A Return to Gray

As the Buick LeSabre trundled us back to my home in Michigan's Lower Peninsula, bringing my three-day sojourn to the Lake Superior coast to a close, I was assaulted in the eyeball with increasing amounts of gray. I was unsure where to place the blame for this.

Could it have been psychological? The very tail end of a vacation, like a skunk's, is always the least fun. The most emotionally bland. Time to put on the cruise control and barge all the way back home, where live my responsibilities and cats.

"They're going to have pooped on the floor. I just know it," I said to my girlfriend/navigator/travel planner.

"Your responsibilities poop on the floor? How very impossible of them. Or were you being metaphorical?"

I suppose that would have worked either way. Moving on.

The resurgence of the Gray Army could also be put down to simple geography and social engineering: there's just more people and cars and buildings in the L.P. More pollution of every variety leads to an increase in smudgy, slate-coloredness.

Too simple. There has to be more going on behind this North-South gray-dient, and I think I have it.

Squirrels.

The ones in the LP are sort of brownish, and the ones up North are black. Coincidence? I think not. The Upper Peninsula squirrels are absorbing the gray! They're like twitchy little smog sponges, and they perform this miracle seemingly without any ill effects on their own physiology. I think we need to scoop up a bunch of them and ship 'em down here. If we just sprinkled a trail of stale graham crackers along the edges of the Mackinac Bridge, they would ship themselves, even.

I did remember to bring my camera and its batteries and memory cards, which is fortunate, as photography was the major impulse behind the trip. I was like a DSLR ninja up there. I swooped in and snatched about nine and a half gigabytes of pictures, and left before the stunned vistas knew what just captured them.

The pictures themselves? Well, I'm glad you asked! They are to be part of a project I'm working on--a picture book. But not the kind you'd give your sticky little toddlers. No, this is going to be a stunningly-rendered, full-color pictureography of my glorious two-landmassed state, complete with a vibrant historical account told through the keyboard of an octogenarian.

In other words, it will be stunning and full color, but the rest will be total and utter falsehood. I can guarantee that it will at least be entertaining falsehood, so everyone should definitely start saving money for their own eight copies when they're available. Personally, as this project combines two of my favoritest things (photography and making crap up), I cannot wait for it to be completed.

Now...back to Photoshop.

Report from No Man's Land

I'm not sure how much I can say, for fear of this transmission being intercepted by the dreaded Wisconsinites. I will keep it brief.

The troop and I have made it safely to Mackinaw City, where we have holed up in a curious bunker called Best Western. The enemy has tried to flush us out by providing us with horrible "bar" soap, but the joke's on them. I brought liquid foamy soap of my own, so a gunky, rubbery rinse-off is not in the cards.

We made a recon tour of the island. It appears to be badly fortified, despite having its own fort. Insertion points include...pretty much anywhere. Beware of snakes, however. They will not hold still long enough for you to get a decent photo.

My troop and I are planning a push into the Northern Landmass today, although I cannot mention specifics. Details to follow.

Michigan; A Primer

Good afternoon, audience! I am going to assume that it is afternoon outside your windows, wherever you are, because it's my favorite time of day. It is also afternoon outside MY windows as I am writing this.

It is also Michigan outside my windows. Inside, too, technically. You know Michigan? If you've been watching any news reports about the economy, I'm sure you've heard mention of my state. They usually represent it by showing a bunch of people in line at an unemployment office. It used to be by showing video of cars pinballing around on an icy stretch of road. Those were the days!

Regardless of the condition Michigan is in ("lousy"), I am still relatively proud to hail from it. In fact, this coming week, I will be embarking on a road trip to the Upper Peninsula (geographer's term for "upstairs") in order to capture its natural beauty with my digital camera. I set the camera to the Adobe RGB colorspace because I read that it has a wider grayscale gamut.

If I encounter any color, I can always change it.

What this means is that if I am unable to get to an Internet connection, Ambient Moronics will go on a brief hiatus while I'm burning petrol getting lost up there. I apologize to my reader.

So what exactly makes Michigan Michigan? Other than incompetent automakers? My trip up North will focus mainly on scenic vistas of natural splendor, so I shall mainly focus this post on that.

First, you have Michigan's wildlife. This consists almost entirely of ducks, sparrows and moose. I have provided a picture of a duck in order to illustrate this. You will note that the only other animals to appear in this documentary-quality photograph are other ducks. This is no accident, as Michigan's duck population is set to overtake its human one in 2011 if trends continue. They are everywhere; movie theaters, lakes, ponds, swamps, bars, clubs, rooftops, basements, convertibles and playgrounds. Their diet is 97% stale bread, 2% cigarette butts with the remaining 1% split between gravel and dead minnows. They have to compete with migrating flocks of seagulls for the cigarette butts, which is hilarious.

It is lucky for The Duck that he has a prodigious reproduction rate, as the vast majority of them die off when Old Man Winter comes stomping around, swinging his ice cane and shouting unpleasant things at the top of his snowy lungs. It is a common myth that ducks fly south for the winter. This is what the ducks would have you believe, but it is impossible for a bird to fly the distance needed to change climates.

Squirrels, on the other hand, are capable of making the trip. They just don't.

Those ducks that haven't fattened up on bread during the tourist season and gone into hibernation in their duck burrows inevitably perish. This cycle is nature's way, and it is strangely beautiful.

Given the peak seasonal size of the duck population, it is may seem odd that Michigan's leaders have selected the sparrow as the state bird. The reasons given on the Michigan state website, however, make a lot of sense.

The Sparrow's indomitable spirit and ability to thrive in any environment is a fitting homage to the Michigander's own resilience. Its stubborn refusal to relocate during the state's harsh winter months puts to shame all the pussies that spend those months in Florida. And like the cars built here, the Sparrow is ubiquitous, rust-colored, short-lived and spends a lot of time under gas station canopies.

Which brings us to the most rare of Michigan's creatures; the moose. Certain adorable skeptics have told me time and again that there are no moose in Michigan. "Honey," the skeptic has said, "that was a deer."

Preposterous. There are no deer in Michigan.

The moose makes its home in the remote, forested areas of the northeast. Subsisting on little more than dew and wisdom, the moose dispenses its knowledge only to those sophisticated enough to see the path of light they tread. Hunted to near-extinction by philosophers and new-age twits in the 1980s, their population has rebounded somewhat, but they remain scarce and well-hidden.

So where might you find this veritable Noah's Ark (or at the very least, Noah's Dinghy) of Michigan's fauna? Why, in Michigan's flora, of course! The state is home to a great many lakes, teeming with fish and aquatic moose. These lakes abut beaches replete with sticks. In fact, in the state's Stick Museum in Ann Arbor, one learns that Michigan has the greatest diversity of sticks in any of the Lower 48.


All of those sticks have to come from somewhere, and that is where Michigan's bountiful forests truly shine. Here, in these sun-dappled expanses of lush evergreenery, sticks grow by the truckload. They dapple the ground and the sides of old-growth timber like the dapples on the majestic dapplepotamus (extinct, sadly, since the 1700s). Dapple trees are particularly productive, resplendent with sticks year-round in addition to their delicious fruit. Friendly farmers with large dapple orchards often allow visitors during the harvest season, welcoming them to sample and purchase dapple cider and home-baked dapple pies. Dapple pasties are also available, but nobody ever gets within ten feet of them.

Well, folk, I hope you have enjoyed your little tour of Michigan and its splendidness! I shall return in mid-October, laden with pictures and chiggers, which I cannot wait to share with you all!

12 Step Program

“My name is Rodney, and I’m a terrible person.”

“Welcome, Rodney!” the group shouted back in unison. Rodney took his seat.

“Simply admitting that you have a problem is the first step, Rodney. Congratulations. My name is Steve, and I was once a terrible person. With the help of Assholes Anonymous, I’ve been jerk-free for three years now. I know the system works, because it worked for me. I’ll be leading our discussions. Are there any questions?”

Rodney looked around the room. The small Lutheran church had been kind enough to let them use its basement meeting room. There were fluorescent lights on the ceiling, doughnuts and coffee on a table in the corner, and about twenty people in folding chairs sitting in a circle.

“Yes, please, I have one.”

“What is it, Rodney?”

Rodney made another quick count. Yep. About twenty people.

“I just kind of figured that there would be more people in a group like this.”

Steve smiled. “Well, a lot of people don’t know that they’re terrible,” he said.

“Doesn’t that kind of make them even more terrible?”

“Yes. Yes it does.”

Time-outs for Terrorists

Detective James Breckenridge glared angrily at his coffee as his leads disappeared into the ether around him one by one.

"Darg! There goes another one!" He slammed his fist down on his desk, causing his music to skip and his oscillating fan to oscillate right onto the floor.

"Angry, much?" asked an infuriating man.

"Yes," James replied brusquely. "What gave it away?"

The infuriating man formed himself an annoyingly patronizing little smile, which he applied to his clean-shaven face. "It's hard to make an MP3 player skip. And you've been eating paperclips by the handful. Anything I can help with?"

James doubted it. It kind of depended on what he meant by "help". The rookie was always prancing around the place offering advice and suggesting new ways to solve crimes. The worst part about it all was that his ideas had merit. In fact, the rookie could singlehandedly replace every man woman and K9 unit in the room.

If he wasn't such a whinging little twit, that is.

"No."

The infuriating man seated himself primly on the edge of James' desk. "Oh, come now Jim. I'm sure we can find you some new leads if we work together. I feel that this would be a good opportunity for the two of us to develop some synergy."

"I feel that this would be a good opportunity for you to see if you could stuff yourself down the break room sink."

"Quick! There goes another one! It went under your mouse pad!"

James steadfastly refused to look down at his mousepad. He gritted his teeth and focused all of his hate on the infuriating man's belt buckle. He clenched his fist. He couldn't take it anymore and he yanked the mousepad up by a corner.

"DAMMIT!" Another lead scurried down the side of his desk and disappeared into the ductwork.

"These are bad men who hate America, Jim. We have to find them and deliver swift and pointy justice before they can spread their hatred like the disease it is." The infuriating man was actually saluting his wall calendar. It was July, and there was a picture of an American flag on the top page.

"There are only two of these wackos, and when we raided their apartment, it was obvious that they had been gone for weeks, maybe months. They're probably not even in the country any more. And I say good riddance."

"They might have friends, Jim," the infuriating man said, looking away from his calendar flag briefly to arch an eyebrow at James.

James watched another lead hop off the stack of papers in his inbox.

"Somehow I doubt that. They were planning to bomb the public library because it contained too much knowledge. Not gonna get a whole lot of support for a crusade like that."

The infuriating man wingtipped around behind James' desk and inspected its surface. He slid a picture of Mrs. Breckenridge behind the computer monitor, setting in its place a Captain America action figure.

"They will stop at nothing because they hate our way of life. They hate our freedom! Freedom you and I have to fight for every day."

"If we're constantly fighting for it, it's not really freedom, is it?"

"There there. I know you're angry, but that's no reason to start talking like a Communist, Jim," the infuriating man said.

Another lead skittered into the adjacent room. James could hear the splash it made as it threw itself into the toilet.

He didn't care.

"You know what? It's time for a chicken pot pie. You can go yell yourself red about the terrorists. I'm going to treat them like the children they are and let them scream and holler and hold their breath while I ignore them. And that goes for anybody else who wants to forgo intelligent discourse for explosives and flag-waving."

"You're playing right into their hands, Jim!"

"Then I'll personally take a dump right on their palms. Get off my desk."

Coffee Visits the Grand Canyon

"Ask that guy over there if he knows where the canyon goats are."

It had been going on like this for perhaps the last hour. Truth be told, it had been going on the entire trip in one way or another, but the last hour was dedicated to the goats.

"Coffee, please shut up for one seven-hundredth of a second," I said wearily, peering through the viewfinder of my camera.

"What for?" he said, giving me a well-timed shove. "So you can take more pictures of rocks? You took pictures of those rocks over there already. This place sucks."

"Those rocks 'over there' weren't rocks. They were petrified trees. And that was yesterday." I deleted the blurred picture and aimed again.

"Oooh, excuse me. So you took some pictures of wussy trees pretending to be rocks. My bad. You know, if you wanted to hang around a bunch of liar trees, we could have just stayed home. This place doesn't even have any skunks. Have you seen any? I haven't seen skunk one."

The sun's disk was perfectly bisected by the horizon. The deep blue sky met the torn edge of the Earth as sunrise chased shadows out of the great canyon and etched its fiery mark on the undersides of the clouds. It was a magnificent sight. The appreciative sighs and snapping shutters of the tourists joined the birdsong and insect noises.

"Hey look! A hobo!" squealed Coffee.

"That's a park ranger," I said.

"He's got a beard."

"Doesn't mean he's a hobo."

"You got anything I can throw into the river down there? I bet that's at least a thousand feet down."

"Right in front of the ranger?"

"Aww, what's the hobo going to do? Splash some bum whiskey on us?"

"Dude. He's armed."

"Seriously. If I don't see any canyon goats or gorge skunks in about two minutes, I'm going to shove some fat kids over the edge."

"As impressive as the Grand Canyon is," the ranger was saying, "The solar system's largest known canyon system is actually on Mars. Its Valles Marineris is over three times deeper than the Grand Canyon..."

"Ask that man if there are any goats in that one," Coffee slapped me on the back, and only the neck strap saved my camera.

"The canyon he's talking about is on Mars."

"And?"

"Never mind."

The ranger led our group along the South Rim, toward Lookout Studio, talking as he went.

"Check this out," said Coffee. "An empty liquor bottle. It's called 'Hot Damn'! Isn't that hilarious?"

"It's kind of sad that some moron just dumped it here."

"It's kind of sad that some meh meh meh!" mocked Coffee in a whiny, singsong voice. "Let's throw it into the river then. I hear that some, like, crabs or something like to live in bottles and cans. You'll be doing them a favor. And here, smell it! It smells like gum!"

I waved away the bottle and its strong cinnamon odor. "How about you throw it in the trash can instead, and I'll let you have another Snickers bar."

Coffee eyed me skeptically. "I think you're just trying to screw with me now. You and whatever protein deficiency is keeping you from being cool want me to shut up so you can keep all the goats to yourself. Ain't happening mister."

I promised Coffee a trip to the Waffle House when the tour was over, and he agreed, but only after I took a few photos of the Hot Damn! bottle. I had close to thirty seconds of silence in which to operate my camera.

"Holy shit! A giant sparrow! Where's that bottle?"

"That's an eagle!" I said, aiming the camera.

"Oh. Never mind then."

"That's our national bird," I explained.

"Unless it poops on those children, I really don't care. You should have brought some bottle rockets. You know what you should do? Eat your lens cap and then fall down."

"Why the hell would I want to do that?"

"Hilarity. Something to take everyone's mind off the total lack of goats in this place. Ask that hobo if we can climb down there and look for some."

I had to admit, Coffee's repeated suggestion that we leave the tour group and climb down into the gorge was starting to sound like a good idea. The sun was well above the horizon now, and it was starting to get hot.

"See? Shade. Cool, refreshing, goat-harboring shade," Coffee said soothingly, tossing a handful of pennies over the edge.

"Okayokayokayokay! We'll climb down. We'll probably break our legs, but we'll climb down."

"Oh, don't be such a hamster. You'll heal up. Hey! A sand salamander!"

"That's a stick."

"You know what your problem is? No imagination at all. And no imagination means a whole backpack full of no fun. That's what you are. Six water bottles full to the brim of liquid dull, and a packet of crackers with lame between them."

"Oh man. Glad you mentioned that. We got our water bottles?"

"Sure do!"

He said that a little too quickly. I decided to check for myself.

"Whoa, hold on! What're you up to, Captain Killjoy?"

"I'm checking our water bot--"

"So...that's like a mechanical man made of water is it? See! You're making progress on that imagination thing already."

I turned the backpack over and dumped out our six bottles. All of them except one were full of gravel.

"Why," I asked in a measured tone, "are our water bottles full of rocks?"

"Not rocks!" screeched Coffee. "Ammo! Man. I must be giving you too much credit. You saw all those kids back there, right? And what did YOU bring to throw at them? Nothing."

"We're going back to the group."

"Yeah. And let all the goats get away."

"Yes. And give me that band saw. I don't even want to know what you were planning on doing with that."

"I'll tell you if we can go to the Waffle House right now, and skip the rest of this boring skunkless tour."

"Deal," I said.

On Art, Belief and Chewing Gum

"Doesn't it just...speak to you?" Eric said, his eyes filled with emotion and his mouth filled with Juicy Fruit.

"No," replied Melody.

Eric turned from the painting to face her. He looked her square in the eyeball and tried to fathom her.

"You're doing it again, aren't you?"

He moved his gum from one cheek to the other and went back to the painting. "What? Heavens no."

"You were fathoming me again. I can tell when you're doing it. You stop breathing and you look at me like I'm from another planet." Melody swung a hand in a dismissive arc. "I just don't like it."

Eric plunged into deep thought while the ambient noise dimmed and rolled off, becoming a phone conversation between strangers heard through a bucket of ping-pong balls. He wondered that two brains, ostensibly the same machinery in each, could react differently to the same stimuli. Was it, at its most fundamental, a simple chemical equation with different variables?

"Could you, darling, explain why you don't like it?" he said, his pondering on hold for the nonce.

She hated it when he asked questions like this. She was of the opinion that if something worked, you didn't go poking around in it. The painting was just ugly, is all. Nobody in their right mind would want to cover their walls with a wallpaper print made from it, so why should it look any better just sitting in this building's window?

Besides. Nobody ever has to explain why they like or dislike something unless it's to a person who disagrees. It was a pointless endeavor.

"I don't know. I just don't think it looks good. He painted a bunch of horses, which is totally fine, but he didn't even give them the right number of legs. It's creepy. And the sky looks like a bunch of melted purple crayons." Melody squinted through the window, cupping her hands around her eyes. "I think I can even see bits of Crayola paper in there."

The city was unusually loud for this time of night. It was holding an art competition, the winner receiving some hundreds of thousands of dollars. A publicity stunt for a city whose economy had been beaten with the knobbly end of the fiscal club. Paintings and sculptures dotted the grid of streets all over downtown, like little bits of soul confetti sprinkled on graph paper.

Eric took in Melody's words and mulled them over like a moose eying a branch laden with pine cones. He was one of those saps who believed that disagreements taught the disagree-ers something about each other. He could be forgiven for this, as it is a common misconception. What actually happens is each person simply adds to their list of things not to bring up in conversation with the other.

Everybody has a list like this. The people who are termed "annoying," are the ones who don't keep theirs up to date, or have lost it in the laundry entirely.

"The misshapen horses and the transparent washing machines they carry on their backs symbolize the artist's pain and his desire to see what his socks look like when they're spinning around in soapy water," Eric said. "It's sad and triumphant at the same time."

This, of course, was bullshit.

Melody jerked a thumb over her shoulder. "I liked the stuff back on 43rd a lot better. Those paintings actually looked like things in real life. More believable."

"How would you define a belief?" Eric prodded.

Melody sucked in a lungful of the clammy September night air. She held it there for a few seconds, eyes to the stars. She let it out in a whoosh. "Well, I guess you could say that a belief is something someone holds to be true. It's like a personal fact. I know that's not quite right. It does disservice to the rigid definition of fact, I guess, since different people have different beliefs, you know?"

He craned his head back and spit his Juicy Fruit into the air. As it fell, he swatted it into the street with his hand. This is a trick he was immensely proud of, and he grinned at Melody. She favored him with an obligatory smile, even though she was a little jealous that she hadn't been able to do it yet. Of course, she didn't want to waste the gum practicing.

"That's pretty close, I think, especially the 'personal fact' part. But aren't all facts personal, at least to start with? Take something like the mass of the Earth. The first person to come up with the question in the first place was probably the first person to seek an answer. If he got one, he was the only one who had it. If he believed he was right, that his answer was true, it
was his own personal fact."

"He was probably wrong, though," said Melody. She looked back down at the painting in the window. "My personal fact is telling me that this painting is shitty. If I could do something myself, it doesn't merit my being all impressed when someone else does it."

"Right! Just like you're not impressed with my ability to use oxygen as an electron receptor in fueling the Kreb's Cycle to produce ATP, because you can do it too." He took several exaggerated breaths in quick succession to illustrate.

"When you put it that way, it actually does sound impressive."

"Doesn't it?" Eric often had free time at work, and spent more time on Wikipedia than was likely healthy. This led to the creation of a special little brain vault he could poke around in whenever he wanted to sprinkle his conversation with the spoken equivalent of a smirk. Just a little ground-up affected smug to add ironic punch. Some tongue-in-cheek spice. Expostulation seasoning.

Now he was a little hungry.

A Cadillac Escalade growled past, its windows festooned with sozzled hussies. Mingling with the aural medley of traffic, wind and distant speech, their drunken squeals pranced down the street and up the faces of the skyscrapers like retarded otters.

Melody and Eric both ran the previous scene through their brains, different coprocessors coming into play and different neural firing patterns returned the same result: no public event would be complete without at least one person incapable of having fun without getting dizzy.

"I stopped thinking being dizzy was fun when I was three," Melody said, watching the Escalade's taillights disappear around a corner.

"That's a fact. It's a personal fact, but it's also provable," said Eric.

Preferences themselves are sort of nebulous, their roots disappearing entirely into a tangle of chemical reactions if you trace them to their genesis...

"But a belief doesn't have to be a fact. It doesn't even have to be a personal fact!" he continued. "For example, what if I said 'wait here baby, I'll be right back' and then ran off down the sidewalk?"

"I would wonder about you. But I would probably do it. Why? Is that something you're likely to do?"

"Probably not," he said. "Unless you keep sassing me. Then I might just."

"Ha. You like my sass and you know it." She stuck her tongue out at him.

"But you'd wait. You would wait because you believed that I would come back, even though there's no proof that I would."

"You said you would."

"I say a lot of things."

"So, okay, I consider my belief well-founded because you have shown yourself to be reliable in the past. Except when it comes to navigation. Oh!" She favored him with a "yeah, I went there!" expression. Eyes and mouth wide in a parody of surprise.

"Hey!"

"Tee hee!"

In turn, Eric put on his serious face with the half-smile and the one slightly-raised eyebrow. The one he used when a making point he was proud of.

"So a belief is merely a species of opinion you attach deep meaning to. An opinion can be readily changed if contrary facts are presented, but a belief is a little more stubborn. A lot of people believe some pretty crazy things despite overwhelming evidence, right?"

He put the expression away carefully. He liked that one.

"Like that the Apollo moon landing was faked? Even though you can see the rovers and landers and stuff with a powerful telescope?"

"Exactly!"

She moved over and draped an arm over his shoulder. She kissed him on the temple. "Honey?"

"Yeah?"

"That still doesn't change the fact that I think this painting is shitty."

"You wanna go look at the sculptures, then?"

"I believe I do."