Tine tension or lettuce not live in fear

I have a salad everyday for lunch. I keep supplies here at the office and I make a salad every single day. I use the same salad bowl everyday. It is mid-sized as salad bowls go, with a convenient handle on one side.

Everyday I fill it with lettuce to pretty much near the brim. The bags-o-lettuce I buy give me two days-o-salad per. Half a bag=one bowl-o-salad. If I don't fill the salad bowl each day, the math inevitably goes to shit and I wind up with a dimebag of rotten brown lettuce on Monday morning.

Everyday, I cover my salad with dressing. Nothing else. Lettuce and dressing. I have no time or inclination to 1) shop for; 2) store, 3) manage; 4) deploy any exotic toppings. Kinda simple like that. I do have a few different flavors of dressing on hand, though. Currently in the armory are Thousand Island, Creamy Ranch, Feta Cheese something, and Caesar. Today was Thousand Island. Lovely.

Here's my point. Everyday, I walk from the kitchen with my bowl of salad, my tupperware canister filled with sandwich meat, and a couple of sticks of cheese back to my desk. The next 60-90 seconds is filled with a tension I only became aware of today. As I stir in the dressing to the bowl of lettuce, I get discernably nervous. The sources of tension are two-fold: 1) will my plastic fork shed a tine?; 2) will I flick a dressing-laced piece of lettuce onto some critical document, my desk, or my lap? Both have happened on numerous occasions, making me kind of salad-shy.

The bowl is clearly not huge. I could buy a bigger bowl to reduce the risk of overflow and flip-outage. But that seems pretentious, don't you think? I'd probably just start buying more lettuce to make bigger salads. Have to eat with a friggin' pitchfork.

And don't get me started on forks. Two weeks ago, our seemingly endless supply of plastic forks came to an end. The box of 1000 forks that seemed infinitely bountiful for more than a year withered and died. Fortunately, I saw the end coming and informed our receptionist to replenish the supply. She did. But she got two 50 packs of lame-ass Vons party forks. For a gruesome week before she replaced them with GOOD plastic forks, I was subjected to the humiliating use of forks with the tensile integrity of a Jesse Helms erection. Then, not only did I have to face down the challenge of not breaking my fork or coating my desk with lettuce, but also having my knuckles get covered with dressing as my new faux-fork limply bent left and right, collapsing pitifully beneath my insistent, agitated stirring.

Despite it all, I still manage to blog during most lunches. I know...I know. Brave, perhaps heroic. I just refuse to let lettuce run my life, you know?

Tale of two universes

Hitchhikers' Guide
Among other weekend activities that included Dad's Dessert Night with Emelie on Friday, Syd's second-to-last softball game on Saturday, and Mother's Day brunch yesterday, we went to see Hitchhikers' Guide to the Galaxy Sunday. Once we confirmed that it was kid-friendly, we all went to a matinee. I was definitely anxious to see it, and I think Lori was curious.

We all enjoyed it. Obviously, a vast majority of it was over the kids' heads, but they both sat through it apparently captivated. Considering it was two hours long (about 50 minutes longer than the average kid flick), we were both happily surprised with their attention spans.

I was satisfied with the movie. Not amazingly good, but I think it did the books sufficient justice. Lori and I both laughed out loud and walked away pleased. The one thing that struck me as I left the theater was an awareness of the same residual feeling I had after reading the books. I read the first four parts probably during the period of 91-92. And I haven't re-read them since. But I recall being honestly relieved after reading them. Besides being throughly entertained, I was moved by the undercurrent message that just about everything concerning our earthly lives is trivial when taken in a broader context. I seemed to take the "Don't Panic" message to heart, and it truly gave me a sense of calm...particularly in the immeidate post-college timeframe.

So yesterday, I considered it a measure of success for the film that that same feeling of welcome insignificance percolated to the surface of consciousness.

Go home in peace or in pieces
Driving to the grocery store to pick up lunch today, I was behind a truck that had an interesting bumper sticker. The truck appeared to be relatively new...large F250 type. On the side was a magnetic banner -- the kind people apply when they run their own business. This one was for an electrician.

On the back bumper were two stickers, carefully positioned and clearly of supreme significance to Jethro inside. One was a small Electrical Workers Union sticker on the lower right bumper. But dead center was a green and white placard that read, in two bold lines:

Wife and Dog Missing!
Reward for Dog

Nice first impression for business calls, and nice statement to your wife. How do you go home with that every night? Not quietly, I presume.

Subconscious reminder, conscious gratitude

Last night, amidst a flurry of disjointed and strange mini-dreams, I was visited by a more unsettling vision. In this dream, I was watching television with Lori. Except the screen was rather large and I got the impression we were in a house of the near-future. We were watching the news with passing interest while engaged in miscellaneous household activities. We watched various news stories from the top of the broadcast -- the usual montage of scandal and vice.

Immediately after a commercial break, the anchor intro'd a story about the latest violence from the Middle East. The screen resolved to show some grainy "home footage" from a ubiquitous Iraqi street. I asked Lori if she had seen the footage, and she nonchalantly answered yes as she crossed to another room.

The footage appeared to be from a dashboard video camera -- like the kind all the police chase videos use. However, what I was looking at was a scene of a Humvee flipped on its side and two soldiers on the ground writhing. One was in the extreme foreground very close to the dashboard camera that was clearly upside down. The soldier in the background was trying to crawl away toward a sand-colored wall.

As I watched the soldier in the foreground, the camera slowly pushed on his face. The Humvee was on its side, but teetering on the brink of rolling onto its top -- the edge of its roof a tenuous fulcrum. The soldier in the foreground was suffering from a broken leg, I sensed, and couldn't get out from under this Humvee. Again, the camera pushed tighter as I started to become aware that some dangerous edge of this unstable Humvee was now pressing down from off camera onto this GI's head.

I physically became quite distressed and I wouldn't be surprised if I was moaning or mumbling in my sleep. Soon, this Humvee started bringing its full weight to bear on the cheekbone of the soldier, easing back occasionally to give me the hope it would roll off of him. His face was round and moonlike. Pale and young. He started screaming frantically at the other soldier who was incapable of providing help.

Finally, the camera pushed so tight as to only frame his head and the metal edge of the Humvee captures what I feared was coming. The vehicle rolled at a weird angle, straight down, and collapsed the man's head like so much melon. It flattened it at the equator between his ears, sending blood and matter shooting every which way and out every orifice. The screaming finally stopped, but the Humvee then became like a hammer, repeatedly slamming down to completely flatten the soldier's head -- until finally squeezed of all inner substance like roadkill that has been traversed for a week.

Even writing about it still unnerves me. It was frankly quite horrible.

But I awoke with a feeling of two things: I was impressed that this horrible footage was stuck half-way through the news broadcast. Like the conflict was no longer top story-worthy. I had the same reaction a few weeks ago when the footage surfaced of the helicopter being shot down by insurgents. That even included the Belgian pilot being executed as he tried to plea for his life. After all the beheadings and car bomb cleanup imagery, what does it take for video to be important?

Secondly, I was left with a lingering sense of sadness and gratitude. Gratitude for the men and women who are in the shithole every day and night, fearing they'll end up beneath a Humvee. They do a greater work and know greater courage than I ever shall.

Thank you.