Wednesday, July 31, 2013
A realization
For the first time in longer than I can remember, I don't have anything that I'm especially looking forward to. I can't help but think that this isn't especially good for me, but I suppose I could be wrong about that. It is probably good for me to remember this timely FB post.
A friend, the son of dear friends
In therapy we discussed how you can still have mixed feelings about someone long after you have forgiven them. On your birthday, J., I am praying that you are in the presence of the One who loves you best (that is, I truly want the best for you), and ask that you would join me in praying for those you hurt most, including your parents, widow and young son, and my precious daughter, who thought the world of you until that night. It is impossible to know which of those two tragic choices did more harm to your soul, but I hope you're healed of all of it.
Ah! Today's word, not yesterday's . . .
pinchbeck \PINCH-bek\ - 1. made of an alloy of copper and zinc used especially to imitate gold in jewelry 2. counterfeit or spurious
Love the new word, even if its second meaning is a besmirching of Mr. Pinchbeck's good name.(Somehow they had this one posted yesterday by mistake, which they then took down and replaced with "cocoon." Today, they have this one back up. I hope it stays this time, as I'd hate to have to edit the hyperlink back out again!)
Another %*$(! dream (edited)
I am really beginning to hate that our brains don't just switch off when we sleep.
I was being seated as a replacement in a room with a jury that was deliberating the level of guilt of a child sexual abuser. In that weird way that dreams have of not being quite right, we were in some sort of cross between a petit jury and grand jury environment. There were prosecutors in the room with us, explaining the thirteen (!) levels of offense of which the defendant could be found guilty. They clearly felt that he was deserving of the highest level, and my fellow jurors and I seemed to agree. But as we jurors were deliberating, one of the prosecutors handed another one the paperwork for another case. It was also a child abuse case, and had my name on it as the suspect! The prosecutorial staff began observing me closely, silently communicating among themselves whether I should be removed from the present case, given my past record (?) and my apparent involvement in this new case. However, when we unanimously voted according to their wishes on the current case, they didn't want to put their result at risk by bringing in another juror to replace me.
After the other jurors left the room, I began speaking with one of the prosecutors about my case. I knew I was not guilty of this charge, so didn't mind speaking to them. I didn't know the victim at all. I told them that I already have a lawyer that I work with, at which point they seemed to expect me to not speak further. Still I cooperated with their interview. It seems that there was not yet any analysis of physical evidence which tied me to the crime, only the victim's insistence that I was the one who had attacked - her? him? this wasn't clear in my dream. I had been clipping my nails during the previous jury vote, and offered my clippings as a DNA sample. The prosecutor told me that fingernail tissue doesn't contain DNA (not true in real life). Still, my clippings, which were now a substantial pile of fingernail remains, could be useful for analysis against the pattern of fingernail marks from the victim's wounds, so could help clear me. The prosecutorial staff remained skeptical of my innocence, and I was afraid of being railroaded for a crime I didn't commit. They told me that I should take my clippings and deposit them under the juniper tree (dreams!), so I walked along the fence line - yes, I was now outside - holding my pile of clippings in both hands cupped together, and desperately looked for where they meant. When I reached the trees, I couldn't tell which one was the juniper, and there was no one in sight with whom I could deposit my clippings. I was suspicious that they were just trying to get me to dump any evidence that might clear me of the crime they were certain I had committed based on the victim's account and my past.
No, really, I'm starting to become leery of going to sleep. Now it occurs to me (a little later) that the outdoor part of that may have been a separate dream, as my dreaming throughout the rest of the night had this investigation hanging pendulously over me and over whatever else I was dreaming about.
I was being seated as a replacement in a room with a jury that was deliberating the level of guilt of a child sexual abuser. In that weird way that dreams have of not being quite right, we were in some sort of cross between a petit jury and grand jury environment. There were prosecutors in the room with us, explaining the thirteen (!) levels of offense of which the defendant could be found guilty. They clearly felt that he was deserving of the highest level, and my fellow jurors and I seemed to agree. But as we jurors were deliberating, one of the prosecutors handed another one the paperwork for another case. It was also a child abuse case, and had my name on it as the suspect! The prosecutorial staff began observing me closely, silently communicating among themselves whether I should be removed from the present case, given my past record (?) and my apparent involvement in this new case. However, when we unanimously voted according to their wishes on the current case, they didn't want to put their result at risk by bringing in another juror to replace me.
After the other jurors left the room, I began speaking with one of the prosecutors about my case. I knew I was not guilty of this charge, so didn't mind speaking to them. I didn't know the victim at all. I told them that I already have a lawyer that I work with, at which point they seemed to expect me to not speak further. Still I cooperated with their interview. It seems that there was not yet any analysis of physical evidence which tied me to the crime, only the victim's insistence that I was the one who had attacked - her? him? this wasn't clear in my dream. I had been clipping my nails during the previous jury vote, and offered my clippings as a DNA sample. The prosecutor told me that fingernail tissue doesn't contain DNA (not true in real life). Still, my clippings, which were now a substantial pile of fingernail remains, could be useful for analysis against the pattern of fingernail marks from the victim's wounds, so could help clear me. The prosecutorial staff remained skeptical of my innocence, and I was afraid of being railroaded for a crime I didn't commit. They told me that I should take my clippings and deposit them under the juniper tree (dreams!), so I walked along the fence line - yes, I was now outside - holding my pile of clippings in both hands cupped together, and desperately looked for where they meant. When I reached the trees, I couldn't tell which one was the juniper, and there was no one in sight with whom I could deposit my clippings. I was suspicious that they were just trying to get me to dump any evidence that might clear me of the crime they were certain I had committed based on the victim's account and my past.
No, really, I'm starting to become leery of going to sleep. Now it occurs to me (a little later) that the outdoor part of that may have been a separate dream, as my dreaming throughout the rest of the night had this investigation hanging pendulously over me and over whatever else I was dreaming about.
Tuesday, July 30, 2013
I dunno
I'm just going to try not to think about what it really means, because it hurts too much when I do.
Monday, July 29, 2013
A field of dreams
My purpose really was that I love this game so much and love what it will lend you if you allow it to. Because it's just an incredible game of failure, and life is nothing more than failure. - Lou Presutti, founder of Cooperstown Dreams Park
I hope he means "failure is as big an element of life as any other individual component is," rather than "in life there is nothing other than failure." I'm not so sure he's right in either case, but I'm a little comforted today by the first thought.
I hope he means "failure is as big an element of life as any other individual component is," rather than "in life there is nothing other than failure." I'm not so sure he's right in either case, but I'm a little comforted today by the first thought.
"A bad day golfing"
On Saturday, I found myself invoking the old saw about how a bad day at a fun hobby is better than a good day working. It turns out that I'm really glad this is going to be the last outing.
On the shotgun start, our threesome was the furthest out on the course. This made us the lead group; everyone else was behind us. I had golfed once this year. The most regular golfer on our team goes out every other week, and as a senior, has no distance to his tee shots. My friend Tom was the third, and he has also golfed very little this year. We had a good-natured debate at the outset over who was stuck with whom. We did okay (for us) on the first couple holes, though, parring them both in the increasingly heavy rain. On the third hole, we were on our third shot, about a hundred yards out from the green on a par four - very bad for a best-ball scramble to not at least reach the vicinity of the green in regulation - when the horn sounded calling us in because of the weather.
It would be about two hours before we could resume. Things didn't get any better. I think we had only one double bogey, scrambled to "save" a couple of bogeys, and made par about a third of the time. The best team posted 12 under par, but was eliminated for failing to sign their scorecard, so the winning score was 9 under. We finished 22 strokes behind the winners, 25 behind the best score. Still, I wasn't too concerned, and was having fun.
Except apparently my fun, or our combined incompetence, was interfering with others' enjoyment of the day. The sun came out about two hours after we resumed, we were drying out, and it was becoming an enjoyable day. We had to go over to an adjacent green to pick up two errant shots that the double-hitter on that hole (in a best ball threesome, to keep things fair with the other groups, group members rotate playing an extra ball on each hole) had knocked astray. At that point, the youngest brother of the deceased for whose son the educational fund-raising tournament has been held each year told us that we needed to speed things up.
Well, here was the problem: we weren't playing slowly. We didn't spend a lot of time looking for errant balls we'd hit; if we didn't find them quickly, we just let them go, and sometimes we didn't bother looking at all. Also, we didn't spend much time standing over our shots, taking a bunch of practice swings. We were just playing very poorly. On the two "longest drive" holes, we were hitting our third shot from the marker where both the men's and women's longest drives had been hit. We took over 33% more strokes to complete the course than the best scoring teams did, including 42% (!) more than the disqualified team. Taking that many more strokes simply takes way more time. The only way to speed things up would have been to quit mid-round. So I attempted to explain this to John, who merely became insistent that, since we'd already had a two-hour rain delay and we now were slowing things down even further, we should do whatever it took to speed things up. As if just by him saying so we could start playing better.
Well, we did the best we could without quitting, which was really no better than before.
After dinner - which was originally going to be lunch - when we were waiting to say goodbye to Jeff (the deceased) and John's dad, who is my good friend, one of the other regular golfers was still chewing on his ear about what he needed to do to keep the problem from happening in the future. Well, this was already the last year for the outing - they've hit their fundraising goal - so I think they've fixed the issue already. But just in case they change their minds, they will never have this problem with me again.
On the shotgun start, our threesome was the furthest out on the course. This made us the lead group; everyone else was behind us. I had golfed once this year. The most regular golfer on our team goes out every other week, and as a senior, has no distance to his tee shots. My friend Tom was the third, and he has also golfed very little this year. We had a good-natured debate at the outset over who was stuck with whom. We did okay (for us) on the first couple holes, though, parring them both in the increasingly heavy rain. On the third hole, we were on our third shot, about a hundred yards out from the green on a par four - very bad for a best-ball scramble to not at least reach the vicinity of the green in regulation - when the horn sounded calling us in because of the weather.
It would be about two hours before we could resume. Things didn't get any better. I think we had only one double bogey, scrambled to "save" a couple of bogeys, and made par about a third of the time. The best team posted 12 under par, but was eliminated for failing to sign their scorecard, so the winning score was 9 under. We finished 22 strokes behind the winners, 25 behind the best score. Still, I wasn't too concerned, and was having fun.
Except apparently my fun, or our combined incompetence, was interfering with others' enjoyment of the day. The sun came out about two hours after we resumed, we were drying out, and it was becoming an enjoyable day. We had to go over to an adjacent green to pick up two errant shots that the double-hitter on that hole (in a best ball threesome, to keep things fair with the other groups, group members rotate playing an extra ball on each hole) had knocked astray. At that point, the youngest brother of the deceased for whose son the educational fund-raising tournament has been held each year told us that we needed to speed things up.
Well, here was the problem: we weren't playing slowly. We didn't spend a lot of time looking for errant balls we'd hit; if we didn't find them quickly, we just let them go, and sometimes we didn't bother looking at all. Also, we didn't spend much time standing over our shots, taking a bunch of practice swings. We were just playing very poorly. On the two "longest drive" holes, we were hitting our third shot from the marker where both the men's and women's longest drives had been hit. We took over 33% more strokes to complete the course than the best scoring teams did, including 42% (!) more than the disqualified team. Taking that many more strokes simply takes way more time. The only way to speed things up would have been to quit mid-round. So I attempted to explain this to John, who merely became insistent that, since we'd already had a two-hour rain delay and we now were slowing things down even further, we should do whatever it took to speed things up. As if just by him saying so we could start playing better.
Well, we did the best we could without quitting, which was really no better than before.
After dinner - which was originally going to be lunch - when we were waiting to say goodbye to Jeff (the deceased) and John's dad, who is my good friend, one of the other regular golfers was still chewing on his ear about what he needed to do to keep the problem from happening in the future. Well, this was already the last year for the outing - they've hit their fundraising goal - so I think they've fixed the issue already. But just in case they change their minds, they will never have this problem with me again.
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