Proto_Dork_Safe_For_Patrol

A right of passage for the young male at Case De Ora Elementary was being recruited for the Crossing Guard. There were a limited number of uniforms, a red sweater like thing and a cap, and the staffs sporting stop signs were getting beat up by the time our sixth grade came along. This was back in the day when girls could be excluded from things based on gender, and they were excluded from the Crossing Guard for sure. Their domain was the ball and sporting good check out at recess, and they took their revenge often enough, doleing out the choice kick balls and teather balls to their same sex sisters and sticking the boys with deflated broken down gear. I don’t recall having any interest in being a crossing guard but its greatness was thurst upon me early in the 6th grade school year. There was a morning shift and an afternoon shift on the guard. The afternoon shift was the most desirable as you did not have to get to school half an hour early to do it, being that I just lived accross the street I think I was recrutied for ease of service more than anything else. The drill was that you met the teacher in charge that week behind the Cafatorium where a short set of steps lead up to the back stage area that served double duty as the Cross Guard room. Mostly the teachers just unlocked the door and made a b line to the lounge to get some coffee, a danish and have a smoke. A couple of teachers liked to make a para military exercise of it and make us march single file out to the corner to our posts. The Viet Nam conflict was in full swing, but we did not talk about it much if at all in school, we just watched it on TV while we ate dinner. Once we made it up to the street the Duty Sgt. of the day would assign a corner to each of the four guards and take his post at the corner nearest the bus stop with his staff. The Sgt. at arms staff did not have a stop sign attached, it was for directing the Guards Men to either stand at ease or lean their signs out into the road to stop up coming traffic. The Sgt. at arms also held the whistle, passed from mouth to mouth each day after a wipe with a foul tasting disinfectant swab. As kids came to school they would wait at what ever corner to be allowed to cross under the protection of the guard. Most drivers were pretty good about paying attention at the school corner but there was one incident where an older gentlemen decided to ignore the guards stop sign and just went rolling right through the intersection. The Sgt. on duty took down the Lic Plate and ran to the office, the police were called, and the man was pulled over down the hill as he was leaving the Mayfair Grocery to return home. He was informed that for all intents and purposes the Crossing Gaurd was a sanctified arm of the law and he was bound to obey their stop signs just like any other. That was a pretty cool day. I got tired of the guard after a while, it became clear to me that it was more and more of a recruting ground for the ROTC, and I knew that the ROTC was just a stepping stone to the military and then to Nam. The war had being going on for as long as any of us kids could recall, for all we knew we would be drafted after High School. Part of me did not want anyone thinking I was cut out for the military so I gave up most of my shifts as soon as I could.

Church Of The Inspirational Rattlesnake : Aug 3, 2006

The routine is mostly the same, except when punctuated by travel, illness or sloth. Monday through Friday I rise from a few to 30 minutes before Starbucks at Five Points Plaza opens at 5 in the morning. Natural body functions ensue in a orderly fashion if I am lucky. By exactly 5 AM I am walking from my car to the coffee shop door. 345 out of 365 times I ask for a simple Dopieo ( two freshly pulled shots of expresso in a short cup) all other times I ask for a Triple Soy Latte in a short cup. One out of perhaps twelve times I get a blueberry scone as well. One third of the time I get a bottle of water or a small orange juice. By 5:16 to no later than 5:25

I am scrolling through the numbers on the cell, counting to fifteen as I look at the road and not the readout from the bottom of the list. Ron picks up within 2 to 4 rings for the most part.

If it is cold out he might answer with:

“Ice House.”

My response is mostly the same no matter what,

“White car approaching.”

This statement was modified from the original:

“White truck approaching”

only a short while ago when the truck ceased to function and an 8 year old four door sedan was purchased.

I park the white car across the street from Ron’s for the most part, except on Sundays. If the sky is clear I often take this time to observe the stars over head and engage in a few knees straight, knuckle dragging leg stretch’s. If the morning paper has been delivered early I will take it to the front door and push it through the mail slot. Mondays, Tuesdays, Wednesdays and Fridays Ron emerges from the house with one dog on a leash. He keeps a mental record of which of his five Jack Russell's is due for the treat of a pre dawn adventure. On Thursdays two dogs are selected and I take the leash of one as we head out on the hike. Some might call it a walk, but I equate a walk with a more easier paced effort. The weekday jaunts are 2.3 mile affairs that we hoof in about 39 to 42 minutes depending on how often the dogs might wish to stop an or how awake we are. One mile of the effort is steeply up hill and takes us past the local water processing plant and the Jesusita trail head. What ever you want to name it, it gets the blood going and the brain processing. Ron is a sales manager, he often give me a short replay of the previous days toil. Which sales person is doing well, who is tanking, how the numbers for the week are stacking up. We talk about work, what we cooked for dinner the previous evening, how are families are doing. By the time we are back at his house the sun is mostly up.

Sundays are unquestionably genuine hike days. We start an hour later and 90% of the time head over to Tunnel Road Train Head which affords us 5 or 6 various routes to cover. My same coffee ritual applies to Sunday. It is customary for us to head up hill for at least 75 minutes before pausing to take in the view, gulp down a bottle of water, and head back to the car.

Four or Five times a year we get ambitious and do a longer hike. Up to seven to eight miles instead of the average five. One of our favorites is what we call the “Rattle Creek Connector” Starting at Rattle Snake Canyon we head up to the” Connector” and climb up and along the ridge back to the right fork of the Tunnel Trail. We park a car at both ends of the trip and shuttle back to the start point.

There are dozens of other parishioners in the Church of the Inspirational Rattle Snake. We see the same faces, the same dogs breaking trail ahead of their people week end after week end.

Not many of us have the nerve for the early mass, but it is the best one if you ask me. The cool of morning is well with you till at least the turn around point. The trail cows on their mountain bikes are few at this hour. Most Sundays we return to the white car with a good amount of sweat dripping from our persons and a renewed bit of thankfulness for just being alive. As practicing atheists and card holding members of curmudgeons anonymous The Church of the Inspirational Rattle Snake puffs out our empty spiritual balloons with a trinity of Trail, Sky and Steady Incline.

We’ve been doing this routine for three of four years now, or some version of it. We field a fare number of new member inquiries but most are put off by the early start time. No one seems to understand that early hiker gets the best pew with a view

To Lurk Or Not To Lurk : from July 31, 2006

Ok, I admit it, I am a lurker. Not by the classical definition of the word:

LURK

v 1: lie in wait, lie in ambush, behave in a sneaky and secretive manner [syn: skulk] 2: be about; "The high school students like to loiter in the Central Square"; "Who is this man that is hanging around the department?" [syn: loiter, lounge, footle, lollygag, loaf, lallygag, hang around, mess about, tarry, linger, mill about, mill around] 3: wait in hiding to attack [syn: ambush, scupper, bushwhack, waylay, ambuscade, lie in wait]

but by the post MySpace definition of one who looks at profiles without commenting.

I further admit that the profiles that I lurk are mostly the young people my children are friends with. I am pleased when I see a youngster who has set their profile to private. Not that those who choose to leave their profiles public are universally making a poor choice. Many or most of these public profiles are benign. Why they choose to leave what amounts to a recorded log of private conversations, images and personnel journal entry’s open for any random person to read struck me as decidedly odd until I started reading up on the adolescent mind set. The short explanation is as simple as the classic bumper sticker:

“Hire a teenager while they still know everything.”

The not so short explanation is that until age 17 or so teen’s brains are undergoing a radical rewiring that began at around 12. If one believes in a psychological view of the universe you can think of this rewiring period as the pre-adult shake down of the Ego and Id. This brain growth can engender any number of outward manifestations. The sulking, woe is me, down trodden, teen, the hyper, always on always going teen…the combinations are endless and they all go back to one core teen experience, i.e. learning to live within and cope with a world where they are not the center of all things. I was talking to one of my kids friends and they mentioned their MySpace page, I told them I’d seen it an I liked their photo on their profile. They could not understand how I could have seen their page. I explained to them that their page was not set to private and if I wanted to I could read their blog postings, surf through their friends list and read all their comments.

After a couple of minutes I was told:

“No offence or anything, but I really don’t want adults reading my page.”

I had to explain that the Internet is open to the public, 24/7, year round to anyone with access to computer, that the only way to pick and choose who looks at their page is to switch it to private. Which, for some reason, is perceived as being a real un-cool drag.

What I realized is that this generation of young people has never known a world without an Internet so, they have no frame of reference to understand the significance of its existence. For them it is no different than turning on the tap and getting hot water, or turning on the TV and getting 200 things to watch. This is what the creators of MySpace have tapped into, a “me” generation that makes those old fogies from the 1970’s look like rank amateurs.

The news is littered with accounts of kids being lurked in the classic definition of the term, “wait in hiding to attack”, by all sorts of predators. While this sort of lurker is by far the most dangerous and the most alarming to parents. Another type of lurking can be found if you look for a little while, namely, kids lurking kids. In many respects the friends list on any given kids MySpace is as or more telling than what group of kids they sit with at lunch. The same cliques, jocks, nerds, misfits, popular, et al, exist in the web world. Like a multi paged jig saw puzzle these pages often hold out of context pieces of a larger story or, in many cases, drama. I lurk random profiles within a 5 or 10-mile radius of my zip code too. In an age where one might only learn the name of a neighbor after living on the same street for a decade you can learn more about the folks on the other side of the fence or green belt than you might expect. I browse friend lists and click through profile after profile. I am routinely astonished by how closely the “Six Degrees of Kevin Bacon” game mirrors the interlinking “friends” of the MySpace user.

Earlier this year MySpace was acquired by for 580 million dollars ($550 million more than the next highest offer) by News Corp. News Corp says it will be working on how to market their news, media and commercial advertising offerings directly to each and every MySpace user. You can bet the early research groups will be lurking our kids pages heavily. Lurking their groups and forums. Pushing the videos, music and media that News Corp will profit from the most. How long will it be ‘till a friends :”Thanks for the coffee” comment triggers a search engine hit to the word “coffee” and sends a “ add friend” request with a printable coupon attached from McDonalds? Not much longer is my guess.

So for now I will keep on lurking Myspace like some sort of cyber version Boo Radley.