It was back in ‘96 and I was nursing a beer on a slow, dark Wednesday night in the Million Dollar Cowboy Bar when she walked in and saddled up beside me. She told me that she had been outside on the river all day, and was exhausted from the effort. I mentioned that I had never rafted, and asked questions — probably too many. We talked easily in the dim light, trading adventures until closing time. Finally we stood up together and walked to the door, each ready to go our own way.

“Are you coming?” she asked.

* * * * *

I woke up at twilight. I watched you sleeping soundly, your shoulder uncovered in the early-morning light. I pulled the covers over your shoulder and opened the curtains so that when you woke up you would have an unobstructed view beyond the window and the sunlight streaming through.

I thought of you as I rode along the river in the early-morning mountain dawn. I’m remembering you again today.

Dreamland V

Sonny must have been messing around for a while with Celia’s email courtesy of pillow talk and passwords. I mean really, how else do you find out someone’s email password to their personal accounts? You’re either watching over their shoulder, or they outright give it to you. In either case, it’s not a good idea at the best of times.

For those of you dear readers who are involved in something like this, change your passwords now. I shall leave it to you to come up with an appropriate excuse for doing so. Be assured that it will give you great piece of mind later on when the relationship falls apart.

Regardless, it looked like Sonny had logged in to her account and saw emails to and from her newest boyfriend. At worst, he probably saw emails from a couple of others too. I’m not entirely sure what Sonny did to Celia via his access to her email account, but I knew that she was talking to him about someone stealing passwords and sending copies of email from her account. After all, “it’s a small family business.” How could I not know?

I also knew it was Sonny. Who else could it be? Really, what’s more boring than another person’s email, unless you have a vested interest in knowing what’s going on in their life? Believe me, I had absolutely not one shred of interest in Celia’s little life nor in any of the lives of her pathetic boyfriends.

Why Celia never changed her password throughout this episode was beyond me. Had she been a likable person I’d have had some sympathy for her and would have suggested that she do so, but I didn’t. Besides, I was having fun watching the two of them dance. They were so wrapped up in each other’s lies and denials that they couldn’t see the obvious.

Celia’s email security issues went on for a week or ten days or so. Sonny asked me several times if I was the one doing it, but of course it wasn’t me. I figured if he wanted to put the blame on me, he could go right ahead. My shoulders were broad and I could deal with the consequences. I also enjoyed using the occasions to look him square in the eye and think to myself what a chickenshit little hypocrite he was.

Eventually I became fed up with being dragged into the stupidity going on between the two of them, so I wandered into Sonny’s office and gave him a lesson on how email works. I explained how server addresses, routing, and eventually the real sender’s address was all contained in the header information, which is part of any sent email. It took a while for it all to sink into Sonny’s thick skull. When it did I could practically see the synapses firing and the wheels turning reflected in his eyes.

He must have really put the pressure on Celia after that, because late in the afternoon of the next day the madness really began.

My memory of this is a little hazy now, but back in the fall of ‘95…

I was running hard, headed west on the 10.

A couple of hours earlier I was out of Alamogordo — where the day before had been hot and dry, just like all the rest – and through Las Cruces. I had started my journey before the heat would set in for the better part of the day, and thankfully it stayed cool into the morning.

I grabbed a tankful in Deming, and that got me into Willcox at around 0800 in the morning, maybe 0830. Maybe a little later. It was still cool, but the sun was getting up and it was looking to be another scorcher. I pulled into a gas ‘n’ go, picked up some water and climbed the overpass to hit the westbound 10 one more time.

She was leaning against the steel railing at the top of the crossover. I didn’t know she was a she until I was past, of course, but in that split second of recognition I hit the binders and pulled off onto the shoulder. I figured since she had a small bag that I could strap it on the back and we’d be off post-haste.

Instead, on the walk towards her I decided that I’d take my time. She was wearing dark sunglasses, so I couldn’t see her eyes. She was bundled up against the fresh morning air in an old army parka. A scarf covered her head. She had socks and sandals on her feet. She was holding onto a mesh bag filled with what looked like mail, or letters or documents of some kind. I didn’t ask any questions about that.

I pushed my sunglasses onto the top of my head, hoping she’d do the same. No such luck. She left them on the bridge of her nose, revealing nothing.

Angel. She said her name was Angel.

I took her for a local.

She told me she was headed west for a bit, and then north to a music festival, of all things.

Well now, I thought, I could use some entertainment. And it’s Friday. Why not detour around and check out the sights and sounds?

“No problem,” I told her. “I’m going that way.”

I don’t remember the exact exit now, but I’m certain it was well before Benson, and probably by Johnson. She told me to pull off so I headed north. Eventually the road turned west again onto two-lane blacktop.

Now, I’m a gullible bastard when it comes to women, but I try to keep my eyes open. For a music festival trail, this road was remarkably free of traffic, notwithstanding its closeness to Tucson. In fact, I didn’t see any other traffic on the road at all.

I mentioned that.

Well,” she said into my ear, “maybe I got the day wrong.”

Oh, okay.

Let’s see now. I was in the middle of nowhere, having swallowed lock, stock and two smoking barrels a music festival storyline that had started to look and sound more and more like a fairy tale. The woman on the back had her days mixed up and I had no idea where I was headed or what was waiting down the road. I was adventurous, but this was starting to get a little strange.

I went on for another ten miles or so, and eventually came to a small country store, pulled in and shut down. I was somewhere, finally. The road ahead rose up into the hills, and looked to be gravel. I used that as a perfect opportunity to explain that I couldn’t take this heavy decker onto gravel. That’s not the truth, of course — I’ve ridden on plenty of gravel — but it seemed the prudent thing to do at the time.

Angel seemed happy to be there, so I said goodbye and left her to wander into the store while I backtracked on the music festival route to the 10 and on into Phoenix.

In retrospect I’m sure she wanted only to get as close to her destination as she could, and selling a story probably seemed the best way to do that. Still…

Dreamland IV

Sonny’s affections were rather fickle. You could always tell when he was drawn to a new victim by the questions he asked: “What do you think of so-and-so?” “Did you see the blonde that was here yesterday?” Or, his old stand-by, “I invited ‘insert female employee name here’ out for dinner last night with her family, but her husband was out of town.”

Sonny was big on, “We’re a small family business and I like to get to know my employees”. In truth, he wanted to get to know only the next employee that he thought he could sleep with. Consequently, the rest of the employee trash was exactly that – something to be let in in the morning and swept out at the end of the business day — an inconvenience that interrupted his desire to spread his goodwill among those he deemed worthy of his hard-on.

During the course of his affectation with Celia, he developed a yearning for one of his customers, a tall, big-boned blonde, and he took an opportunity to follow her on an overnight group ride south out of the country. Normally, he never went on these rides — unless he was chasing something or other — for the rides were beneath his dignity. Sonny didn’t like to associate with the riffraff that was his customer base unless there was something in it for him. This time his chase was short-lived and didn’t appear to go anywhere, for I had seen him skulking around the cantinas late at night, alone. The lucky woman didn’t know what she missed.

Toward the end of year two of the business reclamation project, Celia finally clued in to Sonny’s bullshit and realized that the promises he had been making to her would come to naught. Much to Sonny’s chagrin, she reached out to one of her married customers — a contractor with his own business located in the low desert — and began carrying on with him. Adding insult to injury, she bagged one of Sonny’s employees just for spite. That really knocked the wind out of Sonny’s sails, and definitely ensured that Celia wouldn’t have a future at the shop, no matter how she spread her goodwill.

After that, Sonny took matters into his own hands — not the smartest thing for him to do since he wasn’t the brightest candle in the wind. He screwed with Celia’s email, hoping that would scare her into not straying. When that didn’t work, he phoned the contractor’s wife at home from the shop and revealed her husband’s relationship with Celia to her.

Sonny never heard of call display, but the contractor’s wife certainly had.

And that’s when, through no fault of my own, I became involved.

• Keep your mouth shut and your eyes and ears open. You’ll learn more. When people start to realize that you don’t shoot your mouth off over a free lunch and a cup of coffee they’ll eventually tell you anything and everything.
• Listen. People like to talk about themselves. If you don’t interrupt, they’ll go on forever. Eventually they will tell you almost anything.
• Ask questions, but don’t make it sound like the third degree. Keep it simple: “How did that happen?” “What did you do then?” “Why do you think he did that?”
• When you say you’re going to do something, do it. Most people are full of hot air and can’t be depended upon to do what they say they’re going to do.
• If it starts to feel like it’s time to go, it probably is. I can’t emphasize that enough. Trust your instincts and get the hell out, no matter what situation you’re in.
• Three can keep a secret if two are dead. This quote is first attributed to Ben Franklin. A little harsh, to be sure. I make mention of it only to provide an example of how some do business.

I perused an article on Alternet that discusses the news propaganda machine that is now in vogue across America. [ Link here. ] It’s another example of the dumbing down of network news and current affairs programming that has become commonplace. The author, Don Hagen, calls it a “Sliming Bowl”, and I’m inclined to agree with him.

I find the video in the article particularly interesting. It shows a compendium of clips disparaging Barack Obama, presently a contender for presidential nomination in the 2008 election campaign.

One of the ideas put forth to counter the Slime Bowl effect is for the candidates to ignore any kind of faux news and not participate in their shenanigans. I don’t think that would hold up under scrutiny, given the audience numbers for the network, but if it’s possible, it sure sounds like a good start.

The article goes on to describe the disinformation machine that is the current occupier of the White House together with the “news” organization that is faux. It’s an interesting read, and to me paints quite a picture of how the disinformation campaign will unfold during the two year campaign. Which reminds me — when did election campaigns start running two years in advance?

It should be quite a show to watch.

Yesterday morning/afternoon I lost my WP database. Completely. Entirely. In total. Everything gone! Fortunately, because I’m such a computer expert dumbass, I learned to always make a backup. I know. I know. Nobody makes backups. Well, I do. Do ya think maybe that in the past I’ve had similar disasters, perhaps of greater magnitude? Yup! And I learned my lesson a long, long time ago.

Thankfully, the good man at Il Filosofo has a plugin that he is managing for just such a purpose. I had it installed, and it was emailing me the backups on a weekly basis. Yes, that’s right, you can schedule backups weekly, daily or hourly, via email, server save, or direct download

After a phone call to lunarpages.com I was back up and running with a re-install of my WP database. Only one post was missing — yesterday’s — which I replaced. Thank you, lunarpages for your fantastic customer service. The entire fiasco lasted only an hour or so, no big deal time-wise.

Following my restore, I immediately set my backup schedule to daily. You may call me silly paranoid if you wish.

Consequently, I’ve been doing some investigating regarding backup plugins, and I’ve discovered another very useful backup routine by GaMerZ called WP-DBManager 2.10 for version 2.1 of WordPress. It puts a Database menu selection on the Dashboard. As of this morning it’s installed and running well. I didn’t even have to tweak it. The interface is simple and easy to understand, and has options for email, download and restore. You can even optimize your database. It does not provide for automatic backups, but that’s all right. I’ll run it in conjunction with the other. In fact, I already have.

I use another plugin from GaMerZ. It’s WP-Ban 1.10. It permits me to ban users by IP or host name and even allows a customized ban message to be displayed to the bad boy (or girl). So far, I’ve not had reason to use it.

As I have discovered, the WordPressWorld is diverse and varied. By means of search engines I’ve been able to discover and make use of a wide variety of plugins to save my ass help me manage this newfound interest. There is an entire net full of themes and plugins to satisfy my every whim.

Thanks to all of you.

Loyal readers — of which there are 45 to 50 two or three, thank you very much — will have noticed that I’ve changed the template. I prefer the new look and feel — it’s not quite so boring. The new theme accepts sidebar widgets, and I’ve added anti-spam control, digital fingerprinting (his server is really slow), SpotMilk to clean up the WP dashboard interface, and a banning plug-in, among others.

FeedBurner does a great job of tracking blog stats. Thanks, guys, for responding to my now-lost post from yesterday with your suggestion to add a plugin, even though I hadn’t queried you on the subject. I have absolutely no idea how you manage to do it.

Ah yes, the wonder of it all. Whilst attempting to do some blog fancy-dancing this afternoon, I inadvertantly deleted my database. Although it’s taken me decades to learn to do regular backups, I had one! and so I’m back up and running. Thanks to lunarpages.com for your ministrations on my behalf.

And now back to regularly scheduled programming…

Dreamland III

Some years earlier, the old boy set one of his sons up and gave him a chance to run his own business over in the next town. Ever true to the family’s sense of accounting, Sonny eventually went bankrupt and left town with his tail between his legs. He tried his luck at a series of loser jobs back in the big city from whence he came, until finally his old man’s name got him a job during which time he was able to practice his customer/employee relations.

In his attempt to retire, the old boy had put the day-to-day running of his business into the hands of his latest wife. Given that she wasn’t too with-it in the sense that she was running the business into bankruptcy, the old boy had second thoughts and eventually smarted up and brought Sonny back into the fold. He offered to let him discover what was going on with his business: namely, that it was close to being insolvent, and that his wife and employees were stealing the rug out from under him.

Over time, Sonny laid off the thieves, helped the old man divorce his wife — who, I might add, got a big fat settlement through their prenup, which she undoubtedly deserved for putting up with his ugly hatefulness — and tried to bring some semblance of order to the dark, dingy, dirty hole that was the building, which hadn’t seen a thorough cleaning in decades.

The floors and walls were dirty and the windows were splotchy. The staff was incapable of putting a clean rag to the cluttered shelves and display racks, while management appeared incapable of giving them direction. If you picked something up off of a shelf it was covered in dust and dirt from the ventilation system.

During the entirety of this rescue fiasco — which went on for the better part of two years — one employee was retained. She was the finance and insurance link in the business. She had remained loyal, and had assisted Sonny through the discovery process as he attempted to uncover the money missing via a maze of accounting errors and loans to employees, both present and former.

Celia turned out to be quite the comfort to Sonny, whose wife and children wouldn’t be joining him until June and the end of the school year. By the time I arrived on the scene, both Celia — who also had a spouse — and Sonny were well on their way to extramarital bliss.

It became obvious that he had used several tired old lines on her to get her help and cooperation with the business. Needless to say, her acceptance of “I need someone to be my eyes and ears for me,” had put her in the unenviable position of employee spy, and that didn’t sit well with the drones since most were aware of her relationship with Sonny. Had she been a nice person, she might have carried it off. Instead, she was very much a spiteful, vengeful harpy who was encouraged by Sonny to think of herself as a shadow for every employee who walked through the door each morning. Everything was her business, and it was duly reported to Sonny at some point in time, either during the day or as pillow talk.

It didn’t take me long to get fed up with this stupidity, and eventually, after spying her in a mirror as she lurked behind a column that stretched to the ceiling, I stuck my head around and invited her to join in our conversation. Her eyes widened as the cloak of invisibility was removed, and she stomped off to Sonny’s office where I’m certain there were some harsh words spoken. I didn’t care. I was there for the fun of it all, and fun it had finally become.

Christmas of that first year eventually came around, and Celia received a substantial bonus for her tireless dedication to Sonny’s undying affection. Unfortunately by that time, her services as Sonny’s chief investigator were over, and she was left with the more mundane duties her regular job entailed, chief among them being to keep Sonny happy in a loving way. The longer the affair went on, the more she became the floor police, scurrying here and there in an attempt to project her perceived power and influence among a bunch of teenagers, some of whom were still in high school.

Celia’s dedication was as tireless as it was fun to watch, but it was also pathetic.

Dreamland II

By the time I met him he was in his 80s. He had driven his first wife to death by alcohol. His second was running his business into the ground. His employees in the shop were robbing him blind. He was never happy with anything. Consequently he had plenty to scream about, and would yell and stamp his feet and be verbally abusive to almost everyone who worked for him, mostly because they were in his store and apparently not doing anything, and because, according to him, they knew nothing. He fired employees on a regular basis. Most of them didn’t last six months, and in fact if you walked in to the store after that time you were faced with a whole new pack that he constantly abused anew.

He had no friends. How could he? He was a walking example of how not to treat people, one that could explode at any second at the most trivial slight and begin a tirade of verbal abuse that knew no bounds. He took special delight in calling people cowards, and because many of his employees were kids just out of high school, they were in no position to dispute his assessment of their character.

Like all bullies before him, he was the real coward. If anyone stood up to him — and I witnessed a few who did — he would put his tail between his legs and run like the gutless little weasel that all cowards are. After each of these encounters he ran straight to his son, who would give him comfort and sooth his fractured ego, all the while wondering how anyone could have the effrontery to show the old boy up as one of the most pitiful excuses for a man that could ever exist.

To get him out of the shop, they would send him on errands to other businesses in the much larger city to the west. It was my privilege to drive him on those occasions that happened more and more as the old boy got increasingly miserable with each passing day. Since I didn’t know where any of the locations were that required our presence, I relied on the old man’s geographical knowledge of place, which wasn’t outstanding. Considering that he had spent the bulk of his lifetime in the city, it wasn’t a pretty site to see us driving around aimlessly because he was too stupid to look at a map, ask a question or otherwise demonstrate some measure of intelligence to find out where we were.

Call me vengeful if you want, but there was no way in hell that I was going to do it!

After one such occasion when we were yet again lost, arriving at our destination demonstrated the futility of it all, which was summed up by my overhearing his comment, “That dumb son of a bitch doesn’t know where he’s going.” Which was entirely too true — I had never been there before. Neither had he, apparently.

After that, whenever I ended up driving him around I began getting lost on a regular basis, and even if I did know where we were going I intentionally chose wrong lanes and made turns at the wrong intersection. Petty it was, but I enjoyed having the last laugh. Hell, once I even drove past the freeway exit to come home. When I told that story the entire shop was convulsed with laughter, for the old boy had been telling his version of the same story: “That dumb son of a bitch never knows where he’s going.”