I’m cutting it close to the wire tonight, as I was delayed on my weekly journey to Essex Junction, Vermont, to participate in the bowling league sponsored by Champlain ARC, a charitable organization for which my probable future sister-in-law works. Today the Adirondacks experienced temperatures in the low 70s, which puts it about 40 degrees higher than this March’s average. While the warmth was welcome, I had forgotten what might happen when an entire watershed experiences about 9 inches of snowmelt in one day. Needless to say, with all the fog and the possible flooding, I’m lucky to be alive, albeit with the last sixteen miles of the drive taking about forty five tortuous minutes. Of course, when you’re driving in the dark alongside a ravine like this, you take as long as you need to.
So I’ll try to get something more interesting tomorrow.

So I was up in nearby Lake Placid the other night for a special concert presented by my friend Dan Plumley, who runs the Totem Project (Just a note, that website seems to be under permanent construction, so don’t expect to be blown away) The performance was by native Mongolian musical and singing group called Uragsha, which is part of the much larger Yara Arts Group.
I’ll admit that I didn’t know quite what to expect, but this group blew me away. I’m not one to be impressed with vocal performances, but the four performers, three men and one woman, native Buryats from eastern Siberia, were extraordinary. Each of them had a vocal range and dexterity that I had never heard, in either a live or recorded performance. In the unlikely event that their North American tour takes them to your area, I would heartily recommend attending. Truly it’s a unique, traditional performance from a part of the world that doesn’t get much attention.
And on a similar, but much more troubling note, I recently received a package from my Aunt Patricia in Phoenix. Included in it was a new musical CD that my cousin, Ryan, had spent over a year producing. He’s the frontman of his group, playing acoustic guitar, backed up by two of friends playing the acoustic bass and drums. Admittedly it’s not the sort of music I usually enjoy, but I put it on to give it a whirl nonetheless.
Well, after the initial serviceable guitar work, Ryan started singing, and to my genuine horror, he was awful. His voice was pretty weak to begin with, almost apologetic and frequently out of tune, and the pedestrian lyrics were no help, but further on when he tried to sustain a note, or even worse, go up or down a third on a sustain, I had to turn to CD off, stunned.
I later played it for my mother, who, within ten minutes, said, “he really needs voice lessons, doesn’t he?” (Putting it on me, of course. My mother’s a lot craftier than I give her credit)
Being a writer, I can appreciate how much time and effort he and his friends must have put into the CD, which makes me all the more aghast. I know my Aunt’s going to call me up sometime soon, and invariably the conversation will turn to my opinion of his work. To this day, I’m still not sure what I’ll say, but for now I’m leaning toward manufacturing some big news on my end so the issue never arises. I may be the first man in the history of the world to get engaged just to avoid brutally panning a relative’s creative work.
Of course, I could just be honest but so appalling in my presentation that the message gets lost in the disarray.
“Well, I’m sure it got him a lot of [chicks], Pat, which was probably the whole point of that endeavor in the first place.”
I’m doomed.

From the Cleveland Enquirer:
At Ohio psychiatric centers, workers molested children, denied them food or gave them alcohol and drugs. Some kids suffered broken bones. Others lived in homes so dirty they urinated on the floor by their beds.
Taxpayers shell out $160 to $1,000 a day for each mentally ill child who lives in these private treatment centers.
Some things simply shouldn’t be privatized. After many years of neglect and oversight, state policy makers are beginning to grapple with the unique issues surrounding childhood mental illness. Given the right treatment and therapy, nearly all of these kids can be helped. But in the stampede to privatize every traditional state service because it’s cheaper and easier, we throw kids into predatory environments that will screw with their heads at a time when they are especially vulnerable. Great.
I’ve been meaning to write about this before, but it keeps slipping my mind. NASA engineers have developed sensors that can detect and process subvocal speech, which is essentially the nerve impulses that travel from the brain to the vocal cords. If this technology matures, it would be like manna from heaven for those with various communication disabilities. Attach these sensors to a human-sounding voice synthesizer and you have what would amount to natural speech. Man, I’d love to dictate to my computer subvocally. This is one of those technologies that has a ridiculously high cool factor.
Leaving on a jet plane tomorrow. I’m not sure what the next six days holds for me, but I’m sure it will be an adventure. Not sure when I’ll be blogging and I definitely won’t be checking e-mail. I leave you in Charles’s capable hands and you’ll hear from me soon.

Another birth in my circle of friends to shout out to the rest of the world. My nurse Michelle recently gave birth to a beautiful daughter, Anna. She has two sons and she kept telling me she wouldn’t believe the third was a girl until she saw it for herself. I think she can start believing it now.
A quick book update. A little more than 150 pages and counting. I’m at a point where I begin to see the shape of the plot for the next…half?…two thirds? I know where I want to go, but it’s difficult to judge how long it’s going to take to get me there.
Do people find the design for this site boring? Seems like all the cool blogs have some visual element that makes them distinctive. Then you have mine, which kind of looks like the Brand X of blogs. If people have ideas for a logo or other ways to add visual flair to my soliloquies, e-mail them to me and I’ll look at them when I return from my trip. I know I’ve put out this call before, but I figure it doesn’t hurt to try again.

I forgot to mention that my new wheelchair was finally approved by Medical Assistance, after only a year of waiting. I even got to pick out the color: Midnight Blue. I’m gonna be one stylin’ gimp in my bitchin’ new ride. I actually met one guy at a work function who had tricked out his wheelchair with neon running lights and speakers on the back of the seat. He must have spent hundreds of dollars on customizations. It was like something out of The Fast and the Furious. You think you could make a movie about a bunch of badasses in souped-up wheelchairs, going around and robbing banks and blowing up cars that are illegally parked in disability spots? Maybe throw in a couple really hot sex scenes involving a Hoyer lift? Would it sell tickets or is it more of a direct-to-video concept?