Ken vs. the City

I spent the weekend at home in Stevens Point Wisconsin, visiting folks I haven’t seen in a long time, and staying with family. It was good to see my dad, who seems to be better than I have seen him. He’s also lost a lot of weight. Probably from the medication he’s on.

I enjoyed a nice thatnksgiving dinner with my folks, and some family friends. And I also got to see Harry Potter on the big screen with my sister and her fiance. I like that movie. It’s no cinematic masterpiece, but it was good entertainment, especially for the low low price of $8.75.

I got to play Settlers of Catan with my friend Dave of Get out of the Boat. “Settlers” is also called “Settlers of Satan” by some folks I know. Settlers is a wicked fun board game ( I highly recommend it). There’s also a “Christian” knock-off called Settlers of Canaan that’s played the same way. Of course, it’s designed by the same guy, so I don’t know if it can really be considered a “knockoff.” Also fun. I soundly trounced everybody.

I wanted to play some poker with some of my buddies, but my friend Mike, who would’ve hosted the poker night, had a baby on Thanksgiving morning. If you follow the link, beware of textured backgrounds and cutesy baby pictures. I stopped by to see Mike and I got to hold the baby, Evan, who was only two days old.

I never drank beer before coming to New York, and having missed out on the brew-ha-ha that is Wisconsin, one of the things I set out to do in Stevens Point was to drink a bottle of Point Special ($1.75). I’m not sorry I missed the whole bar culture, and I’m not a beer connoisseur, but I thought it was quite tasty. A friend that I’ve met, also from Wisconsin, recommended I try Leinenkugels, which is made in Chippewa Falls, but I didn’t really go out of my way to look for beer.

I also got to talk philosophy with my friend Brent of the 8star blog, ate a cheese bagel, drove a car (and parked!), watched cable TV, and, with nary a Starbucks in sight, started re-writing a novel idea I’ve been tossing around in my head for at least two years (not like that blathering I’m writing for Nano).

I also got to attent my old church, which is packed with so many memories it still feels like home. They added a new chapel onto the building right afetr I left, and now have some wierd sort of triple preaching setup with three services, all staggered 15min apart from one another. I don’t know how those pastors do it. Anyway, I also found out the sermons are available as mp3s on the web site. Cool beans.

I left on Monday afternoon. I visited my old university to see the new Fine Arts building, and say hello to some of the faculty earlier in the day, and then through the wonders of modern aviation I found myself riding the subway back in ol’ NYC at around midnight. I would’ve been home at a reasonable hour, but ol’ NYC has an ol’ transportation system thet left me waiting about an hour for the train.

So I ran into Pat Robertson of the 700 Club while I was at Bat Boone’s heavy metal show. I snapped this picture before security quickly ushered me out.

It’s a cold day in the City today. After a long stretch of balmy breezes, the sting of winter is already upon us. No snow flurries yet, but they’re somewhere up there.

Yesterday reminded me of how much I miss the cold. I seemed to have formed some of my best memories when it was cold outside. I guess that’s one of the consequences coming from Wisconsin, but it’s something else too.

It’s a good sort of cold; it’s not so cold that your ears, nose, and fingers fall off; it’s just cold enough to remind you that you are alive. It puts the chilling fire of God into your lungs, and reminds you that there is a fire to go to, and something hot to drink. Maybe the cold outside reminds you of the cold state of the soul when it’s alone, and given the light of that truth, it drives you to seek friends and memories that comfort and give warmth.

God is one of them, and like the cold, his little disciplines and reminders can turn the mundane temperate lives into lives of consequence and action. Part of it, I think, is the smell. When the cold comes, it depresses a lot of the heavy artificial smells and leaves most of the light natural ones. Even in the city, the cold can bring out the smell of grass and greenery. Their faintness cuts through the cold, reminding you of fresh-cut grass of summer. And while that smell is only a shadow, it’s there. And you can fill your lungs with it. Just don’t breathe too deeply, because those artificial smells are still there too.

The cold, like pain, is a call to action. It lets you know that warmth exists and spring is coming. When you experience pain, both physical and emotional, you know that something is wrong. And even death itself is a prelude to resurrection.

Out of necessity, it brings people closer together. It’s much easier for several people to stay warm together than one apart. And, of course, some have someone they can snuggle up against, the memory of whom is enough to keep them warm even when they are alone in the cold.

So I say to the great spirit of the North: bring on your cold and icy blasts. Unless my nose, ears, and fingers fall off, I will enjoy them, because I know spring is near.

I’ve fixed that wierd alignment problem that Firefox was having displaying my Blogger template. I’m not sure why the header got so discombobulated(?), but it works great now that I did some tweaks.

As I’ve mentioned before, this template is my first experiment with CSS, and the other day I ran it through one of those CSS validator thingies (to make sure the code was okay), and there are like 100 errors in it.

Next time I’ll design it a little better, but until then the template works, and that’s what I’m happy about.

I’ve noticed it before, but I’ve never really paid much attention to it: New York City, or at least Manhattan, has a sort of faint rumbling sound that always exists in the background, even at night. It’s similar to the sound of a far off water fall echoing off the walls in a canyon.

You can hear the occasional horn, siren, drunken shout, or the engine of some motorcycle rider who thinks its cool to go really fast over the bridge, but the rumbling noise is always there behind them all. I’m not sure what it is. It could be the sound of a million automobile engines resonating through the city, the sound of the vast network of underground stuff that keeps the city moving, or the sound of a million voices all talking at once at any hour of the day.

I’m sure every city has its own unique sound if you listen hard enough, but I think New York may be one of the few cities that are large enough and have the right geometry to make that sound audible. The tall, flat building faces are probably what carries the sound from place to place. The sound is fainter in the middle of Central Park, and you can’t even hear it in parts of the outer boroughs.

Maybe the city is alive, and the rumbling noise is the sound of its breath. In that case, some people would say it’s a stone and steel vampire sucking the life out of people.

Despite some of the stories I write, I don’t go in much for fantasy.

There’s some problem that keeps the status lists in the header of this template from displaying properly in Firefox. It works fine outside of Blogger, but Blogger adds something funky that causes everything to be a little off-kilter in Firefox.

If it annoys you, use Internet Explorer or Opera (that’s what I use) until I can fix the problem.

I have a generic version of this template, Dirt Poor, but I currently can find no way to post straight HTML code to Blogger without having Blogger try to interpret the HTML itself.

I tried putting the HTML code in a text box, but Blogger automatically puts a <br /> tag at the end of every line break. And I’m not about to make people copy and paste just a mishmash of code. I could turn off Blogger’s automatic line break, but that would screw up all the rest of my posts.

I’ll definately post it once I find a solution

This year I’m one of the crazy people that’ve signed up to write a 50,000 word novel by the end of November in the NanNoWriMo novel-writing event. Starting today, I have to write 1600+ words everyday until the last day of the month. It sounded pretty hardcore to me, so I signed up. I also hope it will help me get to know other writers in the city.

Usually when I start a writing project, I outline the idea first and then start writing, but this time I’ll just start writing and see what happenes. After all, it’s more of a marathon wrtiting exercise than a serious attempt at a novel. I’m going for quantity, not quality. It’s always much easier to edit things after-the-fact.

I’ll be keeping tabs on my progress on a project page (see header).