* Nicotine Dreams

As I briefly mentioned in a previous blog entry, the warnings for the nicotine patch include those damned "vivid dreams." If these occur—oh, no!—one must "consult" one's "physician." (Now there's a waste o' money.) With the patch on as I sleep (to misquote Wordsworth), "I am the dreamer—Nicotine, the dream." I haven't dreamt so well since I earnestly kept a dream journal, as a budding Freudian/Jungian in my undergraduate days. Dreams that seemingly last for hours on end; dreams that are seemingly as cogently plotted as a movie. (Okay, as coherent as a double feature of two movies by David Lynch, maybe.)

And Freud is right again, at least regarding wish-fulfillment. I'm dreaming once again—or more obviously, at least—about things I want to do, not about anxieties I have about waking life: 1) I'm playing guitar for long periods of time (and swear I can ALMOST remember new licks I've come up with in the dream); 2) I'm spending lots of time with my daughter, and with other family members whom I haven't seen in years (incl. my dear dead maternal grandma); 3) I'm even having quite—uh—Freudian dreams about old girlfriends, and, again, for LONG periods of time; 4) and finally, yes, I'm even smoking the occasional cigarette!

Don't pinch me. I'm dreaming.

* Complete Filler!

This blog entry is COMPLETE FILLER. You see, I'm disappointed that I don't have as many blog entries this month ("as per usual"), and I need more. So here's _one_. . . . You see, I spent much of the first half of this month among people, and family (those bastards): "not that there's anything wrong with that." And I spent a good deal of the rest of it OUTSIDE, driving backroads around Lincoln, and neighboring counties, and even up to South Dakota by-ways, watching, uh, BIRDS: "not that there's anything wrong with that." (And rendered my relatively new car a veritable rattle-trap-clap of a vehicle: but it was worth it.)

But I'm back, in earnest, to the Macintosh and to the digital world. I just revised and submitted an article on the Passenger Pigeon to a journal (yeah, one of those lame, uh, print, things, but younevermind); I'm getting ideas about doing something actually funny with the John&Martha cartoon series; and I'm back to converting the rest of my Classic/OS9 documents to OSX versions (mostly WordPerfect and HyperCard; the bane of my existence right now).

You see, I have fruitfully once again forgotten any human contacts. Yes, my daughter in Colorado just had some traumatic dental work—I sent her flowers. Yes, my wife is at wit's end regarding her job, her son, and her raison d'être—I told her that I'd take her to a nice Indian restaurant the next time she limped her sad—auto into town.

So you NETmeisters who thought I'd abandoned our posthuman project—never you mind! I'm back!

* Eco-Indian vs. Eco-Anglo

In The Journey, a museum in Rapid City, SD, humankind's concern for the environment is emblematized in a two-part exhibit, with a definite value-judgment timeline implied. On the left side of the presentation [photo above] is an archetypal Indian, as it were, living as one with the land–although, frankly, he looks rather stunned just to be alive. In the 2nd photo (the Native guy can still be seen, now on the far left), the Euro-American–or, the "new & improved man"!?–has a similarly healthy concern for the environment; moreover, with the aid of charts and graphs and Darwinian science, this dapper fellow must be considered even more eco-conscious: indeed, he is a fine tribute to human evolution, to the advance of civilization itself.  [Oh, my daughter tells me that the person on the right is a woman! Still hard to tell, even from the larger version of this photo, but now I guess she's right.]

* Custer Lives

I'm back from a week w/ my daughter Emma; I picked her up in Denver and took her to visit her grandma, uncle, & cousins in "the Black mining Hills of Dakota." I grew up in the Black Hills, and it struck me on this visit how we longtime locals take the place names for granted, seldom or never considering their origins.

Take the town—and the state park—called Custer, for instance. We camped out at Custer State Park last Friday night—oh, the Mountain Bluebirds & Western Tanagers—and attended a "camp-ranger" presentation that evening, on the park's "Wildlife Management," that is, the state's control of the big-game populations, mostly. When the college student/intern finished her talk, Tom the Terrible raised his—er, my—hand: "I was just curious about the origin of the Park's name. Why Custer? I do recall that he ordered over 700 Indian ponies to be put to death on the spot at one point in his storied career. Is this an example of good 'wildlife management,' perhaps inspiring the name choice?" (Thankfully, most people there got the sarcasm.) She hemmed and hawed, and did her best at disavowing such past behavior, until I actually felt sorry for her. But then, Custer's bloodlust continued into the 20th century in western SoDak, so much so that most of the Park's vaunted large mammals are (re-)imports, including the bison. And at least one, the (Rocky Mountain) Bighorn Sheep, is a "surrogate" for a similar Black-Hills-native animal that was hunted to extinction (Audubon's Bighorn Sheep, all individuals gone to animal heaven by 1916).

* News from the Zoo

Some [much reduced in size] photos from my "shoot" (what a lovely metaphor) today at the Folsom Children's Zoo: Bearded Barbet; Red-crested Cardinal; East African Crowned Crane (3 shots); and Bald Eagle. Oh, the cage wires in some of the backgrounds! Indeed, taking photos of zoo birds is pretty much amateur night: I felt like Dick Cheney on a quail hunt. But I am an amateur, obviously, and my camera isn't up to many good pictures of (small) birds in the wild, unless I'm lucky (never have been) or patient (never have been, or will be). As further evidence of my amateur status, I thought "12x optical zoom" meant 12x magnification, as with binoculars. (Nope—turns out to be focal length, er somethin'.) Magnification-wise, the lens seem closer to a antique pair of 3x or 4x field glasses. I see now that I should have paid just a hundred or two more for an entry-level DSLR camera, but I wasn't sure my interest would match the investment, and—hey—I've always been "cheap."

But the real story here is that this zoo is another venue that brings back fond memories of daughter Emma & me. Oh, how she loved that baby Pygmy Marmocet! Better yet, oh, how she squealed in pre-teen shock-plus-delight as we watched a Euro. White Stork catch a ground squirrel, spear at it for minutes, then swish it around in a water dish, and then—(repeat steps 1 & 2 several x's)—then finally, with a back-thrust-of-the-head, gulp it down in a flash! . . . "Solid, dude." . . . I'm probably projecting, but it seemed that the new dark twinkle in Emma's eye was of a new awareness & acceptance, of a Darwinian stork-eat-squirrel world, of some sado-masochistic cosmos in which the animals of Disney are the worst of pale simulations.

Finally, on a(n even) sadder note: I'd forgotten that these places are somehow allowed to keep native birds (and not just endangered ones)—e.g., the egrets (2 species) and stilts, and the pair of pathetic Bald Eagles, so miserable in the 100-degree day when Emma and I were there. . . . (Hey, they weren't too happy today, either!—see photo above again. [You noble—you poor, bedraggled—one.])

* A Movie Review of Sorts (Tryin' to Relate)

Saw Shrek the Third tonight, alone—just had to get out of the apartment. Plus, memories of seeing the first Shrek with my daughter (who now lives in Denver w/ my 1st wife) probably urged me on, memories from when she was still so young that we shared one bag of popcorn (with chocolate-covered raisins dumped in for good measure), when she hung upon and cherished every clever & knowing aside that I whispered to her. And of course, she always ended up eating nearly all of the chocolate; I wasn't there for the candy.

The movie itself?—ho-hum, especially compared to the first of the trilogy. The best scene is the parody of contemporary high schoolers (at "Worcestershire High"); the best line soon follows: after Shrek has just tried to talk "hiphop/street" to young Artie, the latter runs towards a house they've come upon, screaming, "Help! I've been kidnapped by a monster trying to relate to me!"

My daughter Em is now fifteen, and I'm sure, as she's spent time with me the last couple summers, she's already wanted to shout these very words! . . .

* That "NATIVE AMERICAN" Angle . . .

[This is from an email of mine (August 2001) to the director of my Ph.D. committee, a light respite from slaving over my dissertation. (Written before I came across Alexie's poem "From the Unauthorized Biography of Me" [2000], which has a section similar in content and tone.)]

YOU KNOW YOUR DISSERTATION HAS A "NATIVE AMERICAN" ANGLE WHEN . . .

1) Most of the cities of publication in your bibliography are Tucson, Lincoln [NE], and other God-forsaken places "out West."

2) Most of the book titles in your bibliography have either "Sky," or "Earth," or both; or "Turtle," or "Bear"—or both. . . . But thank God that 99% of the editors' names are Anglo, so you can spell 'em. (But "Rothenberg, ed." and "Lowenfels, ed." still cause problems—and intermittent bemusement & laughter).

3) Most of these same books also have a "watermark" graphic of an eagle silhouette or an eagle feather. (But you kinda like it 'cuz your book's about "Birds & Ind'uns," anyway. . . .)

4) You had to reject half your potential sources because they were written for New Age bookstores by a white person with an adopted Indian name (usually with "Sky," "Earth," "Turtle," "Bear," or "Eagle [Feather]" in it somewhere). This person is also into astrology and crystals.

5) You can't find one good thing written about Native Americans before 1970—and not one bad thing since. (Who said A.I.M. was a failure?!)

6) You email Dennis Banks & Russell Means for interviews, but they're both busy doing voice-overs for Disney movies.

7) You take your daughter "home" to the Badlands & the Black Hills [in western South Dakota, home of the Lakota], and end up spendin' $500 on tourist traps & trinkets. The trinkets at Wall Drug all say "Made by Real Indians"; and all fall apart as soon as you get 'em to the car. ("Oh, I see, Emma, honey: the small print says, 'Made by Real Indians in Cherokee, North Carolina[!?].'")

8) Your dissertation's completion date is now sometime ten years hence since you've once again come to appreciate the notion of "Indian Time."

* Of Birthdays & House Cleaning

I didn't even remember that it was my birthday until I got an e-card from daughter Emma in Colorado. Before that, by "chance," I'd been performing the bi-annual chore of cleaning this filthy apartment (I omit the grisly details)—and I'm still cleaning. (There are two main downsides to a long-distance marriage: having to scrub a whole life-space by yourself is one of them.) But then I thought, how à propos, how almost cliché in the analogy—this supposed renouveau of my birth-year, and this cleansing "rebirth" of my wretched abode. (Well, it'll be "reborn" for a week or two, anyway.)