Miles

Earlier this week, I went hunting for a ghost and him in Seabee cruise books: my father in Vietnam circa 1968.

Seabee Team 0308 – Near Chu Lai in 1966. My father is standing in the rear, fifth from the left.

Seabee Team 0308 one what appears to be a different (later?) deployment. My father is in the front row this time, fourth from the left.

My father died over 14 years ago, in 1996. I cannot claim that we were close. Still, he is there, somewhere, haunting me. Or maybe it is his absence, felt long before he died, that haunts me.

Here is a sampling of the links from this week that I found to be thought provoking.

• Why you can’t work at work – “… people are working longer hours, people are tired – I’m working 50-60 hours this week. It’s not that there’s 50 or 60 hours worth of work to do, it’s because you don’t work at work anymore. You go to work to get interrupted.”
• Minimalism – I have a stack of boxes filling up half the garage that fuels my interest in minimalism. The question is how to implement a reasonable form of mimimalism.

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It’s been seven years since the passing of Joe Strummer and tonight the net is filled with tributes.

• Don Letts Tribute to Joe
• Joe Strummer: 7 years Later – Adam Ricard
• Joe Strummer & The Mescaleros. Willesden to Cricklewood (YouTube)
• Remembering Joe Strummer / Live Clash from Jamaica

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Last night I drug myself out of the apartment and went to the Doll Hut. There I experienced a warm greeting from Lilli the bartender / ringleader. “Where have you been?” she exclaimed. I made my lame excuses, but I was struck by how good she looked. I’ve always found Lilli to be intriguing, but last night she was downright HOT. When I asked what was different, she explained that she’s changed her hair. I noticed that she was also wearing different glasses and a bright yellow tank top. But here was something else, something I couldn’t quite put my finger on. Finally, it stuck me, “That’s it, you look happy!” I said and a broad smile crossed her face as she nodded her agreement.

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I’ve returned from my trip. Though I have not yet completed all of the captions, the pictures from the trip are posted here.

In just over a week from now I am off on vacation to England and Scotland. I will be providing more details later, but for now I’m posting the itinerary here.

As part of the follow-up research to my reading of Oakley Hall’s Warlock and The Art and Craft of Novel Writing, I ran across this Oakley gave at UC Berkeley. Oakley is introduced by Michael Chabon, one of his former students.

Jon Hassler is no longer with us. I stumbled across his name yesterday in the “In Memoriam” column of Poets and Writers. My enjoyment of Jon’s novels is difficult to explain. His characters lived in small mid-western towns or, in the case of the Rookery series, a small mid-western college town, and struggled with issues familiar to most of us. He didn’t rely on hobbits, wizards, psychopaths, political intrigue or explicit sex.

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(via Tim Ferriss)

David Whyte, author of The Heart Aroused and Crossing the Unknown Sea, was scheduled to speak at the San Francisco Unitarian Universalist Church so I took a trip north and dragged my daughter Katie along for the ride.

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