingredients and Prep

1 cup loosely packed basil leaves
1/2 cup extra-virgin olive oil
1/2 cup canola oil
2 egg yolks
2 cloves garlic, minced
1/2 teaspoon each dried mustard, lemon juice, salt, and pepper

1. Bring a large pot of salted water to boil. Dunk basil leaves into the boiling water for 20 seconds. Drain and squeeze out as much excess water as possible.

2. In a blender, whirl blanched basil leaves with olive and canola oils. Empty into a measuring cup or small pitcher and reserve.

3. In a medium bowl, whisk together egg yolks, garlic, mustard, lemon juice, salt, and pepper. Whisk in a drop of the basil oil; continue adding drops of oil, whisking until mixture thickens to a mayonnaise-like consistency. Continuing to whisk, pour in remaining basil oil in a very thin stream. Season with additional salt and pepper to taste.

Preparation

1. Spread one side of each piece of bread with basil aioli. Stack one piece with bacon, tomato slices, arugula leaves, and fresh mozzarella slices. Sprinkle with salt and pepper. Top with second slice of aioli-laden bread. Eat with gusto.

Enjoy this—because we’re sure going to!

Life Is Like An Onion…

Todd Clary — Fri, 06 Aug 2010 14:12:55 +0000

…you peel if off one layer at a time, and sometimes you weep.

Enough said.

Cucumis sativus

Todd Clary — Thu, 05 Aug 2010 12:00:16 +0000

Don’t think I don’t see you under there.

If you slice these and place them in a bowl of rice vinegar, I can promise you you’re never going to regret it.

Roma!

Todd Clary — Wed, 04 Aug 2010 12:54:17 +0000

If canning were in our future, this Roma tomato plant has us sitting pretty. I count (so far) 20 younglings — but not a bit of red ripening. Those red things? String beans, living right next door. I told you they can’t keep their hands to themselves.

I’m going to have to solicit a recipe for an award-winning sauce.

Anyone?

Green

Todd Clary — Tue, 03 Aug 2010 15:16:36 +0000

When our winter refused to budge and fairly defy my hopes for warmer weather, I planned an invasion. A beach head, if you will.

I prepared the soil, marked the territory, and waited for the ground to thaw and surrender the first opportunity to marry loam and seed.

I wanted green. An explosion of verdancy I find, for some hilariously amnesiac reason, new and New every time it happens.

I’ve decided Winter and Spring play this game, cyclically, every trip around the Sun…because Death and Life are immutably threaded into the Son. There is so much beauty in this cycle and I love and hate it all at the same time.

And it’s giving myself over to the patterns and the cycle, the give and take…the surrender and the relinquishing, the triumph and the ruin…

…that I love forgetting that I remember.

The garden is overflowing. It is in no way obeying the lines I intended and when I’m in it weeding, talking to them all (and I do), I’m saying things like, “I told you both to leave each other alone, didn’t I?” Because they can’t seem to keep their hands to themselves and I’ve had it Up To Here with having to clean things up because they can’t seem to puzzle out cleaning up their areas. (Read: they grow so thick that I have to get on my hands and knees to find the weeds that have grown unchecked.) (Read: I have no life.)

For the next few days I’m going to post a few pictures of what’s been happening. And of what remains to happen. Starting with this blazing Prospertiy: a squash blossom.

Here’s to Summer’s Final Act, as Carl in New Jersey called it (and he’d know).

Blog About Blogging – Part III

Todd Clary — Sat, 31 Jul 2010 14:05:21 +0000

(The third in a series of posts on the creating of Waltzing in Perdition.com For the first, click here.)

And now you understand why I just don’t understand why people call me a perfectionist.

In the next post, I’ll tell you what a nightmare it was finding a coder who understood that when I say Pixel-Perfect, what I’m really saying is “The straight jacket isn’t for my safety…it’s for yours.”

You would not starve for vernacular when it comes to the arena of web design—hardly a distinction in the crowd of other professions. Nevertheless, terms like ‘naming architecture,’ and ‘pixel-perfect,’ and ‘cascading style sheet’ are very much part of the daily diet around here.

So when I decided I’d wracked my brain enough and excavated the concept I wanted, it came time to hand it off to someone with far more coding expertise than myself. I knew I was going to utilize the WordPress engine, and since I’d turned my back entirely on the available themes for the custom style I’d been working on, I knew also that I had to find someone with a skill set geared specifically toward translating everything I’d done to something with which WordPress could communicate.

I searched for professionals on Craigslist, on Google, in local papers and by reviewing other blogs searching for credit lines that might put me on the trail of someone I thought I could trust. Talk about overwhelming. And confusing. In dozens of providers I found very little separating anyone from anyone else, turning my very focused search into something like a game of darts.

I ended up contacting a vendor from a popular online service. I posted the job I needed done and in no time (read: less than one day) had several dozen proposals from vendors all over the world. At prices that both encouraged and concerned me. I don’t know about you, but if something is wildly inexpensive, my mind goes to Wildly Poor Quality.

But I found someone whose work I was able to review and determine was a great place to start. While interviewing this person and discussing the precise work I needed, he read into my language and in between the lines and offered, “…oh, you want pixel-perfect.”

“Did you just say ‘pixel-perfect’?”

“Yeah. Pixel-perfect. You know, where exactly what you’ve desi—”

“I know what it means, believe me. Can I marry you?”

He understood that I insisted, unapologetically, that what I designed in Photoshop should translate to a blog absolutely. Down to the location of each and every pixel.

“And, I’ll know.”

“Lol you’ll know what?”

“I’ll know if there is a single pixel out of place, off-center, or bumped out of alignment. I’ll know.”

He laughed but understood me.

The problem with this (I mean this very kindly) complete idiot, was that he didn’t seem to believe me. Long story short, I discovered too late that though he presented himself as the executer of the actual work, what he was really doing was collecting projects and farming out the actual work to coders offshore.

Which is a nice way of saying that someone with a very wanting command of the english language was allowed to dabble in the design I worked on for weeks and offer ways they felt improved it. Which in Toddland means they thought instigating a nuclear war between nations was time well spent. That’s all I’m going to say about this person and my first experience with hiring outside help.

Granted, I was further along than I was when I started…but no where near my original version. Which sounded like this:

Cute Redhead: “So. How’s the blog design coming?”

Mount St. Helens About Five Seconds Before Erupting: “Well. I’d call it about 85% there.”

Cute Redhead: “Hey! That’s great! You can live with that, right? Yay!”

Moody Artist: “Um. No. No, I can’t ‘live’ with that.”

Cute Redhead: “Oh. Well. Then what are you going to do?”

Insufferable Designer: “I’m not sure. I think a SWAT team repelling down the side of his house and AK-47s is a good wa—”

Cute Redhead: “—I meant about your blog, honey.”

Trigger-Happy Perfectionist: “Oh. I’m not sure. I’ll start blogging, I guess. I’m chomping at the bit. But until this looks exactly the way I see it in my head, I’m going to be impossible to live with.”

Cute Redhead: “Wow. That’ll be different.”

Smart Enough To Shut Up (almost): “Shut up.”

In the next, and final post, I’ll tell you what it’s like to (finally)happen upon a master craftsman. And how, so doing, grace and mercy flows throughout the heart and mind to save the lives of lesser ‘professionals’. And their hacks.

Dad Look

Todd Clary — Thu, 29 Jul 2010 21:25:54 +0000

I’ve been on a short hiatus from WiP while the summer doles out its remaining freedom in the lives of The Spawn…who happen to have a new school year on the horizon, if you can believe that. For my part, I’ll never fully accept the idea of any school anywhere starting before September 1st. Call me old school.

We loaded up the Beloved SUV and set our sites a mere six hours north to collect Alpha Male and take in a landmark, I’m ashamed to admit, we’d never before seen.

Making us jackasses like this one here.

Or wild burrows, to be more accurate. Which we happened to see off the side of the road and, naturally, felt compelled to put it in park and make our way up close and personal. Which the kids initially thought (big shock coming here) the Zenith of Boring. That is until they spied certain extra-curricular activities on the part of the beasts…

…garnering no shortage of hilarity and a chorus of, “Dad look! Take a picture of them doing that!”

No.

Getting back in the car, we continued our circuit around Custer State Park (a must see), at a pace as leisurely and bereft of phone signals as Radio-Free America could provide. Or not provide, as was the welcome case. And just when I thought our pace was as leisurely as could be, this fellow injected himself onto the road and afforded the driver of every vehicle a lesson in Oh You Want A Leisurely Pace, Huh?

The original photo begged, I thought, a certain set of Photoshop techniques to render something a bit more Way Out West. I love how that looks.

And that landmark we’d never visited before? There you have it.

Or, rather, there you have it and them. Them being Cute Redhead, Beta Male, and Charlie Girl. I’m not sure where Alpha Male was a this point.

I am sure, however, that Cecille B. DeMil had it right when, describing the Shrine of Democracy, remarked, “You don’t just look at them. They look at you.”

What an amazing place. The drive there and back all by themselves was worth the price of gasoline. And, to tell the truth, I didn’t expect any more than the large sculptures. Boy, was I in for it. Museums, tours, history, books, films and (Beta Male went crazy over this one) the opportunity to speak with the only living survivor of the team who wrested from the stone the faces memorialized.

If you haven’t been, go.

If you have been, I’d love to hear about it!

Mothers, Hide Your Daughters

Todd Clary — Wed, 14 Jul 2010 17:27:06 +0000

Okay, a few Firsts coming here.

First First: I’ve never posted a video on WiP but I’m about to. If the attempt breaks the internet (trust me, I’ve done it before), or your lights dim, or we lose power on the eastern seaboard….well. Um. Sorry.

Second First: I saw the most amazing thing in the world yesterday and I’m still not over it.

So there I was standing out front. Talking to my buddies Bill, who was about to see his whole flash before his eyes, and Herzog, who is the devil (more on him 1) later and 2) in an upcoming interview.)

Okay, see that kid up top? That’s Wyatt.

Okay. Now. Ladies? Take a break.

Men? I want your undivided attention. I’m certain you have all been wondering what in the world happened last night around 6:00 pm Rocky Mountain Time when you noticed the sudden disappearance of your testicles.

Didn’t see that one coming on the ol’ WiP blog, did you? (don’t even try lying).

Well. I can explain:

Your nuts (sorry ladies, but we are in full-on Guy Land and I’m not backing down even a little bit) were removed from your puny being by The Universe who decided that the little dude up there deserved every bit of Testosterone in the solar system.

So. There you have it. You are all now eunuchs. (But not me, Bill, or Herzog. We still have ours. Sorry. But don’t be mad. The only reason we still have ours is because we happened to be in the blast radius of Man Awe when that little dude did what he did right in front of God and everybody…and the gods of the Y Chromosome granted unto us, out of sheer unutterable joy, our nuts.)

And ladies, if this offends you. Well…I don’t care. You could be all ‘Okay Todd, that’s just over the line. The language. Please.’ And then you’d give me The Look or something or whatever. But I don’t care. For all kinds of reasons…including the fact that there are men the world over who are, right now, no longer real men because that little dude pulled into himself all the Real Man from all seven continents (and five surrounding counties).

Okay. So. There we were talking about Very Important Guy Stuff (meaning when you ladies ask us ‘so what’d you talk about’ we say, ‘nothing’). Which isn’t a lie. It really is true. But it’s not what you think it is. We could talk about curing cancer or cold fusion or where in the hell Jimmy Hoffa really is (I just dated myself bad), but it would all be wiped from our minds when something like What Just Happened happens.

What Happened:

We heard this scrape, screech, stomp-stomp-stomp-stomp-stomp (but like really, really fast stomping, right?), and then this sort of Barbaric Battle Cry. And then we stopped what we were talking about and, together, turned toward the sound of Something Amazing.

Something Amazing: about 25′ away, in the middle of the street was one of those ramps all the kids go over on their bikes and scare the living hell out of every parent worth their salt. All you moms who yesterday, right when all the dudes lost their nuts, suddenly and inexplicably stood up and yelled PUT YOUR HELMET ON! but don’t know why you did it?

That’s why you did it. Every molecule of ovarian whatever-it-is-the-runs-amok-inside-you-all turned inside out, flipped backward, divided, mutated and caused your uteri (that’s the Collective Motherhood thing) to hit Defcon -9000.

That’s what happened.

Okay. This actually gets even better.

When Bill (who is awesome) and Herzog (who is the devil but also still awesome) and I saw him do What He Did several things happened all at the same time:

First Thing #1: Bill had heart failure and went OH HELL NO!

First Thing #2: I realized there is a God and went OH HELL YES!

First Thing #3: Herzog almost snapped his neck right off his shoulders because he is the devil and locked onto The Presence Of Awesomeness.

Here’s what we saw:

…

I know. Watch it again.

…

Okay. I know, right? Words fail. (okay for most people, maybe, but I can’t shut up about this one lol).

Alright. Now.

As if this wasn’t already amazing all by itself…it gets even better. You may be wondering how in the world I got that on video when it all Happened So Fast, right?

Sit down.

The reason I got it on video is because IT’S TAKE TWO.

We. Lost. Our. Minds. Bill did the Dad Thing (and had five years shaved off his life), I did the Jackass The Movie thing (and yelled DO THAT AGAIN RIGHT NOW), and Herzog (the devil) saw a future athletic god pass by him in a blur of blond screaming underpants.

That is Wyatt.

Wyatt is the only man on planet earth (besides us three) (sorry).

Wyatt is a god.

Wyatt rules.

I am This Close to throwing a kegger in honor of Wyatt.

We cannot hide our joy. We cannot hide our pride.

So, mothers, hide your daughters.

Time Between Times

Todd Clary — Wed, 07 Jul 2010 12:00:26 +0000

“In the time between times, when the dew of creation was still wet upon the earth…”

…I grabbed the camera and catalogued a few shots before the sun rose high enough to burn things off.

Those are Martha Washington cherries. And if you like tart, you’re in luck.

Clematis. I think. It climbs up a drain spout and looks like kindling until, one morning, all those purple things pop.

The honeysuckle.

The raspberries Beta Male and Charlie Girl will fight over.

I see an apple pie in my future.

Out Riding Fences

Todd Clary — Tue, 06 Jul 2010 12:00:21 +0000

I’m a big believer in humiliating oneself before anyone else beats you to it. And, shocking as this may seem, I provide no shortage of that favored past time.

That image up top is, to the untrained eye of the layman, a fence post. A cedar fence post which, you’ll be happy to know, is “environmentally prohibited” in certain parts. More on that later.

I’ve been wanting to replace our makeshift and very rigged wire fence along one side of the yard to keep in the big, fat, Golden You-Know-Who. And make it so I didn’t have to constantly turn the camera away from such an ugly thing in an otherwise very nice backyard. So, weekend before last, Cute Redhead (who now openly denies all culpability in any of this) decided It Needed To Be Done Now. Which went off like this:

“I hate that fence.”

She said that. She actually, honest-to-God said that. She actually, honest-to-God said, “Honey…I need you turn the next three days of your life in to making mine a living inferno straight from the Devil’s Pantry.”

And so I did. I dropped everything I was doing and transmogrified (that’s for Holly, in Texas) into Cowboy Todd. Who is a desperado. Who is out riding fences.

Fences like that one. Which is bent all out of shape, knocked over, run over, walked over, impossible to mow around…and has all the structural integrity of wet Kleenex. Which got me all bent out of shape and wrapped around the axle.

Speaking of axles, this is the sort of photo one takes while steering with one’s knee (not recommended) on the way back from Stupid Home Improvement Store (for the fourth time).

The Humiliation I mentioned:

Cute Redhead CLAIMS she suggested I “really be sure about accurately measuring the 8′ between each post before you dig.” She is lying in front of God and everybody. She did not say this. At all. What she said was something like, “I think you’re a girl.”

Which is sort of how I heard every suggestion she made over the next several days after I royally screwed up the accurately measuring the 8′ between each post before I dug.

On Digging:

If you’re going to dig holes for fence posts, I’d like to suggest renting an auger.

That way you can one day sit with your grandchildren and share nice stories from Way Back When. Stories like, “Did grandaddy ever tell you about the time he was raped by a crocodile?” Because that’s all a one-man auger is designed to do as far as I’m concerned, and that’s all I want to say about that.

Those two posts right there happen to be the only ones properly spaced such that the pre-cut and notched 8′ cedar planks tucked themselves in just right, right?

Right.

And then everything went to Hell. There are so many things that went wrong on this that the only thing that kept me from losing my mind outright was the laughter. At myself. Because the only thing missing from my work was keystone cop music.

A few highlights, however:

1) When I stood up on the lawn chair with one foot on the saw horse with a chainsaw tearing a gash into the space-time continuum, I was doing so because I couldn’t reach the [not important and you wouldn't believe what I was trying to do anyway] and was wanting to do it before Cute Redhead got home at 3:30 and saw me doing something Not Wise.

2) Cute Redhead got home at 3:25 that day and saw the whole thing.

3) When I work around the house I am Marty Stewart.

4) When I tend to the children all by myself I am Marty Poppins.

5) But when I work in the yard, I put on my old Levis, my ropers, and my cowboy hat. And I am Cowboy Todd. Cowboy Todd cusses. A lot. He also scowls. A lot. And he never applies sunscreen. Ever. John Wayne didn’t do it so Cowboy Todd doesn’t.

The only reason I’m putting in this photo is to show you that it really was me screwing this all into Kingdom Come.

With a chainsaw.

And geek glasses. While cussing. In six different languages (our Cowboy Todd, while a stud, is very cultured).

6) If you walk into a Certain Stupid Home Improvement Store and answer Lumber Section Dude’s “…so, whadaya need?” with, “…a gin and tonic,” you will see Lumber Section Dude flutter his little eyes like he’d just suffered an aneurysm and hear him respond “Eeewwwkaaay,” as if the idea of men in lumber sections being pissed off enough to want hard liquor was beneath the little wuss. Who would be better placed working as a maître d’ in some snooty restaurant.

7) When you walk away from Not A Real Man and set off to find Other Lumber Section Dude who clearly knows what he’s doing and lead off with, “I need 9′ uncut cedar planks to notch in myself on a fen—” you will be cut off with: “Sorry. We’re environmentally prohibited from selling that.”

At which point your brain will explode inside your head, start oozing out your ears and accompany the fluttering of your eyes brought on by the aneurysm you just suffered because you just heard the dumbest thing in the world.

“—wait. What did you just say to me?”

“I said we’re environme—”

“Stop. I got it. YOU’RE. ENVIRONMENTALLY. PROHIBITED. FROM. SELLING. CEDAR. PLANKS?!”

“Yeah.”

“A ha. Okay. Who do I have to talk to to get this material?” (I didn’t say ‘talk to’ which rhymes with ‘truck’) (and I didn’t say ‘material’ which rhymes with ‘hit.’)

Which is what I wanted to do. Hit, that is. Something or someone. And bad.

I walked away before Lumber Section Dude got Cowboy Todd’s boot in his ass, and made my way to the only REAL lumber YARD in the city I will ever work with again. Because when I walked onto that place there were forklifts and beaten up trucks and old men who have been working with ENVIRONMENTALLY NOT PROHIBITED lumber since Noah walked his ass in looking for cedar planks (Cowboy Todd is allowed to mix cussing and biblical stories). And these old men don’t even wear gloves while they shake their heads and chuck ~~splinter factories~~ 9′ foot uncut cedar planks and tell them about the idiots over at Stupid Home Improvement Store who might as well wear big, pink bows in their hair and leave the real lumber to these old guys.

And Cowboy Todd.

Who, after two days of fixing what he screwed up (and all by himself for those of you ‘men’ who suggested he quit and hire out the rest of the job) (and you know who you are) (and I have a big, pink bow with your name on it), he finished the job.

Cowboy Todd finished the job.

And that’s one fine looking fence, if you ask him.

A sturdy, cedar split-rail fence he cut and notched in himself and muscled (yes, muscled) the already-set-in-concrete (don’t ask) posts enough to loosen them to make it work.

And by work, Cowboy Todd means keep the big, fat Golden You-Know-Who in the yard. Who actually, honest-to-God had this to say about getting his picture taken again…

“You really are a loser you know that, Cowboy Todd?”

A Study In Light

Todd Clary — Mon, 05 Jul 2010 14:12:49 +0000

There is this one wedding photo of Cute Redhead where she’s staring alluringly into the camera and surrounded by melting, smoldering, liquid, infinite white.

Which, I later found out, was a technique achieved not by a special camera filter…but by her bridesmaids pulling her wedding dress up over her head.

Brilliant.

So, naturally, when I saw the Golden Recliner sporting the Cone of Shame post-minor eye surgery, I couldn’t help soothe the pup by sprinting for my camera and laughing my head off.

Looks like a Canine T-Rex. I should have named him Dogzilla.

I don’t quite know why he was at all cool with this…

…I think he looks like a satellite dish.

“Dude…seriously. It’s going to be okay. It’s not forever. I know how you feel. It’s just so you can’t gnaw at things. I know it’s uncomfortable because I remember my vasectomy like it was yesterday.”

Ladies Night

Todd Clary — Sun, 04 Jul 2010 14:37:00 +0000

So I’m at the hardware store, right? The one with the garden and nursery section on the back, ‘member? That one.

And I’m getting a few things I need for other Important Things and remember that I’d had a plan to recruit the formidable energies of a few girls for some of the garden’s heavy lifting.

And there it was: the little refrigerator containing the little packets of the little lady bugs.

“I need one of those packets of lady bugs.”

“No problem. They’re sleeping right now. And don’t put them out until dusk. When you get home, put them in the refrigerator until you want them.”

“Would that worked on all women.”

“Pardon me?”

“Nothing.”

Last night also happened to be the neighborhood’s annual Fourth of July Float-Building party. Which happened to take place at our house this time. Which happened to have me sort of on the busy side, what with the surfboards, securing the trailer hitch to the Beloved SUV, and painting the waves and deciding you’re not really painting until you’re painting yourself too. More on that in another post soon.

So I enlisted the help of Every Little Girl In The Neighborhood with:

“Sweethearts, I have a job for you. I need you to go get those ladybugs and—”

*squeals*

“—okay, remember how Mr. Todd’s ears don’t like to bleed? Let’s not scream at that pitch anymore, alright? Alright. I need you to take these and put them in the vegetable garden.”

And then I was onto other things and forgot all about them. There was paint to roll around in half-naked, after all. Again, more on that in another post soon.

But this morning, during the second cup of coffee *sign of Cross*, I realized the girls were now in their new home and went out to see how they were doing.

Oh dear.

Did you know that 2,000 ladybugs sort of…well…completely take over and crowd out an 8′ x 24′ garden?

And did you know that they tend to huddle together to keep warm.

And did you know that made me laugh maniacally and run and get my camera to show you?

And did you know there are photographs on that camera of the paint I rolled around in half-naked that you’re never going to see?

(just checking)

Happy 4th of July everyone.

Breach

Todd Clary — Fri, 02 Jul 2010 00:08:10 +0000

Today was a day like many others.

So how anyone in this season of life ever gets anything, really anything, done is beyond my ability to comprehend.

Most days we work double-time just to keep our heads above water. And most days we don’t even do that.

We learn to float, sort of, submerged just below the surface, and there we somehow learn a new Normal; sometimes rolling onto our backs looking up at a quicksilver ceiling, sometimes rolling over and looking down onto a world sunlit.

Or shadow.

In this way Life has always seemed, to me, like a whale. And we, its happy, dumb offspring.

Life…large and largely gentle in its wisdom, gliding along side us, and over, and under. Ever present and knowing just when to move only inches away to give us the illusion of Self.

And Life…large and hardly gentle in its wisdom, gliding along side us, and over, and under. Ever ready and knowing just when to breach us from our insulated Everything and push us up and out to take air, so that…

…we breathe, really breathe, and know that a whole other world, in fact, exists and rests itself right over our heads.

If The Lord (or Nicholas Cage) Ran The Internet

Todd Clary — Wed, 30 Jun 2010 14:10:36 +0000

Alright, folks…I’ve been look forward to this interview for a long time. Here’s why: when I started WiP, I designed the layout and color scheme, etc., etc., and then went in search of someone who could give it a brain. Meaning, power under the hood. Meaning, I need to be able to launch missiles from NORAD and I’m sort of not kidding. I went through about four Mindless Monkeys before I found the best of the best…and have been ruined ever since. Because I didn’t just find an expert, I found a god. Or a messiah. Or something like that (it will make sense in a minute).

Ladies and gentlemen, meet Ash Goodman…

1. Let’s get right off to a fascinating start. Where were you born?

London, England born… Virginia, USA raised.

2. Fascinating. And you live where now? (this isn’t usually a question I’d make a point of asking, folks, but get a load of this one)…

Manila, Philippines… Huh? Oh! You want the back story… ok. About umpteen years ago (I didn’t really track time when I was younger), somewhere around 21 or 22 I got this hankering to travel so I bought a one way ticket to England, worked there and in Europe for a while, got bored, took off to Asia about 13 or 14 years ago, and just kind of never left… Then after a while I met a girl (in the Philippines), got married, had kids and had to get all respectable and grown up and that’s what you see before you today. Me, as grown up as I know how to be….

3. Okay, and there’s just no way around this one (and we’re all thinking it anyway): anyone ever tell you you bear a striking resemblance to Nicholas Cage?

Short Answer: Yep. Long Answer: It’s funny you should mention that. My cousin and I used to do this thing and it went something like this… The Girl: “Has anyone ever told you that you look like…” Me (Cutting her off acting very upset and angry): [Enter favorite explicative here]!!! If one more person tells me I look like my younger brother I am going to lose it!” Girl: ”You mean Nich…” ME (cutting her off again): “Yes, yes [explicative]!!! Nicholas is my *LITTLE* brother. And I don’t look like him. He looks like me!!!” Of course after a few minutes I admitted it wasn’t true, but it made for a great ice-breaker!

4. What about a striking resemblance to Jesus? (don’t even pretend you didn’t know I’d go there). Dude! Way to rock the hair and the beard. So…a bit about your real life and work: what is it you do that lets you get away with reminding us the Grateful Dead are alive and kicking :)

It’s funny you should mention that…. just kidding! But yeah, I do get the Jesus thing as well. I work from home which means I get to pretty much look however I want, Living on tropical islands in Southeast Asia means most days it’s t-shirt, sandals and shorts. What do I do? I empower people by giving them the tools they actually need to manage their online presence effortlessly. Put another way: I build awesome websites that are as cool as my hair and a heckuva lot easier to manage.

5. Jesus pretty much loved everyone. Okay, he definitely loved everyone. But let’s be honest…you’re not Jesus. Anyone on your nerves who you’d like to send into the eternal fires of damnation? (I mean, in love of course)

Barney. I am convinced that purple dinosaur is secretly an alien with plans to take over the world. (Can’t argue with any of this.)

6. Seems like you’re having a pretty good day what with your new-found deity and all. Now that you’ve gotten eternal judgement checked off, how about a little Me Time? You get to change anything about yourself. So, what’s it going to be? Smaller thighs or a bigger brain? Go.

If this is a keeping it within the realm of possibility kind of change I would say more patience, better health. If it’s a ‘what kind of superpower would you want’? Wolverines healing factor, I mean how cool is that!

7. What was your favorite book as a teenage know-it-all?

Now that’s a tough one! I have always been a voracious reader since age 4. (Yes I am a geek, the long hair is just a disguise). When I was growing up my mother worked in a library so after school I would sit there and read everyday until she finished work. In my teens I was groovin hard on the scifi (ok, ok, I am still groovin hard on the sci fi) and was reading the Dune Series by Frank Herbert and the Well World Series by Jack Chalker. But my favorite would have to be HHGTTG. (The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy, the best 5 part trilogy ever written)

8. What is your favorite book now?

My favorite book for 2010: Sandman Slim by Richard Kadrey. One of the funnest and funniest reads I have had in a while.

9. Time to tell our readers what it is you REALLY do. Waltzing in Perdition does what it does with a lot of power under the hood. Power you programmed from the ground up. Here’s where you plug shamelessly. The mic is on, Ash, so let’s hear it: tell us about your job.

[Cue lights, Sound] [Cue music from 2001: A Space Odyssey] [Cue cool announcer voice]

Imagine if your website actually did what you needed it to do. Imagine what you could achieve if only there were no limitations. Now stop imagining because it’s even better than that.

[Cue confetti]

I take WordPress from where it is to where it should be. When I am done working on your site everything you have ever wished you could do with your website and a few things you didn’t even know you could wishfor are all built in. Point and click baby, its all just point and click. While other developers make pretty designs, I make beautiful websites that function as well as I believe that managing your website should not require you learn even one line of code. And I don’t think a user should have to accept limitations on what they can or can’t do with their website. So over the last 2 years I have developed a framework for WordPressthat makes it… well… effortless really. And I hope more fun and empowering as well. Its built with the user in mind. Rule 1 is always, how can I make this easier to use. Everything, and I do mean everything is built in. SEO, search robot control, ad management, fine grained navigation controls, social networking, analytics, and a slew of other awesome features to extensive to list here. Your website should be the control center for your online presence and I ensure that it is.

Put simpler: My WordPress framework is what other WordPress themes want to be when they grow up. In schoolyard language: My WordPress kicks your WordPress ___! Bold statements? Perhaps. So I’ll just say this: Todd, I think your on version 1.5 of my framework. Go ahead and tell the nice folks what it’s like.

I want to marry him.

And version 2.0 comes out next month. It’s even better, easier to use, more powerful and just plain stuffed chock full of awesomeness ;)

(And have his children.)

10. And now it’s my turn: you know how uptight I can be about my design and blog, so you know I don’t trust just anyone (stop laughing, Ash, it’s rude). But I’m feeling magnanimous today and want to share your expertise with the world. How does someone find out more.

Well they can email me direct at ash@thinkinginvain.com or visit the business website at and email me through the site. Either way I’ll arrange a no-obligation guided tour of the custom backend so they can see what they have been missing.

11. What do you love about your work in general?

It’s a philosophical thing really. I believe in the founding principles of the internet, the democratization of communication and self expression. These are fundamental rights, not privileges. It’s what computing and the internet is all about. Every day I get to help make that process easier for people. My work both empowers and frees and I think that makes me a pretty lucky guy!

12. What do you…not love…about your work in general?

Well, I hate it when I come across poorly written code, but what really, really bugs me? Internet Explorer. I mean, come on!

13. Okay you just took an elevator 50 stories up. Only you and Steve Jobs. Naturally there wasn’t much to do finding yourself in the presence of the Fourth Person of the Trinity, besides falling prostrate and burning incense. BUT—it’s you and Bill Gates on the way back down and you’ve been given Temporary Deity Status. It’s high time he had a few Upper Management Spankies, so let him have it. Go.

Internet Explorer. I mean come on! Internet Explorer adds 20% more time to a project because of its poor standards support. Code that works perfect in every other browser breaks in Internet Explorer. And if support for earlier version like version 6 are important it can add as much as 30-40% to the project timeline and limit your options. Have you ever seen that film with Adam Sandler? I think it was called Little Nickie or something, you know the one where he is the Devil’s good son. Remember what they did to a certain German with the Pineapple? Substitute Billy Gates.

14. Alight, enough of that. Omniscience gets pretty knotty. Let’s step off the elevator and get under the hood a bit. Favorite meal in the whole wide world?

Well thats a 2 part answer, cause my favorite I can’t eat anymore. Used to be Italian food. Pizza, pasta etc. But extreme gluten sensitivity put that to rest. And Twinkies, I think I miss Twinkies the most. Now my favorite is Steak (ok, to be fair, Steak has always been right up there) But its very, very hard to find good steak over here. *sigh.

15. Children? (not to eat, I mean do you have children?)

Yes I have 2, both boys, both wild and precocious as children should be. The eldest is 6 and has already been hacking his toys for over a year now. Whenever I want to know where my screwdrivers have gone I just look for him. I’ll find him taking his trains and other toys apart and reassembling them his way, swapping parts making changes etc. My youngest is nearly 2 and a half, has no fear whatsoever, no concept of limits and believes anything his brother can do so can he. Which explains why my white hair count has gone up over the last year…

16. What did you want to be when you were 12?

A Grownup. No really, I never was one of those who knew what he wanted to be, I more of the “why do I have to be any one thing” kind of guy. My big goal in life was being old enough to make my own rules. Once I got there I had pretty much achieved the *BIG* ambition and after that I figured it was just a matter of keeping yourself open to what life tosses at you. And that’s kind of been my life story really. I took chances and opportunities as they have presented themselves and have had a great time along the way.

17. What did you want to be when you got up this morning (ha ha)?

21. Getting older sucks. I do have an ambition to be a writer though. I reckon I have 2-3 books stuck inside and one of these days I hope to dislodge them and get them on paper.

18. (Sorry, can’t resist this one) Saying you kind of sort of know your way around the internet is like saying the Pope sort of knows his way around the Vatican. Let’s say you get to design the whole thing from the ground up FOR. THE. WHOLE. WORLD Ash-style. Any bright ideas?

I won’t say I have the solutions but I will say there are 3 areas I would look at.

1) Search. Search sucks. Google is great, but still a far cry from where search needs to be.

2) Spam, something has to be done about spam. And not just spam email,spamming blog comments or worse still, blogs that are spam. Fixing this would improve thing #1

3) Free Access. OK, so its not feasible yet to have free blazing fast, high speed access for everyone, but everyone should have at least free basic access to the web. Its a right, not a privilege.

19. Good book in a chair beside the ocean or throw all your stuff on the sand and get in the ocean?

If it’s a good book its no contest, I’m reading.

Ten points if you know the song your parents called Their Song. Hit me.

I have no idea, at all. My mother was fond of Mel Torme, that’s as close as I can get.

20. Speaking of songs, play any instruments?

Yes, guitar. (Don’t tell me that’s a surprise, I mean just look at my hair!) I actually used to give lessons (before I started my travels).

21. Favorite movie?

Oh wow, That’s a hard one. I am gonna cheat and give more than one. Ordinary Decent Criminals, or the Usual Suspects. (Kevin Spacey rocks!) Firefly/Serenity yes, I am a browncoat and if you don’t know what that means: shame on you! Monty Python

22. Check it out! The Hollywood talent agent sitting next to you couldn’t help notice how enthralled you were. They’re remaking the movie and he’s giving you the role of your choice. Who do you play?

OK, so I really do gotta pick just one movie then. Ok Serenity, I play Mal of course.

23. Looks like you’re having a pretty cool day, what with the temporary omniscience, the music, and the starring role in the new movie. And wouldn’t you know it? John Lennon just stepped off the Space-Time Continuum elevator (you left the door open). He’s feeling musical (that crazy John), but doesn’t have a lot of time. Time to kick back and enjoy a song. Which one are we going to hear?

If its a Beatles tune: Eleanor Rigby. If its open mic: get the Led out.

Working Part Time

Todd Clary — Wed, 23 Jun 2010 14:24:55 +0000

Okay, I’m going to sort of plug something and someone here so bear with me.

My sister, Pam, has this knack for taking what I would call junk and turning it into what I would call Cool Junk (ha ha, kidding). Actually, she is really talented at rummaging through attics, garage sales, and back lots in God-knows-what part of town…so if you hear a bunch of scuffling and see strange objects flying up through the air, it’s not a big badger burrowing its way through the undergrowth. It’s my big sister burrowing her way through buried treasure.

She gathers all sorts of this-and-that and takes it back to her studio, grabs tweezers, a glue gun, and (for all I know) a Kirby vacuum cleaner hose. And breathes new life into the little misfits from the Island of Forgotten Toys.

Like this.

And this.

Now, I’m not one to where jewelry of any kind. I don’t even where a watch.

But—if I woke up one morning in my wife’s body (leave it alone) and decided I simply Had To Have something unique to complete the ensemble…well, I’d forego the attics, garage sales and back lots and find my way to Pam’s web site.

In The Middle Of Our Street

Todd Clary — Tue, 22 Jun 2010 12:00:57 +0000

That look is headed for Broadway. We know this because that’s Chloe and she is the street’s up-and-coming ballerina. And though she wasn’t on stage and this wasn’t a performance, I couldn’t help but realize the kid knows how to look into a camera.

At least long enough so as not to mess up her art work, that is. And Charlie Girl along with her.

It was Tuesday and that means Miss Alma, once again, has something unique to pass along to the kids in the neighborhood lucky enough to have secured a spot in her ever-popular art class.

There is no telling what they’ll come home with but it’s always hands-on and always worth a frame or a honored location on the mantle.

Very. Hands. On.

Whether Miss Lucy likes it or not (and she didn’t, by the way). But her mom, Annie, isn’t new around here and knows the exact balance between Here Let Mommy Show You and FINE YOUNG LADY, DO IT YOURSELF! Which sounds more like a yell than Annie ever would. Annie, like Cute Redhead and I (and like so many other parents in our season are admitting more and more and more), is in the wrong decade altogether. Meaning we’re ten into the 2000′s and all of us are thinking that the 1950 through the 1970′s had it more right than they ever had it wrong.

Which plays out something like “Get out of here and don’t come home until the street lights come on.”

And if you’re a product of those decades you know exactly what I’m talking about.

(This isn’t a word I throw around at all — it’s just not a guy word, sorry — but when I said “face this way and smile, honey” and she faced this way and smiled, I couldn’t stop laughing and had to say The Word I Don’t Throw Around Because It’s Not A Guy Word: Fabulous!

Of course I’ll take a photo of yours, sweetheart.

Is it just me or does this beg a two-page magazine spread for perfume lol?

And this is Miss Alma showing off the more masculine approach to the handiwork, courtesy of Ian. He and his brother David Michael joined the effort and produced pieces of their own. Not bad.

And not bad for our street.

Summer is well under way and I just discovered there remains but one home still occupied by its original owner, just across the way. Another neighbor, Kitsie, who was a young mom back in the day, tells us that our block alone (and not the all-the-way-around-the-block block…JUST up and down this side of it) once had (sit down for this one) 100 kids on it.

And, nowadays, our house is in the middle of the street.

And in the middle of that street is a riotous number of new kids learning all the things you learn on your street. Including how to carve up the summer months by hauling it over to Chloe’s driveway and making something cool like Mexican Niche Shadow Boxes.

Oh, and this little dude is our Y-Y. Which is what we call him. And how it’s pronounced. But it’s short for Wyatt.

And he rules.

Just ask his grandmother, Miss Alma.

Blog About Blogging – Part II

Todd Clary — Mon, 21 Jun 2010 12:00:53 +0000

(The second in a series of posts on the creating of Waltzing in Perdition.com For the first, click here.)

My brain split in two and I had to concentrate very hard to listen to her and take in the fine points of the article about the camera with the left side while, at the same time, do my best to hang on tight while the right side went on a joyride. In a split second (and I’m not kidding lol) I realized I knew now what I was going to do. And how.

I was going to blog.

I suddenly realized how and why and where and what I was going to do. My only problem was that the board meeting going on inside my head was…well…stuck inside my head. But in a split-second I more or less saw it all design itself and, immediately after my friend left, pulled out a pencil and a clean sheet of paper.

Which always surprises me. Pencil and paper, that is. Because it’s 2010 and no one is really expected to use a pencil and paper anymore. But I do.

Which also surprises me. Because it’s 2010 and everything is electronic and computer and Photoshop and email and Facebook and iPhones (*sign of Cross), but before I put pixel to Internet I still start with a pencil and paper.

So, line-rectangle-square-rounded-edge-divider-divider-divider-those things I draw when I mean dummy text areas-erase/erase/erase (no, that won’t work)-line-line-line-done. And then the thunderstorm sent a bone-shattering bolt of lightening from the open atrium at the top of my laboratory, and I raised my fists to the sky and yelled, “It’s aaaAAAAALLLLLIIIiiiive!”

And then I hated everything I just sketched and decided there was probably a job opening for me somewhere in a shopping mall food court. I decided I was a horrible designer, a hack, a charlatan (ha ha, no one says ‘charlatan’ anymore!), and had no right whatsoever picking up a pencil, let alone firing up Photoshop.

And then I realized how much fun Moody Artist mode was and how much more fun it’d be with a gin & tonic (not that I would) (at 2 in the afternoon), but (yes I would) there was work (and no I didn’t) to be done, so I took another shot at a layout sketch.

And was pretty ticked off.

Because I knew what I was about to put myself through over the course of the next several hours. Which was to try and un-see what I’d seen in the blog design that first rattled my cage and design something that spring-boarded itself off the finest parts of that blog yet didn’t completely bastardize everything within a ten-mile radius. Try as I might, I just couldn’t bring myself to deny the fact that, as design and purpose and communication goes, I was bought and sold the moment I laid eyes on it.

But I’m not new around here and I knew there was no way I was going to not land right back where I started. Because even though there’s only so much one can do with a given amount of screen real estate, I couldn’t escape the tension of settling for anything less than what I’d seen and decided was the Best I’d Ever Seen.

So I gave up, caved in, swallowed my pride, and made quick work of 1024 pixels wide by 800 pixels high.

I was in full I’ll Know It When I See It mode, which is ToddSpeak for “I’m going to be impossible to live with until I get it out of my head and in front of me.” I needed a proper home for what I wanted to write. And not just what I wanted to write, but how. I was working out in my head something that I could be proud of to not only deliver what I wanted to blog about, but make the experience of delivering it something I actually enjoyed. Which is way more complicated than the process right-out-of-the-box actually is. I mean, you can go to any number of blog creating web sites and start Right Now.

That is, unless you have something so customized going on in your head it’s going to take and Act of Congress to wrest it from the recesses of your freak brain.

It was time to find someone who could take what I designed and give it a brain.

And a very big one, at that.

I wish I had a way to open up every folder within a folder within a layer within a mask within a channel…and show you all that I decided Had To Be Done. But the best I can do is this meager screen shot of the actual source file of the WiP blog in its native format. See that Layers palette on the left? I actually counted the individual layers in the original design. Now, mind you, though a great many of them are merged in the final form, the number is a little lower than the actual…but, then again, not really. Because everything is created in—and remains in—layers so that I can go back at anytime and decide I hate everything.

To the tune of (brace yourselves)

357 different layers.

And now you understand why I just don’t understand why people call me a perfectionist.

In the next post, I’ll tell you what a nightmare it was finding a coder who understood that when I say Pixel-Perfect, what I’m really saying is “The straight jacket isn’t for my safety…it’s for yours.”

The Pool

Todd Clary — Sat, 19 Jun 2010 12:00:50 +0000

If you don’t have a neighborhood pool, get one.

And if your kids complain every summer morning because they have to get up before God turns the air on and get in it for swim team practice, ignore them and tell them that Back In My Day I had to walk to summer swim team practice in the snow!

If your child is given to screwing up his champion breast stroke because, when he sees you watching him, he laughs…watch him anyway.

And when they hunt you down in between their events to beg, borrow, or steal a few bucks for ‘something to eat’ (read: candy), deny them outright…because this isn’t your first rodeo. They can, however, have some fruit.

Or, better yet, some vegetables. (I go for the vegetables)

If your neighborhood happens to have one of those Eternal Pillars of Mom-ness, like Laura here (who is not only an Eternal Pillar of Mom-ness, but also eternally cool), then thank your lucky stars. Because a neighborhood with a billion kids needs a Pillar on every perimeter if there’s to be even a scintilla of security and to keep an eye on the demonic horde (read: that billion kids I just mentioned).

And this is our neighborhood pool. And from Memorial Day to Labor Day it is, all by itself, the nucleus and heartbeat of our patch of heaven. Swim team practice every morning and swim meets every Saturday. All the mom’s running the show (dad’s, don’t even try telling me we do anything to make these things run smoothly. Because you know and I know these woman could run Congress with their eyes closed before we even have the guts to admit that, when it comes to the kids being corralled, carpooled, and organized, the most we got is a vague awareness that there are short people in the house.)

But it was a Saturday, and that meant another swim meet. And grills fired up (awesome). And hot dogs and hamburgers (win), root beer (after your last race), candy (no), fruits and vegetables (yes, and don’t roll your eyes at me), and some of the greatest people we’ve had the good fortune to call friends.

And then this little guy, catching forty winks while his mom did that Mom (or Dad) Sway Back and Forth that all moms and dads do instinctively whenever they hold one of these lil’ sack o’ potatoes.

Looks like a future breast stroke champion if you ask me.

From Everlasting to Everlasting

Todd Clary — Fri, 18 Jun 2010 12:00:46 +0000

When in the course of human events, it becomes necessary for one people to dissolve the galactic bands which have connected them with another, and to assume among the powers of the ballroom, the separate and equal station to which the Laws of Nature and of Nature’s God entitle them, a decent respect to the opinions of mankind requires that they should declare the causes which impel them to the separation.

[Translation]: The fiendish Galactic Empire found itself engaged in epic struggle against the rebellious onslaught of chiffon and satin gloves. And we, everyone one of us, discovered the real purpose of prayer.

That is, that those on either side of the battle lines would in fact wage their terrible campaign and conduct themselves duly within the rules of war.

Such as it is.

Defiant, our young battle chief (aka my nephew, John) throws down the challenge and arrays his lines with a bone-chilling compliment of:

Droids

Stormtroopers

and (wait for it)

Light Sabers.

It’s not going to be pretty.

But wait! What’s this?

It appears his would-be adversary (aka my niece, Mary) has comported herself with what, at cursory glance, appears a meager defense! Ha!

“I’m ready. But…um. What are your weapons?” he challenges in defiant and confident mirth.

And with equal confidence—and every bit of Right Always Wins—our Mary meets the recalcitrance with that most ancient and deadliest of salvoes:

“My weapons are karate…and Everlasting Love.”

No small counter-attack, we observe.

And no small job for the Referee (aka my sister-in-law, Lara), who found herself navigating the knotted diplomacy when our John argued, “MoooOOOOOOomm! That’s not fair! Then they’ll never die!”

Ah, the art of war.

Watch Kirsten Undress

Todd Clary — Thu, 17 Jun 2010 12:00:44 +0000

Don’t even pretend you didn’t click on that so fast you almost hurt yourself.

I meant undress some cabinets. Which is what we found Kirsten (our wonderful neighbor) doing today when Beta Male came barging into my studio with, “Dad! Kirsten wants you to come see her project!” Which I did and right away, too. If there’s one thing I know about Kirsten it’s that when she takes on a project, it’s usually one I want to see.

This is Kirsten. And those are her cabinets. And that’s Kirsten on the phone refinishing the cabinets. While she’s on the phone. Which is because Kirsten is a mom of five. Which means Kirsten could change the oil and a diaper at the same time.

But not today. Today Kirsten is doing what she told me is ‘undressing’ the kitchen cabinets.

She knew I’d want to see this because our homes, built on the same block in the same 1960′s still sported the same Not At All Nice Looking cabinetry. And Kirsten had stumbled upon a solution that blew my mind. So, before she could say “here, watch me undress!” (ha ha she didn’t say that but it made me laugh), I ran home and grabbed the Rebel Force to get these photos.

That’s what goes on the woodwork first. No other prep in the world, if you can believe that. It looked like tacky dough like Bisquick is when you make those drop-biscuits. And if you don’t know what those are we can’t be friends anymore. (Policy. You understand.)

And then she lightly sanded down the surface to something smooth, which apparently wasn’t that difficult to do considering the texture you’re going for at the end.

Then she brushes on this stuff, and it apparently comes in all kinds of different colors. Do you see where this is going yet?

There’s a close up of one she finished. Bright sun made it a bit challenging to appreciate.

She had three tables set up outside. When this woman crafts, she does not mess around and I don’t mean maybe. Those are finished doors…

…and this is the finished result. If you could envision very plain, very ugly, very boring, very personality-less cabinets—that’s what these were. But now? Now they’re vintage and cottage and all kinds of other words that garner a look that looks On Purpose but not like you’re trying to fake anything at all. And I think that’s a fine balance. And Kirsten nailed it. I can’t wait for Cute Redhead to see them.

Because our kitchen cabinets are very plain, very ugly, very boring, and have no personality.

Which I wanted to discuss with Kirsten a little more. But…well. The phone rang again.

Did I tell you Kirsten can undress and talk at the same time? (ha ha I made myself laugh again).

And He Will Direct Your Path

Todd Clary — Wed, 16 Jun 2010 14:24:10 +0000

You can imagine the way I put my hand to the proud heart beating within my chest when I happened upon the journal Alpha Male kept at camp.

I found it while examining the small pile of items I’d taken out of the studio during remodeling, and now sifted through to determine their worthiness (or lack thereof), and whether to return them to favored spots on the wall or on the shelves.

Two summers back he and several buddies left the confines of pre-pre-adolescence and, for one week, lived in loin cloths and war paint and bonfires over which they cooked the day’s kill. They chanted ancient ritualistic intonations, calling down on their enemies no small portion of Hell’s wrath and, to be sure, Heaven’s blessing upon themselves.

Meaning they went to camp and spent their days being boys and indulging in all manner of Boy Stuff, while rounding out the Whole Man with a fair measure of spiritual exercise, thought, and meditation. As you can see.

This is the only thing I found he’d written in his journal and I’ll treasure it forever.

John 3:16 and Proverbs 3:5-6.

What more could a father hope for his son? What finer wisdom could a child lean into, gather about himself, and equip his young heart and mind while, bravely, he steps forward into the world and ma—

…wait a minute…there seems to be more.

Oh dear.

Real Estate

Todd Clary — Tue, 08 Jun 2010 12:00:03 +0000

All done.

I cleaned out the overgrown grass, liberated a dozen very healthy raspberry plants, and discovered several more hiding under the overgrowth.

But look at all that real estate! Woo hoo!! Cute Redhead has already transplanted irises and lilly from the front gardens so I better move quick if I’m going to have anything to say about the strawberries I’m thinking about.

This is right outside my studio window. Love this view. There’s full wifi coverage (*genuflect) and shade enough to explain why you’ll be finding me on a lounge chair with my laptop.

And remember the rhubarb I hated? I don’t hate it anymore. And I’m thinking that container in the corner is begging for some giant sunflowers.

Call me crazy.

The Magical Elvitas

Todd Clary — Mon, 07 Jun 2010 16:04:27 +0000

If you have sunglasses, I might suggest you don a pair before gazing too long at that photo.

And if you’re a married man, I might suggest you suspend the part of your Male Limbic Brain governing What’s Fair. Meaning, the part where you’ve been trying to get your wife on the same page with something for years…but which she never would…but which she finally up and pulls the trigger on all by herself, completely circumventing the fact that you’ve been willing to sell your soul for it all along.

Read: “It’s not a Good Idea until it’s Her Idea.” (whatever)

And what are we talking about today, my friends? What is it that has me riding the crest of a wave so joyous the smile on my face would pass for transfiguration?

Cleaning ladies.

CleaningLadiesCleaningLadiesCleaningLadies!

That photo up there? That’s the interior of the microwave.

And it’s white.

Did you know it’s white? For the life of me I thought it was a Jackson Pollack canvas. Or a murder scene.

But several hours after The Magical Elvitas left, I wandered around the Waldorf Astoria in a stupor. Inhaling large draughts of lemon-fresh scents and trying to figure out what those shiny, white things bordering all the floors were (answer: baseboards).

So last week Cute Redhead asks me out of my office to meet The High Priestess of Pine-Sol.

“This is [name withheld because I'm not sharing her with anyone] [ever].”

“Hello there. I’m Todd. Will you marry me?”

“Very funny, Todd. Go away.”

And I did. I went away. And the next day when The High Priestess’ team of Magical Elvitas showed up, I ushered the Spawn out the door (myself with them) and prayed to God Almighty in heaven that they wouldn’t take one look at the domicile and decide setting it on fire wasn’t the easier route.

And five hours later…

FIVE. HOURS. LATER which I’m embarrassed to calculate (lie. I think this is awesome.) equals out to fifteen man Magical Elvita hours of deep cleaning.

And why do I call them Magical? Simple. Ten minutes before they showed up I’d forgotten to unclutter the master bedroom and just shoved everything, five million pairs of HER shoes and all, into the closet and shut the doors. No reason to hoist that nightmare on them, right?

THEY. CLEANED. THE. CLOSET.

And all the shoes were matched, paired, lined up, and pointing in the same direction. Just like those little magical elves did in the fairly tale in the middle of the night. I’d detail more but I’m crying too hard to type.

I Have A Hoe…

Todd Clary — Fri, 04 Jun 2010 12:00:09 +0000

…and I’m not afraid to use it.

I was on my way to run errands when I heard a crew of honey bees doing their thing. Caught that little guy and his wares making his way from one blossom to the next.

This is a portion of the yard I’ve not shown before. Not in full, anyway. And, as you can see, it’s an area better kept out of the camera’s eye. What you see there is an apple tree, too much overgrowing grass, and a fine batch of raspberry bushes.

Here’s the entrance to the patch. I took off the gate a few years ago and put it on another section of fence. I think the former owners used it as a dog run. I’d have kept it on for the Golden Recliner…but that’d require actually running and, um…yeah no.

I spent Memorial Day weekend attacking that area with a hoe and a favorite weeding tool, and one thing led to another.

A few hours later, I’d cleared the path, divested the raspberry patch of enough bind weed to choke a DC-10 engine, and uncovered patches of ground I intend for strawberries, sunflowers, and, I think, blueberries. That is, if I can hunt some down at the nursery.

I was pruning, digging, and throwing out all kinds of plants and bulbs and finding a great deal of satisfaction in being Judge and Jury. That is, You Grow There If I Decide You Grow There.

I happen to like that about gardening.

And I happen to like a verdant yard with enough going on to keep me not just busy…but deeply satisfied.

It was in the middle of a good hour and a half weeding the vegetable garden on Sunday morning that I realized my hands in the soil and my soul in the work is all the church I need.

Or want.

Amen to that.

Somewhere In The Wreckage

Todd Clary — Thu, 03 Jun 2010 12:00:32 +0000

Okay, it’s Saturday and we’re going to actually fix the garage door. And by ‘we’ I mean one of my buddies is going to actually do it while I stand near and look interested and helpful. And by ‘garage door’ I mean that boxy thingy that hangs up near the ceiling and pulls on that chain thingy and opens and closes the door.

Which actually is working just fine. The problem is we’ve misplaced the actual garage door opener. And by ‘misplaced’ I mean that somewhere in the wreckage of this household there lies hidden the garage door opener, one or two undiscovered Easter Eggs and the original plans for the Death Star.

The issue with this particular garage door mechanism is that it’s Ancient. Though it still works, it seems to operate at a radio frequency now disallowed by the Government Office Governing Garage Door Radio Frequencies because, it would seem, that should we activate it, satellites would drop from the sky.

Whatever.

As it is, I’m not going to clean the garage until I’m sure I can open it from the outside.

(32 Hours Later)

Okay, it’s Sunday and I actually fixed the garage door. It was hell and I am not making this up.

There must be some theorem or primary law of thermodynamics saying something about a problem devolving into chaos the more attention and energy it is given because such was the case with the God-forsaken [very unpublishable word here] garage door opener. I basically rebuilt the entire mechanism along the way.

I cursed out my own father several times, solely because he was not nearby to take one look at the mess and say, ‘oh. yeah. you need this-thus-and-so-boom-you’re-done’, while at the same time grabbing the correct tool from that ancient olive green canvas tool bag he’s had since God was a boy. He’s like that (my dad, that is). He can tear down and rebuild anything. I’ve seen him do it. He can take a Q-tip and a can opener and build you a Pratt & Whitney jet engine. Yet, while I stood there anxiously waiting for that part of my DNA to kick in, the garage door hung askew mocking me all the while. Mock, mock, mock.

The garage door opener engine was a hissy fit of wires which I had to figure out. I could rewire the Space Shuttle after that. And, okay, I know there were only six wires involved but we’re talking about me, and in Toddland that equals the entire electrical grid west of the Rockies.

The gear head around which the chain moves, according to the manual, is described deceivingly as a ‘chained spreader.’ It does not, I might mention here, spread the chain enough to make a damn bit of difference. but I won’t go into that because there are all other kinds of things to go into. Like how the cable wiring that maintains the proper tension of the chain drive, and the weight of the garage door. Or the Golden Gate bridge.

I am, also, convinced that somewhere within a three foot radius of my work area (and by ‘work area’ I mean the area in which I could throw anything that made me mad during this freak show), there is a rip in the Space/Time continuum that causes cable wiring and garage door chain links to mysteriously multiply and then shrink for no reason.

There were so many stupid little detours to this pain in the rear end, it’s not even humorous.

The door opens perfectly.

The door closes perfectly.

That’s all that matters.

Well…okay, so it doesn’t close perfectly.

I don’t want to talk about it.

I’m still trying to figure out how to make all of this someone else’s fault.

Blog About Blogging – Part I

Todd Clary — Wed, 02 Jun 2010 12:00:03 +0000

(The first in a series of posts on the creating of Waltzing in Perdition.com)

This whole blogging thing is very much a love-hate relationship, believe it or not. More love than hate, but the tension is ever-present.

It has to do with the arena of blogging and the alleged rules ordering the frontier. It occurred to me yesterday while working in the yard and I thought a bit of How Did This Happen was in order…all the better to explain What I Love About Blogging and What I Hate, that is.

About a year ago, I self-published my first book: A Beautiful Hell – Book One of the Waltzing in Perdition Chronicles. It was a great experience and one that dropped me smack-dab in the middle of something I’d been putting off and hiding from for years: writing publicly. A few radio interviews, a few small speaking engagements, and not a few Wait…You Did WHATs and I realized I never should have waited as long as I did.

I love writing. I love words. I love wordsmithing. I live for cadence and lyrical expression and, though I am an obvious fan of what they call the ‘run-on sentence,’ I’m an even bigger fan of the lethal minimalism I occasionally come across (without feeling the pressure to imitate).

As writing and other creative processes began to whirlpool, not the least of which was amateur photography, I made mention to my friend and neighbor Kirsten my wanting a digital camera. A few weeks later she stopped by to show me a certain blog who’s author used the very camera after which we both lusted. I’ll never forget that day, because when she pulled up the specific article detailing the camera, my eyes glazed over and I went into an artistic catatonic state.

Because the blog’s layout and design immediately arrested my attention and hit me over the head. I see a lot of design. A lot. I’m a designer and web developer, so it’s part of the daily diet around here. To put it mildly. And I don’t care if it’s kind or not, it has to be said: 95% of the blogs out there are ugly as sin. A mess. A train wreck of article and advertisement and Google Ads, and, worst of all, unoriginal regurgitated articles in the form of lists.

But not the one Kirsten showed me.

I was going to blog.

Perilous Night

Todd Clary — Mon, 31 May 2010 12:00:18 +0000

To this day, when I watch any sporting event, particularly the one I love most (major league baseball), I catch myself still looking up to the players. Even though they’re, now, at least two decades (this is for Lady B) my junior.

Such a funny thing the mind does…stamping onto young psyches something like hero worship and leaving indelible relief. I can think of so many examples, but chief among them are a photograph of my grandfather from World War II.

I recently renovated the studio and had to temporarily pack away the photos and memorabilia to paint, so by the time this article posts, I’ll hope to have excavated the photograph to which I’m referring and include it here.

It is a photo that, to this day, makes my back stiffen to attention when I look at it. Roland in his leather flight jacket, his hat cocked off to the side and a devil-may-care grin. The color is vintage but not Photoshopped. It’s the real deal because, of course, the photograph is that old.

What I love most about the photo is that he was only nineteen years old when it was taken. Nineteen. He was a Hump pilot, which was the name given by Allied pilots in WWII to the eastern end of the Himalayan Mountains. He flew military transport aircraft from India to China to resupply the Chinese war effort of Chiang Kai-shek and the units of the United States Army Air Forces based in China.

Nineteen.

But when I look at that photograph, I’m a little kid again and I’m looking at a god.

And then I remember what I consider the most meaningful conversation with him I ever had…

September 11, 2001.

Cute Redhead sat on the couch cradling our five-day old baby girl. I’d just stepped out into the room seeing the second plane do what it did, and stood there unable to absorb the momentum of what my mind could not imagine.

You remember the day.

And I remember the trauma leveled against myself and my failing ability to navigate what had happened, what it meant, and what was coming.

And then Roland was on the phone. And having lost the best of his hearing years ago, was yelling in the way I’d pay anything to hear again. Which never meant he was angry with you, by the way…but which certainly could; it took a certain understanding to understand that he never whispered. He never mumbled. He yelled.

I miss that yell.

“Hi grandpa. I can’t bel—”

“Is this Todd!”

“lol yeah, Roland…it’s Todd. I was saying that I can’t bel—”

“You listen to me boy…”

…and then he paused and spoke courage into me in a way that throttled me and punched a whole into my mettle.

“…we’re going to be fine, boy.”

And I lost it. I did my level best to be the brave private hearing the braver colonel’s Just Let Them Try, but for the first time in my life…I heard him not yell, but talk softly.

And over the miles, over the phone…he set his giant hand on my shoulder and emboldened me. And in the moment, in a flash, I was eight years old and wanted baseball games and days of deep summer and some way, any way, to not know anything about the world.

I’ll never forget.

I wish there was more like him these days. The curtain is closing on The Greatest Generation and it unnerves me because, no matter what we think we know, they know more.

They know that, no matter what, we’re going to be fine.

That’s what I remember.

That’s what I need to keep remembering.

Too Perfect

Todd Clary — Sun, 30 May 2010 12:00:25 +0000

I felt like messing with a cartoon so I pulled this one out of my pile and scanned it in.

I drew it back in 1991 or 1992, I think, and the character was a shot at a single-panel comic strip entitled Grizelda Kanarpfarkle (and summarily rejected by every syndicate it was sent to). The original caption was “Morning has broken.”

It’s been my plan to create videos of some of the process I employ on a daily basis—and I promise I will do just that. But I wanted to first try showing how things happen with some photographs of the craft.

I didn’t anticipate what happened though. Which was a bit of frustration with the coloring process.

This was rendered by hand, obviously. Or, perhaps, not so obviously: I use a Wacom drawing tablet, but never for actual drawing. All that is done by hand. And it always surprises me how many people, upon seeing the pen tool in lieu of a mouse assume I’m drawing on it and onto the computer monitor.

Never.

The reason, for me anyway, is that, when I draw I’m looking directly past my fingers holding the pen and at what it is I’m drawing. Using a pen tool and tablet means looking not at my hand, but at the monitor, which means there’s a gap in the process. Other brains might have adapted to that anomaly, but mine never will.

Ever.

What you likely don’t know, can’t know, is that it’s been an embarrassing number of years since I’ve actually produce any cartoon work for a client. And I mention that only to mention this: I never did it on the computer.

Ever.

I sketched, inked, and colored it all by hand. And loved it.

Always.

So, you’ll forgive the Moody Artist for his complete disdain for what I’m posting anyway. That is, a drawing I Don’t Hate (artist never Like anything they create…the best they’ll give you is I Don’t Hate It).

See that background? Photoshop.

And all the other colors? Photoshop.

Not a big shock.

But as I laid in the color using the tools of the trade nowadays, I found a frustration I’m none too pleased with:

It looks too perfect.

I used to draw on hot pressed watercolor paper and color with a certain brand of marker. Then I’d ink the final piece using the only pen I ever liked. And I used all those tools because of how they behaved together. The watercolor paper had a certain composition that allowed the markers to bleed in just such a way I came to love. Depending on how firmly I held the marker, or turned the paper or did whatever it was I did…well…the final piece looked Good.

Not perfect.

Good. And I’m a big believer in Things Were Never Meant To Be Perfect…Just Good.

But this…

…this just doesn’t do it for me. I’m used to a whole different process, a much more organic and basic one. One that has my feet on grass, not in shoes on asphalt, if you get my meaning.

And, trust me, I know Photoshop. I’m a master with the program and I don’t mean maybe.

But it’s that the program has algorithms designed to exude the qualities and properties of the natural materials and processes that I find myself shaking my head at. More, I realize how unimpressed I am.

At the end of the day, there is just no substitute for doing it all by hand the old fashioned way.

So. There it is. I didn’t intend to not like this. But I don’t like it.

It’s too perfect.

Give It Away Now

Todd Clary — Sat, 29 May 2010 12:00:25 +0000

I was long ago taught a lesson I’ve never forgotten and which has brought me a lot of Good over the years:

Your friends are your most valued treasure.
So give them away.

I was in my younger twenties when I learned that one, and it arrested my attention for all its (then) counter-intuitiveness. But it didn’t take but one or two exercises in the practice before learning that there are few joys in life greater than seeing people you love meet one another and form a friendship of their own.

And that’s what happened the other night when, finally, my buddy Jeff flew into town. The stars lined up allowing my other friend Betsy and I to meet him for a bit of dinner, a bit of adult beveragating (today is brought to you by Beer and the letter ‘Ow My Head’), and a lot of Let’s Be Best Friends Now But Not Let Todd In Our Clique.

Which is just what they did because they both can talk music. I mean Talk. Music.

But I remembered my lesson and was not bitter.

Not then.

Now now.

*sob

I should have know how this was going to turn out when I saw that hand smacking the table. I love that look and that hand-smack because I know how he talks and when he’s in his element. That’s when he smacks his hand on a table lol.

Not to be outdone, our Lady B can toe-to-toe with the best of them. They started talking about church and church music and the music industry in general. And if there are two people more saturated in singing, song writing, and the music industry (read Jeff worked back stage at the MTV Music awards, among others) (Remember the David Spade ‘And You AAAAAARRE…??’ Yeah. That was Jeff.), well…they certainly weren’t at our table.

Oh geez. Another hand wave. This meant Lady B was now in her element.

And this was her going into what we’ve come to call Serving The Song, which is our vernacular for the essence of music and getting out of your own way and letting a gift come through you.

And this is Jeff letting me know that I can stop being Loser With Camera.

Marty Marty

Todd Clary — Fri, 28 May 2010 12:00:52 +0000

Alright I know this doesn’t seem like it belongs in the Galley but seeing as how I’m leading off with cooking for this quick story, it just made sense to me.

See those happy little faces up there? Full of hope and promise and joy?

Yes.

Those are faces full of gratitude throwing no small measure of Dad Awe all over the kitchen. Because I made five little hoodlums a proper breakfast, thank you very much. Which, if you throw your sleeping bag on my floor, is going to mean you wake up from the sleep-over to the smell of:

pancakes

thick-cut bacon

fresh strawberries

fresh milk (not kidding about that one)

and hot syrup.

That’s right. Because I am Marty Stewart.

Cute Redhead on the other hand, not realizing I was going to go all Short Order Cook on the place (what? you’re new here?), “set out breakfast for them already,” which summoned this response from the poor darlings…

Cold cereal? AND WE HAVE TO POUR THE MILK OURSELVES?? WHA–??

There, there, my little urchins. Fear not.

And so they turned their backs on Non-Breakfast and sang my praises.

And then I (get a load of this one) shooed them away from the table singing something that made them laugh (because I’m also Marty Poppins) and they flew out of the kitchen like sparks from an anvil to resume their…

…crafts (girls), and their…

…killing each other (boys).

Banner day.

He Is No Fool

Todd Clary — Thu, 27 May 2010 12:00:07 +0000

I hate this painting.

Meaning, I love every bit of it. It’s Norman Rockwell’s Breaking Home Ties, and last week it shot across my bow in the form of my eldest on the last day of what they call Middle School—but which I refuse to consider anything other than what it is: Junior High. Which, in my day, was 7th, 8th, and 9th grade, and then thereafter, the demarkation between worlds we never understood.

That is, high school’s foyer and the threshold upon the wider world.

The painting is considered one of Norman Rockwell’s masterworks, as well as being one of the most widely reproduced.

The young man and his father sit on the running board of the family’s stakesided farm truck. The ticket protrudes from the son’s pocket, and the single rail visible at the lower corner of the painting, by which the trio sit, suggest that they’re at a whistle stop waiting for the train.

The son’s books are stacked on a new suitcase and bear a “State U” pennant. His tie and socks perfectly matched, he wears the pressed white trousers and matching jacket, signifying he is ready for his new life in college. The young man’s shoes are shined to a polished gleam, as, hands folded, and with the family dog resting his head in his lap, his gaze focuses eagerly toward the horizon, and on the next chapter in his life.

But.

The father sits slumped with both his and his son’s hats clutched in his hand, as if reluctant to let him go. The direction of his gaze is opposite to the boy’s. His watchchain dangles, near at hand, from his shirt pocket. There is a red flag and a lantern at the ready, near his right hand, atop a well-used trunk. With the son’s luggage unloaded and waiting next to them…

…there is nothing left for him to do but signal the train to stop, and his pose suggests that he is looking up the track, dreading the imminent arrival of the train that will carry his son away.

Though the two figures are not looking at each other, the sense of family ties is very clear.

I hate this painting.

I love it because, for me, 8th grade was a terrible year. Terrible. It began with my big mouth and ended too many years later with too many scars, none of which I’m interested in unearthing here.

But all of which were erased the day, last week, when I saw August stand when his row was called, walk confidently toward the stage, shake the hand of his principal, accept the document certifying he’d survived, and then walk off, smiling like the cat who got the cream.

And then I saw, years from now, the morning I rose to face the day I felt would never come and the one which, then and now, I’d sell my soul to turn back forever.

How will I handle, how will I truly handle, a house too clean, no longer proving the kid couldn’t pick up after himself if the fate of the free world depended upon it?

How will I not look Cute Redhead in the eye too closely lest she look right back and ruin my Holding It Together…because the Too Quiet is Too Loud?

How could I have been so stupid to think that a day would come when I’d be okay with my boy spreading his wings and tumbling out of my nest?

How on earth can I know that I know that I know that we did what we needed to do to get him safe?

Getting him safe:

A house on fire.

And that’s how I’ve always seen it. That is, when I had calm enough to get my wits about me and steady myself in spite of the tumult called Every Day.

A house on fire.

And it was mine.

Mine to do whatever it takes to brave the flames, suffer the burns, hold the child to me, and falling running falling standing running falling jumping

panicking

certain

horrified

undaunted

thankful

furious

finally

…getting him safely out of the house on fire.

I know, I know. Drama. But that’s how I see it. That’s how I’ve always seen it. And ever since the day I called his name for the first time…ever since the moment he stopped squawking, opened his own eyes to see my own brimming and looking into his…I’ll never stop seeing it.

I’ve said it before here, “Some would say I’m injecting far too much. I’d say they’re not seeing things as they are.”

And I hate that painting.

Because keeping

means relinquishing.

And holding close

means letting go.

and

“He is no fool
who gives
what he cannot keep
to gain
what he cannot lose.”

Dew of the Sea

Todd Clary — Wed, 26 May 2010 12:00:17 +0000

Rosmarinus officinalis.

It’s Latin and it means, Dew of the Sea. And though it’s most closely associated with the cooking of the Mediterranean area, it blocked my way today while walking down the sidewalk.

Right there in front of God and everybody, a whole five foot by five foot display of what looked like a hedge I wanted to dig up and cook with right on the spot.

Which was not fair at all because I can’t smell Rosemary, without thinking of roast chicken. And I can’t roast a chicken unless the dinner I’m cooking falls between September and April. Which might sound stupid, but it’s sort of my rule.

Roast chicken is a cold season meal as far as I’m concerned.

And yet there it was right in front of me. Suddenly I wanted this:

Rotisserie Roast Chicken with Rosemary, Orange and Garlic

Ingredients
1 roasting chicken big enough to feed your crew
1 tsp salt
5 sprigs chopped rosemary (and no I’m not giving you mine)
zest from 1 orange
2 tsp garlic flake
rock salt

Method
1. Rub salt, rosemary and orange zest all over the chicken including the inside cavity. Leave in the fridge for a few hours or overnight.
2. Using a mortar and pestle, coarsely grind the garlic flake. (don’t even pretend you don’t want one)
3. Rub garlic flake over skin and sprinkle with rock salt.
4. Truss chicken and rotisserie at 180˚C for 45-60 minutes or until the juices run clear. (I think trussing is a pain)
5. Rest the chicken for 10 minutes before carving.

So there it is. That’s what flooded my mind when I ran into the Dew of the Sea. It’s no-nonsense, simple, and a favorite around here. And though I’m not cooking it tonight, I’ll break my rule and throw it in the oven the first time the temperature drops below 60˚.

Now…if anyone has an award-winning gravy recipe, I’m all ears.

Making The Grade

Todd Clary — Tue, 25 May 2010 16:32:34 +0000

So Cute Redhead had business travel again last week. Rhode Island, or Boston, or New York, or all three of themIForgetAndCantBeBotheredWithThis…

It, quite naturally, fell to me to make sure the kids didn’t get blood on the walls were taken care of. And, quite professionally, I did just that, if I do say so myself.

I used to make cocky little lists of Things To Do while she was away. Things I can’t get to under normal circumstances due to Life insisting that Life be tended to 24/7. Things like: clean the garage…build the fence…finish painting the trim…go clubbing and dance till they pry my cold dead fingers off the pole. But things which, in her absence, I had more Me Time with which to go clubbing be responsible and focused.

All of that falls by the wayside, however, when it turns into All Hands On Deck and I find myself the sole-center of the Universe (read: Though I Am Fully Functioning Human With Opposable Thumbs, I Can’t Do Anything Without Pestering Dad First) and, worse, completely unable to recruit that most favored of phrases, “Go ask your mother.”

Everything went fine. The kids were alive, fed, clothed, loved, natured, nurtured bleah bleah bleah, right?

But the afternoon Wife returned I noticed she was moving throughout the house with a bit of Drawers Shutting A Little Too Loudly, etc., etc. After a good forty-five minutes of the heavy sighing I made my way to the kitchen to (finally) deal with the sink full of breakfast dishes, whereupon I made a huge tactical blunder that went like this:

[turns on hot water] [rinses plate] “Um…so. How’re you doing?”

“Okay.”

[loads dishwasher] “A ha. Well. You seem to be moving throughout the house picking up this, wiping up that…all with body language leading me to suspect your aren’t all that pleased with the state of things upon your return, yes?”

“Well. I wouldn’t exactly say that.”

[wipes counter] “Lol well. I would. I’m not new here.”

“Yes. Well. No. You did pretty well and I thi—”

“—I DID PRETTY WELL LOL??”

“Yes. I’d give you an 85%.”

[turns off water] “Wait…what? Did you just say you’d ‘give me an 85%??’”

“Yes. What would you have given yourself.”

“A frontal lobotomy on our wedding da—you know, shocking as this may seem, I don’t GRADE my performance like this lol.”

“Oh.”

“And what, pray, was it exactly that earned me this solid B?”

“The dishes were left in the sink.”

“The dishes in the sink.”

“Yes.”

*stares at Walking Grade Book “You’re kidding me.”

“No. It could have been a 92.”

The LawnMaven® 6000

Todd Clary — Mon, 17 May 2010 16:23:32 +0000

Like all Mothers Days, our celebrating Her Highness began with flowers, cards, homemade gifts, overtures of love, promises of undying gratitude, breakfast in bed, and then buying a new lawnmower but getting her to think it was her idea.

Now, I don’t recommend such extreme maneuvers to you younger dudes fresh off the wedding altar. Things like this are not for novitiates, and I can’t be held responsible for any of you young bucks stumbling into potential minefields with all the subtlety of a clown car.

So, gather round, my young padawans and listen and learn.

It all began with the lawnmore we’ve had since God was an altar boy and how someone (NOT ME) left it out every year all winter long, subjecting it all the forces of nature, extreme temperatures, corroded spark plugs, pull mechanisms which pull-twang-snap-zip-slinged their way across the backyard and landed in a tree.

Okay, actually it was me but I don’t think that need factor into this story.

What does factor in, however, is how every spring time I’d have to heft the stupid thing into the beloved SUV and ambulance it to the local toy store hardware store for its annual Let Me Get This Straight…You Mow With This POS? Which is Hardware Store Boyspeak for “You Are A Loser And We All Know It By What You ‘Mow’ With.”

And then two or three weeks later (read: It Never Occurred To Me To Beat The Rush), I’d get a phone call from Hardware Store Boy telling me the machine had something like a new lease on life, albeit temporary. At best.

During that two or three weeks I’d borrow my neighbor’s lawnmower. And this neighbor is my buddy Bill. Bill is cool. Bill is awesome. Bill will hate anyone I hate and has never once failed to gripe about anything with me. He is as dependable as they come, borrows all my stuff while I borrow all his stuff, and has mastered The Guy Look.

The Guy Look: The Guy Look is that look guys give other guys when there is no way they can (or want to) risk verbalizing what’s going through their head while every child ever sired is pecking them to death like ducks while their wives are off making more lists of Things They Must Do To Prove They Love Me And If They Don’t That Means They Don’t Love Me This Minute Anymore And Must Pay. Bill is a master at this look. We’ve passed it to one another across crowded rooms, packed backyards, at soccer games, in our cars when we pass on the street, and in the silent recesses of our Very Man Hearts where we live slowly trodding this mortal coil wondering how in the world we ended up where we are instead of where we thought we would (when we were nine) which was killing the bad guys.

And, yes, even though that nine-year-old perspective also had us in our underwear wearing swim goggles and a towel tied around our necks, it was cool. But rather on the wanting side, we realize that now…

…

…okay, I completely lost my train of thoug—

Oh wait.

Mothers Day.

So my Mothers Day gift to Cute Redhead was Servitude. I would be her drone, her slave, her minion, her cabana boy. I would garden, plant, move this, fix that, and hunt-and-gather whatever she deemed worthy the whim.

But then I decided the Amazon Rainforest doubling as my backyard needed a good trimming. And so I announced that I would lean into the task. And then she announced that I would likely do no such thing because the lawnmower had gone to be with Jesus.

*hands on hips

*scowls in the face of Very Manly Task (mowing the lawn)

And then I said (and here comes the professional part) (professional because of this):

Did you know that the human body undergoes, oversees, and experiences roughly 12 billion chemical reactions a second? A. SECOND.

12 billion. To give you a better appreciation of this number, consider this: if you started counting today, it would take you about 11 weeks to count all the way to 1 million.

And if you started counting today, with 1 billion in your sights, you would reach that number in

32 years.

That’s the scope we’re talking about.

Times 12.

12 billion chemical reactions a second.

That is beyond amazing and why no computer will ever achieve anything like Artificial Intelligence let alone Operating System Superiority.

Unless it’s a Mac.

Now…in that split-second where I realize the lawnmower had passed to the other side, one of those 12 billion reactions sparked along the synaptic byway of Male Limbic Brain. It’s very technical and I hope you’ve brushed up on your college physics because I don’t have time to break this down for the layman. Here is chemical reaction:

I Want A New Lawn Mower.

Which all by itself in no way results in Gets New Lawnmower if you’re married because it has to play out like a mutual decision. However, any mutual decision that leads off with Her Deciding It Must Happen transcends the pedestrian rules governing humans and is immediately ushered to the front of the line.

And it goes like this:

“Happy Mothers Day!” *kiss

*leans cheek toward Offered Kiss

“Thank you!”

“I shall mow the lawn for you! Yay!”

“Um. No. You left the lawnmower outside all winter again, Brainwave. It has breathed its last.”

“Wha–?? But…”

“Yes. I’m sorry.”

“But…I wanted to mow the lawn! For you!” (lie)

“I know you were, sweetheart. I love how you do these things For Me.” (lie)

*defeated “I suppose I should take it in. Or maybe I should just get a new one.”

Now, right here, I was on a razor’s edge. This next move was, I don’t mind saying, brilliant. It went like this:

“I bet [typical hardware store] has some good ones.”

“No. I’d go to Sears.”

*feigns subserviency “…Well. Okay. I mean, if that’s what you think makes the most sense.” *shrug

“Yes. Sears. You should go to Sears.”

And so I went to Sears and came home with the LawnMaven® 6000.

Okay, it’s not really called that at all but it is in the Party Inside My Head.

I love this thing. It has all kinds of cool features, all of which are eclipses by the (go up and look at the photo one more time) Little Blue Thing by the back wheel there.

Do you know what that is? This is hilarious and awesome and the feature Sears Hardware Section Lady almost got kissed right on the mouth for:

After you’re done mowing, you HOOK. UP. THE. HOSE. to that little blue nozzle—and turn on the water full blast while The Bunker Busting SodMonster™ XSi is ON—

And

cleans

itself.

Dude.

Grow Up

Todd Clary — Sun, 16 May 2010 17:24:56 +0000

I took the string off the garden this morning, now that I can clearly make out what’s what and who’s where. And even though the sprinklers were going for broke, I grabbed the camera to mark the occasion…

…only to find our newest family member I bit down in the dumps at his new home.

“Do you want to talk about it?” (and, yes, I really asked him that)

“Why can’t you be more like your brother?” (and, yes, I really said that too)

These are my little iceburg lettuce babies.

I love them.

White Lisbon Onion. How cute is that?

Ho ho HO! You can just stop right there, Weeds From Hell. And don’t think I put in railroad ties for my health. You even think of breaching the wall and I swear to God in Heaven I’ll call in an airstrike. (yeahyoubetterrun)

Okay…that lil’ nipper? That’s my Bloomsdale Spinach.

*tear

We talked a long time. We talked about organic seeds, and nutrients and minerals; we talked about crinkle-leafed rosettes and–

–were interrupted by mocking laughter.

Game face.

Yeah, don’t think I don’t know it was you, Bailey.

Just Fine

Todd Clary — Fri, 14 May 2010 14:11:17 +0000

The house is a mess.

Yesterday one of the cars needed repairs costing way more than we expected.

Two days before that I yelled at my oldest boy for getting uppity.

A few projects are showing their darker sides and really getting on my nerves.

My baby girl had two teeth pulled and suffered a really bad sore throat for two days after.

Every time we run the dishwasher, it makes a sound that convinces me some big round, greasy part is going to come flying through the front of it and lodge itself in the neighbor’s garage door.

I haven’t parked in my garage since 2008 because my son and his compatriots have turned it into a recording studio for their band.

Every morning I wake up, drag myself to the coffee maker (*sign of Cross) and sit down to either read, write, design, or try and get Something Done. And every morning I’m interrupted by kids needing this or that, breakfast, lunch money, a ride, a signature, or socks.

My life…all our lives…are made up of interruptions and a near-constant not-quite-a-rhythm of Three Steps Forward And Two Steps Back. Lately I’ve been irritated with it. And cranky. I can’t seem to get anything done and that makes me crazy.

It’s noisy, frenetic, and feels like the hub of some wheel desperately needs oiling. I wonder if I’m doing anything very well or merely keeping (barely) my head above water enough to keep my mind off what just sank below the surface.

That’s only some of what’s going wrong.

I could go on and on and on but it’d be a waste of time.

A waste of time because it’s a waste of time to write about death when there is so much life all around me. And, yes, I mean death…because, at it’s core, that’s what I think I’m griping about.

Surrounded by a whirlwind of What Happens Every Morning, I glanced up thinking I was going to roll my eyes at the clip-clop-clip-clopping going on over my head (Cute Redhead was up and well underway toward High Powered Day), when this arrested my attention…

“Though darkness lay, it will give way when the dark night delivers the day.”

I needed to see this. I’ll explain why in a minute.

And then I saw this. The rhubarb I promised to dig up and remove. I hate that plant. It’s not what I planned for that spot. But we’ve had late snows and some unseasonal cold, and through all of it…year after year…it thrives.

Absolved. It stays.

I decided I wasn’t looking closely enough at things, so I grabbed my camera and decided to find Everything That’s Going Right.

I didn’t have to look very far…

He’s thirteen now, but as long as I live I will never not see one tiny little foot peeking out of a bundle of newborn blankets.

Even when, being woken by the sound of a camera shutter, said Thirteen Year Old scowls at me.

Beta Male is on an overnight field trip with his class. Though this bed is always absent the little Unibomber by now, it’s empty now because he didn’t sleep in it last night. I’m glad for his adventures, but there’s still a part of me that much prefers all my babies in the nest at night. In fact, no matter how crazy it can get…no matter how bad the wheels have fallen off (and they do) (often), knowing they’re safe, fed, covered and at rest, rests my heart…

…making the duty of waking the Princess of Space, Time, and Dimension a task I do not enjoy. Particularly when she’s clearly spent half the night turning upside down and backwards and burrowing under every stuffed animal in North America. Still, pulling back her hair and whispering,”…time to get up, little calepitter” (it’s how she pronounced it and how I’ll say it forever) makes me feel like mornings were invented so that All Things New had their encore.

And, finally, I took the camera and followed the sound of Purpose and Intent and Professional Control and Decorum and Maturity (read: everything Todd is not lol). And though I was given an eye roll and The Look, I was allowed a photograph of that foot in those shoes.

My favorite part? When I said I wanted a photograph and she tendered me her signature and very exasperated, “…Todd.”

Why I needed to see the sunrising over the wooden fence:

I’m going to a funeral in a few hours. And though I hate Death, I happen to love funerals. In the same way I like weddings. And in the same way I love Births.

Because I believe that The Door swings open at these time-between-times, and, opening, Life (even cleverly disguised as Death) flows from There into our Here and reminds me…

…that all the Wrong in the world is but a live coal in God’s ocean.

Everything…

…is going to be just fine.

Boys Are Loud

Todd Clary — Thu, 13 May 2010 12:00:27 +0000

The little sprite, in spite of staying home with a sore throat, mustered strength enough to establish her resolve, should the boys chance stepping foot past the boundary lines of her domain.

Tread lightly boys, and keep it down.

No Such Thing

Todd Clary — Wed, 12 May 2010 14:18:20 +0000

Isn’t that beautiful?

Ah, spring time in the Rockies and what all most of us know as wisdom enough to never turn your back on her. Her being Mother Nature, that is.

According to the natives (and the Farmer’s Almanac), you never plant before May 10th. After that, however, you’re in the clear.

Yeah, I don’t mean to be picky, but this doesn’t look clear to me.

Isn’t winter-into-spring supposed to be a smooth transition? I want to think so, but then I remember my cousin once telling me (we were talking about becoming parents) that there is no such thing as ‘smooth transition,’ and that the notion played out as well as ‘tasty vomit.’

Naturally, I pruned the lilac bush outside my studio in order to free it up, divest it of the dead growth and inhibiting limbs so that it could sway untethered and released. I’m going to lose my mind.

But I’m going to lose it in Maui because I’ve had it and I’m moving there today.

If you need me, I’ll be staring at the Pacific.

Goodbye forever.

I Think I’m Going To Cry

Todd Clary — Mon, 10 May 2010 23:38:34 +0000

Wisconsin Brie, crispy bacon, hash browns, and a fried egg atop French toast. What else is there to say?

So there I was minding my own business when all off a sudden I realized bacon and eggs are for sissies. If it’s good with those, then it’s got to be better with brie, hash browns and French toast, right?

WOULD YOU LOOK AT THAT?!

Here’s the recipe (and, yes, I’m making it…and if I survive the quadruple bypass, I’ll be sure and let you know what my children think of seeing their dad’s eyes roll in back of his head while he sings opera.)

The Ingredients:

6 eggs
1 cup milk
1 teaspoon pure vanilla extract
Pinch cinnamon
Pinch nutmeg
2 large russet potatoes
Salt and pepper
4 tablespoons canola oil
8 slices bacon
8 thick slices firm white bread
4 tablespoons butter
8 ounces Wisconsin Brie cheese, sliced
Pure maple syrup, optional

The Method:

Make dipping mixture: Whisk 2 eggs, milk, vanilla, cinnamon, and nutmeg in wide bowl. Refrigerate until ready to use.

Peel potatoes and cover with cold water in pot. Season with salt. Bring to a boil; lower heat and simmer for 5 minutes; turn off burner and let sit 15-20 minutes. Drain; rinse potatoes with cold water. When cool, grate with the large holes of box grater. Heat heavy skillet, preferably cast iron, over high heat. Add canola oil; heat. Spread shredded potatoes evenly over skillet bottom. Season with salt and pepper and cook for 5 minutes or until brown on bottom. Do not stir or disturb potatoes while cooking. Using a wide spatula, flip potatoes over and brown other side without stirring.

Fry bacon in skillet until brown and crispy. Remove; drain on paper towels. Return skillet to stove over medium heat and fry remaining 4 eggs. Remove eggs to a plate. Keep warm.

Heat griddle or skillet over medium heat and add butter. Remove dipping mixture from refrigerator. Rewhisk to blend well. Dip the bread slices, one at a time, in mixture. Grill one side. Flip. Brown second side. Top 4 slices each with 1 ounce Brie, a portion of the potatoes, 1 egg, two slices of bacon, and another ounce of Brie. Top with another prepared bread slice. Continue to grill sandwiches briefly to heat the Brie, being careful not to overbrown bread.

Serve with maple syrup on the side, if you have absolutely no shame.

Jackpot

Todd Clary — Mon, 10 May 2010 21:31:04 +0000

So last week, Dentist Lady decided that The Princess of Light and Splendor had a bottom row of teeth mimicking a clown car. Meaning there was no way all those little pearly whites were were going to fit in that precious little muzzle. At least not without a crow bar.

So Dentist Lady fit her out with those little rubber band spacer things last week in order to prepare for what had to happen this week. As in today. As in about an hour ago. As in I’m not sure how much longer I have to live.

She’s that mad at me, in spite of that smile you see up there.

I apparently failed to mention to her that though she was getting pulled out of school early today (woohoo!!), it had nothing to do with Dad Rocks and everything to do with pulling teeth (wha–??).

And I don’t know what you’ve been told, but this ‘laughing gas’ thing they use does not render good humor in little girls. When Dentist Helper Lady came out and told me everything was done, Baby Girl held on her hand which held the tiny white treasure box containing the elephant tus—

“…oh my God in heaven, what are those?”

“Those are her baby teeth.”

“So she’s a baby vampire?! LOOK at those things!”

“No. Those are baby teeth. We had to take those out to make room for her permanent teeth.”

“Permanent for what, biting through kevlar?!”

“Yes, well. It went just fine and I’m sure she’ll be a little sore when the laughing gas [my butt] wears off. So you’ll want to be sure and…”

[all kinds of doctor-to-attentive-parent directions none of which I was listening to, because I know this child and I don't care how much gauze they stuffed into her jaw, she was going to let me have it IN STEREO on the way home if I didn't think fast]

“—yes, right. Got it. Okay, more importantly…”

“Yes? Do you have a question?”

“Well…actually, yes. I know there have been budget cuts but I thought I should check just in case. Your office is, I trust, in compliance with Federal Regulatory Dental and Orthodontics Oversight Committee’s Best Management Practices For The Tooth Fairy Fiscal 2009-2010?”

[didn't miss a beat] “Oh, absolutely. We’ve just updated our database with the main frame and cached all our server’s overflow to a portal to be sure to accommodate the expected heavier traffic.”

“You’re expecting heavier traffic, huh?”

“We are. Did you get a look at those suckers?”

“I did. I’m thinking the Tooth Fairy is going to be laying down some serious bank tonight.”

And that’s why the photo up top shows her smiling.

I better call the bank and take out a loan.

Stuck

Todd Clary — Fri, 07 May 2010 22:02:17 +0000

So, naturally, I set the can of paint on the top shelf in the refrigerator and closed the door.

And forgot about it.

For two days.

And looked everywhere for it. There was touching up to be done, and I couldn’t find the little can. Or the brush.

In the interim, I’d made several meals, opened and shut, moved this and then that, and gone in and out of the fridge no less than the typical number of times just like in any given kitchen the world over.

This morning, I was on the hunt for Something Breakfast-like and realized it wasn’t where it should be, so I rooted around on that top shelf a bit more than I normally might, and, so doing, pulled on something that should have moved.

But didn’t.

Because it was stuck to the shelf and eternally galvanized to the molecular structure of the Frigedaire.

With paint.

But I didn’t realize this…or appreciate the abject absence of viscosity and the arid properties of our high-desert climate…

…until I ripped the box of what it was I was looking for and left that remnant.

* * *

Okay, I can’t keep up this lie any longer.

That isn’t paint.

It’s milk. *sad trombone*

How horrible is that?

On a lighter note, I figured out what that odor was.

“Hey dad…”

Todd Clary — Fri, 07 May 2010 01:54:07 +0000

“…is this how you learn to shave?”

“lol no, buddy, it’s n—”

lol

“…actually, yes. Yes, it is kiddo lol. Don’t forget to rinse out the sink”

From the Archives: Turnabout Is Fairplay

Todd Clary — Tue, 04 May 2010 16:49:25 +0000

Never let it be said that I’ll ask of anyone else anything I wouldn’t want asked of me. So, dredged up from the archives is the interview I submitted myself to and the answers, uncut and (mostly) uncensored. And though this is technically an interview and belongs in the WiP Mic section, I’m putting it up here because it made me laugh. Enjoy.

(…and please don’t read any of this back to me in court)

You can press a button that will make any one person explode. Who would you blow up?
Hannah Montana. And her dad. I know you said only one person, but in my head he was standing close.

You can flip a switch that will wipe any band or musical artist out of existence. Who will it be?
Darrell Evans. I know some of you love his music. But I don’t. Next?

Who would you really like to just punch in the face?
All the women on The View. Except Whoopi. I watched this show for five minutes once and realized I’d rather pour hot tar on my [censored] than listen to that screeching.

What is your favorite cheese?
You had to bring that up. I can’t remember the name. I had it once and I saw the Lord. I saw Him. I’ve been looking for it again ever since.

You can only have one kind of sandwich. Every sandwich ingredient known to humankind is at your immediate disposal. What kind of sandwich will you eat?
The BLT recipe from the August 2006 issue of Southern Living. And I’m not kidding.

You have the opportunity to [go on a nice date] with the movie celebrity of your choice. We are talking no-strings-attached [nice date] and it can only happen once. Who is the lucky celebrity of your choice?
Angelina Jolie.

You have the opportunity to [go on a nice date] with the music celebrity of your choice, who will it be?
Sandra Bullock. (In my head she’s loving it so much she sings.)

Now that you’ve [had a nice date] with two people in a row, you seem to be having an excellent day because you just came across a hundred-dollar bill on the sidewalk. What do you buy?
Nothing. I walk up to the first down-on-their-luck person I see and give it to them. And then walk away. Sort of like Touched By a Todd.

You just got a free plane ticket to anywhere. You have to depart right now. Where are you gonna go?
Fiji.

An angel appears out of heaven and offers you a lifetime supply of the beverage of your choice. It is?
Water. Not very creative, I know. But I love water.

Rufus appears out of nowhere with a time-traveling phone booth. You can go anywhere in the PAST. Where do you go?
No idea who this ‘Rufus’ character is, so I’m going to say five minutes before my wedding where I’ll meet Past Todd and go, ‘…alright, I’m not supposed to do this, but here’s what’s coming. You better sit down…’

You discover a beautiful island upon which you may build your own society. You make the rules. What is the first rule you put into place?
“You do not talk about Fight Club Island.” And that’s all I’m saying. Because you do not talk about Fight Club Island.

You have been given the opportunity to create the half-hour TV show of your own design. What is it?
Hm. I’ll call it Hug It Out. It will be hosted by me, Jeff, and Jill. We’ll shred people and make it real. Then after we’ve brought them to The Real, we’ll hug ‘em.

What is your favorite curse word?
The Queen Mother of All Cuss Words. It is. Mainly because, I’m sorry to say, I say it REALLY. WELL.

One night you wake up because you heard a noise. You turn on the light to find that you are surrounded by MUMMIES. The mummies aren’t really doing anything, what do you do?
Ask them if they laugh as hard as I do at Brendon Frasier trying to be tough.

Your house is on fire! What do you do?
Get the kids. Then the photo albums. Then the Macbook Pro and the iPhone.

The Angel of Death has descended upon you. Fortunately, the Angel of Death is pretty cool and in a good mood, and it offers you a half-hour to do whatever you want before you bite it. Whatcha gonna do in that half-hour?
[go on a nice date]

You accidentally eat some radioactive vegetables. They were good, and whats even cooler is that they endow you with the super-power of your choice! What super-power is it?
*yawn. Flying.

You can re-live any point of time in your life. The time-span can only be a half-hour, though. What half-hour of your past would you like to experience again?
The moment my first child was born.

You can erase any horrible experience from your past. What will it be?
Watching forty year old men on a giant swing yelling ‘frrrrRRRREEEEEEEEeeedoom!!!’ Yeah, my little girl has a swing too, you dorks.

You got kicked out of the country for being a time-traveling heathen who [goes on nice dates] with celebrities and has super-powers. But check this out: you can move anywhere. Where are you going?
Oh whatEVER. Like any country can keep me out. I have super-powers and T.I.M.E. T.R.A.V.E.L. Hlewwww.

This question still counts, even for those of you who are under age, if you were banned from every bar in the world except one, which one would it be?
The Little Bear. If you don’t know where it is we’re not telling.

Hopefully you didn’t mention this in the super-powers question… If you did, then we’ll just expound on that. Check it out… Suddenly, you have gained the ability to fly! Whose house are you going to fly to first, and be like “Check it out I can FLY!?”
Good Lord Almighty what are you thinking! Nobody’s! Are you mad? I can’t afford to let anyone know I can do this or my cover is blown.

The constant absorption of magical moon beams mixed with the radioactive vegetables you consumed earlier has given you the ability to resurrect the dead famous person of your choice. So which celebrity will you bring back to life?
John Candy. I miss John Candy.

Space and Time

Todd Clary — Sun, 02 May 2010 17:49:02 +0000

That small pewter desk lamp weighs about 15 pounds and surprises me with its deceiving heft every time I move it. I mention it because you could say the remodel of my studio started the day I purchased it several years back. I had a Someday in mind. It’s been very out of place for a long time, waiting for the day when the rest of the space would catch up.

I’m happy to say that day has finally come. But before we celebrate the new, let’s take one last ghastly look at the old…

I’m genuinely sorry lol. See all that orange? I’ve tried to say it was supposed to be like a deep caramel-leather brown. But it behaved like orange. The laptop was sitting on top of the light table because I ripped out one wall-length shelf over by the window…thus the strip of non-orange.

Thank God all that is over. Good riddance.

And hello, new paint.

Water Chestnut and Olivewood. Very understated. By themselves very plain and possibly even boring, but thanks to the addition of several antique wood features, they do their job very well. That is, balancing some old with some new…which is just the way I like it.

Cute Redhead sent me, with her blessing, to a local market which I’ve passed through before. But not looking for anything in particular rendering the time little more than Okay, Can We Go Now? It’s a whole different ball game when you’re on the hunt for something specific, however. And this time the goal was a table and chair for the new studio. It had to be just the right height, just the right width, and just the right depth. Too old wouldn’t work and too new would be passed over. I’d know it when I see it.

And I saw it. One solid plank of wood making the top, nails all over the place, and just enough history (built in the 1920′s) to satisfy me.

And a drawer with one divider making two compartments or seven of varying width should I decide to employ the available slots. I’m not one for drawers for some reason. What’s more, the height of the chair I found was ergonomically ideal for my lower back but completely disallowed my legs to fit under things. Not good. On closer inspection I discovered the single supporting piece of wood on which the front of the drawer rested surrendered itself with just a bit of encouragement from the hammer. No damage done and, I think, a one inch by five foot piece of wood with which to dream up some new function.

What do do, though, with the drawer itself. A shelf maybe. On the wall or on the floor somewhere. I can’t decide. Any ideas anyone? The aged smell all by itself begs display.

Couldn’t be happier with this find. The couple I bought it from sold it for less than half the amount they paid for it. “The economy?” I offered by way of understanding.

“No. My husband just wanted to unload it. He doesn’t like tables.”

I could have kissed her.

Solid square legs. This table, by all accounts and purposes, should wobble. A lot. I mean, come on, at 90 years old I’m sure I’m going to wobble some. And you get a peak at the barn wood flooring installed yesterday.

On my way out of the market I spied this chair. I’d already written one check for the table and the college funds were precariously close to evaporating if I didn’t get out of there quick.

I took one look at the original plaque on the back and another at the tag. I realized immediately the vintage quality. And the price tag promised I’d find nothing with half the character in any store while paying more than twice what the gentlemen was asking. “When would this chair have been made?”

“Late 1940′s, early 50′s.”

Sold.

And here it is…the finished, newly remodeled studio. New paint, new (old) barn wood flooring, the perfect table, just the right chair and no more excuses for avoiding the stories I need to write…the cartoons I need to draw…the photography I need to touch up…the books I need to complete…the web sites I need to design…

A shot looking toward the light table. I removed the box from the base and set it atop the built in shelf. This is a garden-level room by the way, so that window looks out on the backyard, the cherry tree, the apple tree, the tree fort, the vegetable garden and, now and then, two or three noses pressed against the pane. Good times.

Also, time to get to work.

If you need me, I’ll be in heaven.

Floor It

Todd Clary — Fri, 30 Apr 2010 12:09:05 +0000

Okay, I know it’s just wood. Old knotted up and roughhewn barn wood. But I’m in love. Love, I tell you.

It’s the new floor in my studio. Which I used to call ‘my office’ and though I likely will call it ‘office’ again, ‘studio’ is much more given to creativity and inspiration.

So. Studio.

Cute Redhead and I decided last week that the old had to go. Meaning I had no idea the old had to go until Cute Redhead told me that we both decided it needed to go. Welcome to marriage, boys lol.

I considered taking a photo of the place in its current state but I’m afraid of a lawsuit because you reached for bleach to pour into your eyes. It’s that bad. What was supposed to be something closer to a caramel-leather kind of color when the afternoon sun graced the hue, turned out to be more orange. And the white ceiling accented the deep chocolate brown of the table tops just enough to make me realize one day: I was working in a giant bowl of candy corn.

And the carpeting? You don’t even want to *cough*shag*cough* know.

I ripped out one wall-length table which was where my laptop and drawing tablet used to reside. Which forced me to move things along, like it or not. I eyeballed the Mayline light table sitting in the corner and grabbed the screwdriver to tighten up the wobbly legs and had a temporary workstation in nothing flat. The light table you’ll see soon when I fire up the cameras and walk you through a variety of design projects. Particularly cartooning. It’s an indispensable tool in my arsenal which I’ve had since 1993. Wasn’t cheap either, but you can’t even find them used nowadays for the price I paid. Worth its weight in gold.

Also too high to work comfortably. Enter the new desk. I found this online and unless Cute Redhead can smoke another out of the upcoming weekend markets, it’ll find its new home in the middle of the room as soon as I can get the place ship shape. Once that’s set up, the light table top will be removed from the base and set atop the remaining shelf on the other side of the studio.

I know you’re all atwitter with this information and can now go on with your life safe in the knowledge that my studio is coming together nicely.

(You’re welcome).

And it is coming along nicely. Paint, floor, new blinds on the window, just like Cute Redhead and I agreed on. Oh and a 53″ HD flat screen TV with Bose surround sound system and leather theatre chairs, which I haven’t bothered her pretty little head about. I see no need to mention the small things.

(Let’s just see how often Cute Redhead reads any of this, shall we?)

“How Do You Write?”

Todd Clary — Wed, 28 Apr 2010 19:56:30 +0000

“How do you write?”

I was asked this again recently and reminded that I said I’d write a bit about writing at all. Now that the WiP blog is finally laid out and organized the way I envisioned it nearly eight months ago, I’m willing to start putting some of this out there.

Notice I said ‘willing to’ and not ‘able to,’ because I’ve been able to all along. Just not willing to. And that sort of brings me to part of how I work be it putting pen to paper to illustrate, or pen to paper to write (albeit proverbially since I do it all electronically). I used to want to think I held a purist’s mentality about that—writing with real pen and real paper. The fact of the matter is, however, I type blazingly fast and find that function far more adept at keeping up with the thoughts bubbling up.

Willing to. I won’t cook unless the kitchen is cleaned. Not scrubbed clean, just once-over-and-put-away clean. I mean, I don’t have that kind of time and we don’t have that kind of live-in maid. Nothing too out of the ordinary; I just won’t start a project until my studio is organized. Or the kitchen counter is cleared of the last project-meal it sustained. If this strikes you odd, I’ll never understand why. If you happen to know anything about Synesthetes, refusing to do anything in the kitchen until it’s cleaned happens to be a hallmark idiosyncrasy of the wiring—something I happen to find hilarious for its specificity. Also for its dead accuracy.

My studio/office can be, like anyone’s, a war zone of piles of paper, books, and all manner of All Manner. Mostly I know where everything is (it’s my mess, after all), sometimes I don’t. Big deal. But when comes the time to start a new Anything, I have to have the proverbial fresh sheet of new paper. Meaning I have to clean my studio and have it completely organized or I am not willing to start.

Notice I said ‘not willing’ and ‘not able.’ Of course I can sit down at the drawing table or the desk and puzzle things out. It’s just that I find myself obstructed and ensnared by everything out of place such that the whole creative process is rendered impotent. It’s the very same mechanism for me in the kitchen. And lots of other areas in my life. If the room is clear, my head is clear. I don’t know if it’s a symbiotic fact or mental illusion. And I don’t care. I just know that unless it’s right in certain parts of the world around me, it’s not right in my head.

The WiP blog and it’s new iteration has been that for me. I’ve wanted to introduce the WiP Chronicles, the WiP Journal, the WiP Studio, the WiP Mic, and the WiP Store for quite some time. But the site overall wasn’t organized to my liking. So I refused. Where some might lean in and deal with what Is anyway, I’d rather fillet the skin off my arm and write in blood. I just refuse.

And I happen to love and hate that at the same time.

What I love: that I do it that way for me, on my own terms, and have no category for what anyone else thinks about it. Big shock, I know.

What I hate: until it’s perfect (according to the Rules Inside My Head), I coexist with a low-level frustration and anger very few understand. (Hint: most think they do understand but they don’t. I just smile and nod when they say they understand and don’t disabuse them of their presumption. The ones that do understand — and you know who you are — never comment on it or remark on it because it’s entirely inconsequential.)

“How do you write?”

Straight Answer: Very mechanically. I sit down with either a formed thought I want to articulate, or an idea or concept I want to struggle with. I have only two or three times in as many years actually pulled out a real sheet of paper and suffered very dormant penmanship. In fact, the last time I did that was to write “Beautiful” from “A Beautiful Hell.” And the reason I did that was because that particular story practically wrote itself. It was a matter of capturing it as quickly as I could and my laptop wasn’t handy at the moment. I saved those sheets too. They’re somewhere around here in some file. I’m a far less nostalgic than people suspect and normally do not hang on to such things. I’ve thrown out more cartoons (sorry Andrea lol) than people would believe. But those sheets I saved. Something about a story about my daughter written in my own hand. Of all the stories in “A Beautiful Hell” it’s my favorite. As much for the topic as the way it happened as the way it flowed from my pen. And if anything I write were to ever land snugly in any category deemed worth any sort of fame…well, I like the idea of keeping those sheets for my baby girl and someday giving them to her with, “…as far as I’m concerned…it started here.”

More Straight Answer: You’ll often find me with earphones in but rarely playing music. I will listen to white noise and though I will listen to some melody, it has to be bereft of lyrics and entirely unobtrusive. All that is just shutting out the world around me to excavate the words inside me.

Another Answer (Not So Straight): You’re going to have to bear with me on this one. When I have a story in my head it is less a composition in verbiage than it is in tone, tenor and (brace yourself) shape. I mean physical shape. I mean I see its physical dimensions and color(s) in my head. The animators at Disney have a storyboarding process I once saw provoking in me thrill and horror simultaneously. It was, if memory serves, the story of The Lion King on one long wall. Made up entirely of color. Not a single word. Just colors conveying the storyline as it unfolded. It was brilliant. That’s sort of what I’m talking about. So the actual process of actual writing is more like chipping away at base rock to bring forth the form in my head. It’s composed not of stone but of words, color, cadence, meaning and other physical sensations I’m not able to articulate to your satisfaction.

Notice I said ‘your satisfaction’ and not ‘my satisfaction.’

Until I feel the story to my satisfaction—in the process of writing, refining, holding, conversing, etc, etc., etc., bleah bleah bleah—it’s not done. And in this particular way, so I’m told, I’m insufferably incorrigible. That is, as far as Im concerned, I’m judge and jury. I write, draw, design, and (bigger shock coming here) speak with impunity. Meaning I refuse to try and second guess an audience. Meaning I couldn’t care less what they may approve or disapprove of.

And believe me, this creates more than a little friction. At times.

And believe me, I couldn’t care less. At all.

If there’s one thing I find *RCA Dog Head Tilt coming here* odd, it’s the idea that I should worry overmuch (read: at all) what anyone else may or may not like when it comes to creating. Many people do, I know that. I just have no category for it and do not at all see its ultimate value. So, no.

By the way, this has been cathartic..I’m articulating things I never — and I mean never — think about. I just do them. You’ll appreciate that fault when and if you ever watch one of the upcoming WiP Studio videos where I’ll stumble walk you through creating a cartoon start-to-finish, or a Photoshop technique. I’m not used to speaking aloud what I do naturally everyday. I’m sure it will be a humiliating mess until I edit it to something helpful.

So. That’s a bit of a look into how I write: sometimes it’s inspired and intoxicating, sometimes it’s rooted out and maddening. All the time, though, it’s for my pleasure and mine alone. I’d say I hope that doesn’t offend you but lol we’ve already covered that lie.

Creating, writing as much as any other medium, is very much its own reward.

Next time I’ll write about how several books developed to the point where I would finally start working on them.

Oh, and one last thing:

The photo accompanying this post? Well…I can’t resist it. I’m hiding at a favorite place only a handful of people know about, and one I’ve returned to when I’ve needed its familiar comfort. It’s been a maniacal couple of days so I completed some other tasks, packed up my laptop and camera and made my way to a favorite bolt hole, Sherlock Holmes style. And, yes, that’s a jet.

And, no, I’m not where you think.

Serving The Song

Todd Clary — Mon, 26 Apr 2010 20:49:07 +0000

I learned a long time ago (and I still believe it) that the most treasured thing you can give a person is your friends. So if this interview with my great friend, Betsy, lands in any of you something like a new friendship…well, I’ll be happy.

Betsy and I go back over twenty years. We’re both artists and, as such, get each other on a lot of levels. Music moves into, over, and through her the way other mediums move into, over and through me. That’s probably why I seek out her artistic vantage point and trust it more than others.

And can she sing? Let me put it this way…I consider the very first time our dear friend Korey introduced me to her vocals the very first time I considered my own talents flat out boring.

She is a true inspiration to me on more levels than I can describe. So—welcome back to the WiP Mic, grab your coffee and enjoy a few minutes with one of my favorites. And when you’re done, crank up the speakers and listen to Lady B give us what for.

1. List four different ways or roles by which people know you — and you can’t say ‘singer’ (too easy and we’ll get to that later).

A lover. A fighter. A do-er. A giver.

2. If you wanted people to know you as only one of those, which one and why?

A lover…..because that’s all that really matters.

3. Do you have any superstitions?

Nope.

4. Ocean or mountains?

I love them both but if i haaaad to pick it would be water all day baby!

5. You get to spend one whole day with any person past or present, living or dead. Who is it and what do you do?

My birth father. I’d introduce myself, give him a shot of tequilla to help him get over the shock, ask some questions, hopefully get some answers, and hear his side of the story.

6. Alright, a few on music. Betsy ‘the singer’ is the easy one. Does it ever bother you being identified with that?

No, not really. what bothers me is when someone doesn’t acknowledge me until I become Betsy ‘the singer’ and then all of a sudden, I’m somebody they want to talk to or work with. I know we all have a tendency to do that with each other but there’s more to all of us than one dimension.

7. Describe the perfect gig.

Last year, my daughter asked me to write her a song for her 10^th birthday. She thought I had forgotten or didn’t have time to work on anything. But I did. Once the party-goers had all gone home and the house was picked up, I brought her to the piano and in the quiet of the late night, I sung to her. she cried. I cried. daddy cried. Brother fell asleep on the couch and could’ve cared less. To me, there are no perfect gigs, only perfect moments where you somehow find a way to get out of the way and serve the song.

8. Tell us about the first time YOU realized and believed you had a musical gift.

Yeah, I don’t really know. I mean, music has always felt more like an appendage than a gift. It’s always been there. It’s what helps me breathe. Early on I knew that singing and playing the piano made me feel better and eventually, I discovered, that when I did it for others, it made them feel better too.

9. Does anything about your talent scare you?

Hahhhhh! Yes. All of it. Despite the fact that I present as confident, the truth is, insecurity runs rampant among artists. Vulnerability just comes with the territory. In order to sing or write a song that means something, you have to connect with feelings and experiences that are not always easy or comfortable.

10. Would you trade singing and song writing for anything else?

Guh, you are sooooo dinner theater…..why must you always be so dramatic? (HEY! lol) Outside of saving someone’s life, no.

11. Tell us something you’ve learned about being married you never expected.

Oh geez, here you go lol.

I have had the fairy tale…anyone who knows us, knows this. Bruce and I have been married for 17 years (18 in july– this is important to anyone married because we all know that every single day in ‘this beautiful Hell’ counts). We fell in love hard and fast. What I never expected was that there might actually come a time where it wasn’t easy. sounds naiive I know, but after being so good for so long I thought, ‘we got this’! There came a point when I realized that, like everyone else in the world, we had to start working for what mattered.

I have learned two things about being married. The first is that the daily grind is where the love settles. It’s when my husband gets up with the kids or when he makes the coffee or holds my hand that I see he’s still in this. Similar to the ‘perfect gig’ question, it’s in the small moments that I see and know we’re going to make it. The second is that you don’t get to quit. you might feel like quitting, you might not like what’s happening, but you have to press on….you promised you would…..and in doing so, you reap the benefits like you would from weathering a storm, practicing the piano, seeing a project to completion. if you jump ship, chances are, you’ll drown. If you stay the course, you’ll get there. It might take awhile, but you’ll get there.

12. What about being a parent?

Good lord. I never expected to be THAT interested in the poop of another human being, to ever be THAT tired, or to ever fall THAT much in love at first sight. Having been adopted, giving birth and being a parent has certainly stirred up some things for me, but more than anything, it has helped me to reconcile my past and bring my focus clearly to the present moment. In many ways, when I gave birth to my children I gave birth to myself. It was like going from black and white to color, from analog to HD….life has become sweeter, richer, clearer, harder, easier…more. More of everything.

13. The Lottery Question: You’ve won 150 Million dollars. What do you do now?

-the happy dance.

-pray for wisdom.

-turn off the phone.

-tell my husband’s employer to ‘take this job and shove it’.

-take the fam to Glenwood and soak in the hot springs so I can just think for a flippin’ minute

-get my ‘financial-advisor-wannabe-hat’ on and do my thing (pay debts, invest, help relatives and others, etc)

-buy a farm house in South Dakota with a wrap around porch, a loft in New York, a beach house in Florida, and a casa in Mexico.

-make music (repeat)

I read a brilliant quote about this a long time ago but i can’t remember who said it….’money doesn’t change you, it just makes you more of what you already are.’ I’m guessing that’s probably true.

14. The Dinner Table Question: Big table, four guests, no holds barred. Who and why?

Easy….. Bruce. Selah. Zion. And me. Because at the end of the day, family dinner is where all that is wrong with the world is made right, and all that is right with the world is sitting in front of me. But as an aside, if it really is a big table as you say, then we can always fit extras…which we often do. So then i’d have to say, the extra spots would be filled with any number of real friends and family…who bring wine.

15. Better Dinner Table Question: Small table, one guest, no holds barred.

This might sound silly, but I think my ‘guest’ would be a great book. I don’t have nearly the time i used to for reading. I’d love to sit at a beautiful table, with amazing food, a beverage, and uninterrupted time to enjoy getting lost in a story.

16. Name one thing that genuinely makes you happy.

Lazy sundays with the fam.

17. And one thing that genuinely scares you?

Any harm coming to my children.

18. Anyone you miss right now?

I grew up with 3 older brothers (feel free to feel sorry for me anytime now) and I miss not having them in my daily life.

19. Favorite book as a child.

‘Where The Wild Things Are’ -Maurice Sendak and ‘Mike Mulligan And His Steam Shovel Marryann’ -Virginia Lee Burton

20. Something about you nobody knows. (Don’t panic. Like this: when I’m alone? 9 times out of 10, I’m singing.) Go.

But everybody knows that’s what you do. (Very funny) Sigh. Ok. I talk to myself. I mean conversationally. My husband worries, but I’ve assured him it’s what keeps me from becoming the unibomber. There, I said it, now leave me alone.

21. You get one hour with your least favorite political figure. You get to ask anything you want and you’re guaranteed straight un-spun answers. But…you never get to repeat or publicize any of it. Still interested? Who and why?

The list is too long, there is no such thing as an un-spun answer, and you and I are are finally in a ‘politically nice’ holding pattern so I’m not going to play this one. Nice try. (Hadatakeashot)

22. Something about yourself you really do like.

I like to laugh, (mostly at myself)…I think that’s a good thing.

23. And (big shock coming here) something about yourself you really wish you could change.

Sometimes I can get a little dark and twisty, I think a little too much.

24. Last question…your next CD. What can you tell us?

I have done a lot of work in the background for the last several years (singing, writing, arranging, recording), and have really enjoyed doing so, but it’s time to get back out front. I can tell you that I feel like I’m onto something, you know? Finally feel like I have something to say in a way that I feel really good about. While I’ve recorded and written a lot the past few years, it’s been almost 15 years since I’ve done my own project. I’m excited to get to the point where people can actually put these songs in their iTodd, i mean ipod, and go. (No, you were right. It’s ‘iTodd’)

If you like Amos Lee, Erykah Badu, Chrisette Michelle, Allison Krauss, Jill Scott, Joni Mitchell, Laylah Hathaway, Ledisi, or Dakota Staton, then you might like my work. if you like Bonnie Raiit, Bruce Springsteen, Mint Condition, The Who, Tuck & Patti, Koko Taylor, Raoul Midon, Nancy Wilson, or the Doobie Brothers, you might like my work. if you like Patti Labelle, Dylan, Sade, Kim Burrell, or Petite Blonde, you might like my work. My influences are vast, eclectic, and are often hidden in the shadows of what I write and sing.I’ve been asked time and time again to describe my music and my sound. I think it sounds different to each listener. I am a singer-songwriter with a soulful bent. Beyond that, I leave the labeling and marketing to others who find that kind of thing important.

All I really know for sure is that my season is not over. People are afraid of their age, afraid to speak their age in this line of work…I know the music biz loves youth so I get it, but I’ve earned every one of my years and I’m not ashamed. I might be a wife, a mother, and a woman of 43, but when I’m singing my own work or work that I’ve collaborated on, I’m just me…that’s something I think a lot of women, mothers in particular, have to work hard to find again and hold on to.

I believe my season, like spring, has just begun.

Because Coffee Solves Everything

Todd Clary — Mon, 26 Apr 2010 05:32:17 +0000

So you know how often you’d like to take a nice hot cup of coffee and throw it at someone’s head? (don’t lie to me).

Well…wouldn’t it make explaining the concussion to the police officer that much more enjoyable if you we’re sipping the elixir of Life from your very own WiP coffee mug? (thought so).

Now you can! Waltzing in Perdition mugs are now available starting at $13.95 (+ shipping)! If you’d like one (or two, in case one breaks) (upside someone’s head), just click here and you’ll find a variety of options to choose from.

Drink up…and remember: Todd loves you and has a wonderful plan for you life.

Of A Sunday

Todd Clary — Sun, 25 Apr 2010 18:09:04 +0000

Taking a break in what’s turning into Another Remodel. That is, my studio. Which Cute Redhead and I have miraculously both agreed needs to be redone. The paint color and the carpet both make us look at one another trying to recall our apparent drug-hazed motivations of several years back. Still can’t figure out how orange and brown happened.

But there’ll be shelves and tables getting ripped out, new paint, furniture, flooring, area rug, lighting and blinds brought it. Very much looking forward to it since the WiP blog is in the last stages of a new iteration and I’m chomping at the bit to lean into all the new projects related to it.

Not that I couldn’t start some of that now (and I have) (some). But I have this thing about starting new anything, be it something in the kitchen or something in my studio: I can’t start it until everything is cleaned first. Sort of like a fresh sheet of paper inside my head and all that.

Anyway, before I head to the paint store to pick up the new color, I thought I’d show you all a little more of what’s happening in the yard and making up some of our Sunday.

This apple tree hangs over part of the garden in the back. I wish it flowered like that all season.

That’s the compost so far. Do you have any idea how excited about this? In fact, that reminds me…I need to pick up a pitchfork.

Cute Redhead planted these little fellas. Pansies. Did you know they’re edible? I know because they came on a salad I ordered once. But they’re bitter. I don’t know why you’d eat those things.

One of the raspberry bushes. Quite a popular feature in the yard every summer. Beta Male and Charlie Girl usually see who can be the first to snag the ripe ones each morning.

This is the other apple tree, just outside my studio window and in the same area as the raspberries. A much bigger tree than the one by the garden, but always a good week and a half behind.

Here’s the vegetable garden again. Between you and me, I’m surprised the lines have stayed intact. I thought for sure the Golden Recliner or Stupid Cat would have shredded them by now.

And these little ladies, Ella, Mackenzie, and Chloe…Emma’s sorority pals, were busy digging next to the rhubarb. I don’t know why, but I managed a quick shot.

That’s some of what’s happening around here.

Happy Sunday everyone!

And The Winner Is…

Todd Clary — Sat, 24 Apr 2010 19:22:03 +0000

So there I was seeing to the tasks Cute Redhead left for me to complete while she and the Duchess of Fashion and Accoutrement were out shopping and involved in all kinds of who-knows-what. I was called out into the yard by Alpha Male because he wanted me to watch him break his neck do a back flip.

Oh no.

I quick grabbed the beloved Rebel Force and high-tailed out to the back fence where he had been whooping it up for the last fifteen minutes. “Hold on, Monkey!” (that’s what I’ve called him since the day he was a newborn) “I want to get this on film!”

“You mean for your blog?”

“No, for evidence when I take you to get your cast.”

And the set-up…

Up you go, boy.

And over.

And back down agai—wait. Dude, what lol? Nice boxers, kid.

How happy?

Very happy.

That’s my baby. My firstborn. That’s the Recalcitrant Teenager about to enter high school next fall. That’s Monkey Head. And he actually has a great sense of humor and a tenaciously fun-loving spirit. Love that kid, heart and soul.

And then I turned around, headed back to the kitchen…

…and stopped. dead. in. my. tracks.

Because there at my feet was the winner of this little contest I’ve been having in my head. The Who Will Sprout First Contest.

Here’s my new baby.

Oh, and if you’re wondering what vegetable that little sucker is, just know that so am I.

Because I can’t find the garden map I made telling me where I planted what.

But I think it’s a White Lisbon Onion. The only reason I’m not sure is that I wasn’t expecting that dude to show up for another three days.

Which tells you that I either know the life of my plants, or I have no life.