Kathleen, Kage and the Company

Kage Baker had no medical insurance for the last several years of her life. Even before she left commercial employment for the free, mad life of a free-lance writer, the various companies she worked for could no longer provide health care benefits.

And since they didn’t have to if they were small enough – and living where we did in the wilds of the Central Coast, most companies were that small – they didn’t. Private health coverage was too expensive (those insurance companies have to make a profit, after all), and of course she didn’t qualify for any public assistance. Because she had a job.

And when she had no job but was instead self-employed, Kage made too much money.  The sale of a book a year disqualified her, and she generally sold more than that. So, no insurance.

By the time she was sick enough to have spent her savings, sick enough to qualify for medical programs designed for desperate women with dangerous diseases – well, by then, she was too sick to survive. Too bad, so sad, worse things happen at sea. She wouldn’t have gotten any help at all, except that her gynecologist lied and said he was afraid of a breast cancer involvement to her existing uterine cancer. That got her enrolled in the program that tried to save her life.

But for Kage, the only individual mandate was a mandate to die.

Today, the Supreme Court decided that President Obama’s health care plan is, yes, Constitutional. This will be of enormous help for many, many people like Kage; people who would certainly have died will have a chance at living. At least, that’s what will happen  once all the inevitable appeals and stalls and road blocks and plain black-hearted greedy subterfuges are defeated, and the program is permitted to go forward.

I’m glad for those people who will be helped. I wish Kage had been one of them.

Kage Baker, as I described yestreday, apparently saw Time as a rotating vertical cylinder. At least, that’s how she visualized it in order to write about it. And over the last 24 hours, Dear Readers, I’ve been pleased and surprised at how many people seem to share that vision, and to understand it completely.

Kage would be delighted with you all.

She had to visualize things to write about them; she was a thoroughly visual thinker. It’s why we travelled so often and so far to find concrete images of the burgeoning images in her head: she needed to have a picture to write. What she wrote often varied a great deal from what she saw – but she had to see it first. Then she could adapt, remodel, combine; modernize a building or reduce it to rubble. She could do anything once she knew how it looked.

Kage said she got the idea from Alfred Hitchcock movies, especially The Birds.  Hitchcock combined places and buildings all over Bodega Bay, and essentially remodelled the geography of the entire area. He made his own version of Bodega Bay, and that really impressed Kage.

Also, she loved that movie. She and Harry watched it often. She’d prop her feet on the coffee table, and Harry would run up and down her legs, watching it too. He’d go down and perch on her very toes when the scenes were getting tense, muttering to himself in alarm – then when the big birds attacked, he’d scream  Oh no! And run back up Kage’s legs to her lap. But he never stopped watching. It was exactly like a little kid peeking at the monsters on the screen through his fingers, both horrified and fascinated.

(It was watching to see just what upset Harry that helped Kage figure out the trick Hitchcock had used. Also, Harry was just plain hilarious.)

The passage of time both horrified and fascinated Kage, too. She firmly rejected the whole Arrow of Time idea – if it was an accident of the way our sensory organs were pointed, she said, she was going to look in a different direction. Up and down, apparently, rather then side to side. Thus, she could travel through time without losing her place, if the place was important; or she could skip the bad places altogether, and just slide on by to a better time.

At least, I think that was what she was doing. It’s why she used her 1966 Yellow Submarine calendar over and over and over – every few years it was actually correct, and in the meantime it meant a year that she had loved was still going on somewhere. And if more people could reach accommodations like that, I suspect it would provide a considerable uptick in happiness and mental health.

Me, I just don’t have a concept of the overall structure of Time. I don’t know why, and it doesn’t bother me – although I wonder sometimes if it should. Perhaps  I’m as adrift as Kage seemed to be, and am obviously just about as worried about it … but it doesn’t seem to be causing any dangerous lacunae in my perceptions.

Kage always patted my head and told me not to fret. “You can read a clock and tell left from right,” she said. “I’ll take care of the dates, and point the way North.”

That still sounds good to me.

Kage Baker first tried to sell a novel in her late 20’s.

We worked on it together. It was an enormous book, made even larger by the fact that part of the plot called for one character to periodically spend several pages telling stories to another character. The size, and the convolutions of two  plots intertwining like a DNA helix, were among the reasons that it bounced around publishers for close to 4 years but never sold. People wanted to buy it, but it was like nothing they had ever seen, and they couldn’t figure out how to market it.

It also didn’t help when the (revered and famous) editor who was then reading it abruptly died. Kage’s novel was among the books that languished on their sadly abandoned desk while the publishing house got its bearings. Once the manuscript was returned, Kage threw her hands in the air and then threw herself into trying something completely different. That turned out to be In The Garden of Iden.

And the rest is history. And history rewritten, history with the serial numbers filed off, history invented, reinvented, stirred into a cauldron spiced with legend and myth and finally trotted out on the stage in a novelty corset to sing vaudeville tunes. Kage got the bit in her teeth, and ran wild through the ages of the world for the rest of her life.

Somewhere around the beginning of Iden (which we always called Mendoza’s Book, regardless), on a fine summer morning, she turned to me and asked “How do you envision Time?”

“You mean – the passage of time? The past, the future?” I sought clarification.

“No, the fabric of Time Itself. The whole temporal construct.” Kage twisted her fingers in her hair, making Moebius strips in it. “How do you see it?”

“Um – I don’t think I do,” I was forced to admit after some thought. “I see the year in a very specific way, but not just … Time. Do you?”

“Yep. How can you not think about it?” she demanded. “Don’t you want to know where you are?”

“Well, I do know where I am.”

“Oh, screw you.” And Kage waved one hand in the air (I remember very clearly how the other one, the left one, was now knotted into her hair.) and said, “Time is … a huge hollow cylinder with ridged sides. Rotating. It goes up and down as far as you can see, and somewhere out of sight the ends connect. But it’s so huge that wherever you are it looks like a straight tower. And you can follow the paths up and down like staircases, or trudge around in one place. Or you can jump from one ridge to another …”

“Most people think it goes past like a road or a river,” I observed.

“Nope. Time is vertical,” stated Kage. “Location is horizontal. And if you can adjust for both directions, you can travel in time.”

We sat there for a few minutes. Outside our living room, the Hollywood Hills – composed entirely of remembered time – loomed golden, studded with red-roofed houses, and the concrete pads where older ones had slipped and fallen downhill.   Kage extricated her hand, and the strands of her hair snapped like glass threads in a witchball as she did – Ping! Snap!

“Okay, that’s good. Thanks,” Kage said briskly and began writing furiously.

I had no idea what precisely had happened, although it became apparent pretty quickly. It ultimately ran on for, what, a dozen books – technically, there are 8 in the Company series as Kage originally planned it; but extras have crept in. And there you have Kage’s recipe for time travel.

Just remember, Time is vertical and Location is horizontal.Keep that in mind and you’ll be fine.

But be careful. If you get them backwards, I think you get the Tunguska Event.

Witch balls. See the fine threads of glass inside?

Kage Baker loved hot weather.

Even if it was truly, dreadfully hot, she enjoyed it; she’d pin her hair up on her head (an epic task), and lounge about in silk pyjamas with the fancy standing fan aimed at the back of her neck. It had blades like bronze palm leaves and evoked Cairo and the smell of puddles on hot stone. She’d drink gin and tonics, or rum and Cokes, or Singapore Slings. And she’d write.

Harry would sit on the back of her chair and be absurdly ruffled by the sweeping fan breeze. He’d amuse himself by pulling pins out of her hair until her braid fell down on him; then he’d fight ferociously with it. When the heat made him too indolent, he’d lie on his back, supported by Kage’s shoulders against the chair back, like a lazy plantation owner in a hammock. He’d fight with his feet and groom his toes. How Kage put up with that little feathery hot plate against the back of her neck, I never knew – but they both seemed to enjoy it.

It’s warm today, in Los Angeles. Not really hot – though the rest of the country is suffering under horrid heat – but warm enough to see how few clothes one can wear and still not stick to one’s chair. It’s weather for spending the noontide in a movie theatre, and then coming home and drinking iced coffee. It’s weather for barbecue and take out food, and then ice cream novelties.

That phrase, ice cream novelties, always intrigued Kage. You actually see it on frozen food aisles, describing the freezer where they keep the Bomb Pops and the Eskimo Pies. Kage loved Bomb Pops. And Italian Ices. And hazelnut gelato. And, if nothing sufficiently exotic was on offer, she’d settle for old-fashioned weird and eat Cherry Garcia, a pint at a time.

I did indeed go to the movies today, to a matinee of Abraham Lincoln, Vampire Hunter. I enjoyed it, too. I haven’t liked most of the recent undead pastiches – I don’t think Jane Austin is improved by zombies. But I liked AL:VH. It’s kind of comforting to imagine, for a little, that Mr. Lincoln could return as an implacable hero with a silvered axe, and save us all. And I do think the movie has a very palpable moral: Republican, Democrat, it doesn’t matter. The real problem is blood-sucking parasites running government for their own black profit.

And yestreday I went to a barbecue at Sister Anne’s, where we had splendid steak (She has the barbecuing gene.) and potato salad and where her younger daughter Annie made a dulce de leche cake from scratch, and topped it with fresh raspberries. Anne and I drank gin and tonics made with Bombay Sapphire – which smells like lavender and juniper, although it is not, alas, the exquisite colour of the blue glass bottle … which always made Kage regretful. So she occasionally added food colouring to hers.

Anne and I refrained, though I may try it tonight …

In the meantime, it may very well be time for a nap. The cats and the Corgi are collapsed bonelessly, competing for bits of cool tile to lie on. The cats have the advantage over the Corgi, and can also coil up in the sinks and play crocodile: just their drowsy eyes and ears peeking over the rim. Harry is a sleepy avocado on the sofa arm where the overhead fan blows a breeze on him: though his eyes are open, and he’s watching TV with his head tucked backwards between his shoulder blades.

It’s Summer, well and truly Summer now. Yeah, time to nap.

Kage Baker often quoted John Lennon. At random, frequently; but when she wanted a specific quote, the most frequent one was: Life is what happens to you while you’re making  other plans. *

Today is full of life; overfull, maybe. And it’s metaphysical life, too,  since some of what is happening is actually due to the other plans I’ve been making. But it all piles up and clogs the gears, you know, and then I find myself seriously lacking in something vital.  Time, energy, vanilla extract, underwear …

All my prescriptions have come up due at once – not too surprising, as they were all written at once, but a major pain to re-order all at the same time. Especially when you get to the pharmacy to pick them up, and only then does the pharmacist tell you that the doctor is changing half of them and they won’t be ready for another day. And then she refuses to sell all of the cold and allergy medicine your sister has added to the drug grocery list (Chloritin-D, Sudafed, Musinex …) because there is a strict limit of how much any one person can purchase lest they set up a meth lab out in the parking lot.  This despite the fact that I had to provide my Driver’s License as ID for every purchase, and if anyone wanted to double check why I was buying 1 (count ’em, 1) package each of 3 different medicines, it would have been pretty easy.

I have a sudden need to make desserts. I have a wake to go to tomorrow, and it’s  BYOB.  (That’s bring your own buffet, not – as one dubious wag has already suggested – bring your own body.) Fetching along a trifle does not cheer me up any about going in the first place. On Sunday, I have a barbecue to attend – a much nicer prospect and a much simpler dessert, but I am cranky and don’t want to go anywhere. I want to be there, you understand, I just don’t want to go there. Life is insisting on making me do things.

The narcolepsies have finally released me from their penumbrous grip. The downside to this is that I have stopped sleeping. This happens sometimes, even with the domestic feline sleep schedule – sleep till you wake up, work till you fall asleep – I have adopted. But it’s tiring, and that’s annoying, because I used to be able to stay awake for days and never mind it!

There’s a cat on my keyboard and another in my printer. They trade places from time to time, but it still makes it awkward to do what I had planned: which is answer correspondence and write. And they don’t like one another, so the changing  of the guard resembles a wrestling match between a pair of velvet socks. It’s distracting.

Harry is loudly practicing his stand-up comedy routine for the benefit of The Thing Behind The Couch. This entails much gravelly monologueing  while hanging with his head down the back of the furniture, occasionally laughing maniacally and exclaiming, “Sweet baboo!”  I’m not even sure where he learned to say that …

So life is really determined to consist of what happens when I’ve made other plans. It wants to be annoying encounters with clerks, and the alarmingly huge bag it takes to hold all my damned pills; it wants to be watermelons too big to fit in the fridge, and having no bowl quite big enough to hold a trifle. (There is never a bowl big enough to hold whatever trifle you have planned; can we rename the things Extravagances?) It’s wants to be the cats whapping one another behind my computer terminal (Paff! Paff! Paff!) until one rolls out and falls into my lap.

It’s the little boy next door running up and down his driveway with a handful of those fake baby fireworks they sell at liquor stores – teeny plastic bottles, and when you pull the string it gives a teeny plastic POP! and shoots confettit everywhere. It’s me and the nephew home alone to order freaky pizza tonight, because his parents are going to his dad’s retirement dinner. It’s 40 pictures of sleeping corgis and the necessity of squeeing over each one. (Thank you, Neassa!) It’s doing the dishes and discovering you set up the silverware to rattle a conga beat when the dishwasher hits full cycle; it’s doing the laundry and discovering that the nifty new soft dissolvable plastic minibags of liquid Tide do not survive being stuck in your pants pocket.

Actually … it’s kind if fun. Now that I consider it. Now that I remember that whenever Kage pronounced that quote –  she was grinning.

Cool.

*Beautiful Boy

Kage Baker liked to celebrate the Summer Solstice with the old hymns to the sun.

One of her favourites was called (Maybe. I’m not sure.) The Mummer’s Song. It was one of the songs we learned at Faire, live, sitting on hay bales with warm beers in our mugs and absorbing the songs the singing groups sang on long golden afternoons. We knew two or three tunes to this one, depending on who was doing it – so I suppose it is a traditional, one of those old, old songs still travelling down the genetic ladder of humanity, mutating and adapting and never dying.

I even heard it a few years ago appended to the end of a Loreena McKennit song. When it goes commercial, you know it’s engraved in the genes.

However, I associate this most especially with Cyderman’s Fancy, at Black[point on the Gypsy Wagon Stage. John with his hairy breeks and curly beard, fiddling and stamping like a satyr out of Breugel; wren-small Claire playing a harp as tall as herself; Morgan on violin or boudran or recorder, her hair coming down like a tide of night as she danced; Steve with an outrageous leather hat like a gravy boat, so heavily waxed he could (and did) drink beer out of it.

We always sang a lot of the old songs, Kage and I, on the old days. It’s one of the really ancient way to mark the turning of the sweet wide world, marking it with the old music. Sometimes we were at a Faire; less and less, though, as the years went on. The song was just as fine, when it was only our two voices as we stood in the twilight of our garden or on the enormous ballroom floor of the sands.

So here is Kage’s song for today, the solstice. Yeah, I know, we’ve tipped over now and are on our way into the dark again (as this song gently reminds). But we have to get through flower and fruit and harvest home first, to get there; all the glories of summer still await us now. With every passing day we turn more to gold; with every night, the stars some closer to the earth.

Today was the longest day of the year – last night was the shortest night. I was awake the night long, watching the skies wheel overhead into the gate of summer. The way it feels, I’ll be awake this night too, singing away the hours as we spin.

Time to dance, Dear Readers. Time to dance!

Oh, we have been travelling all of the night,
And the best part of the day;
We are returning here back again
And we’ve brought you a garland gay.

A branch of May we have borne all about;
Before your door it stands.
It is but a sprout, it’s well-budded out
And it is the work of God’s own hands.

Oh wake up, you – wake up pretty maid
And let the May Bush in!
For it will be gone before tomorrow’s dawn,
And you will have none within.

The life of Man, it is but a span,
He’s cut down like the flower.
He is here today and tomorrow he’s gone
And vanished all in an hour.

And when you are dead and in your grave
And covered with the cold, cold clay
The worms they will eat your flesh, Good Man
And your bones they will waste away.

Our song is run, we must be gone,
We can no longer stay.
God keep you all, both great and small
And send you a gladsome May!

Kage Baker was much interested by time. She studied it, she speculated on it, she wrote stories about it in (I think) an attempt to corner it with sympathetic magic. She used all the resources at her command to maintain the present and corral the past. She was particularly fascinated by the passage of time.

Well, to be more accurate, she was more usually enraged by it. If it had had the courtesy to simply pass, like the wind, she could have borne the occasional blown-out candle and blown-down branch that littered her life. But it is instead a repeating tide, a relentless tidal bore that sweeps inland and bears away all the treasures of careful fields and gardens into chaos and wilderness.

Kage couldn’t bear that.

Hence her intense recreation of things she loved, in her books. If something had ever pleased her, amused her, caught her eye or her fancy or some breathless adoration from her soul – she made it immortal in a story. These additions were often so small and subtle they meant nothing special to the reader – unless the reader had also been there when whatever-it-was engrained itself on Kage’s mind. But a thousand tiny shiny bits go to make up a mosaic; when the artist is done, you don’t see the sources they used, you see what they made from them instead.

Green glass from a spring tide on a northern beach, found laid like exotic eggs in a nest of deep water-kelp. Fragments of blue enamel from an an abandoned garden bench. Red bits from some wild grass that looks like oats until it miraculously sets seeds like chips of ruby. Mirrors cut from foil chocolate wrappers, and sticks of gum, and polished chrome plucked from the gutter where someone’s fender fell off.

You don’t see those sources in the finished project, Dear Readers. Unless, like me, you were there when Kage’s gaze fixed on them and the fire in her eyes  leapt up,  that meant the Storyteller had woken: and then you had to find a bag or a box or donate your pockets to carry all the glittering plunder home. Those moments are part of what I am trying to share here, to keep alive the way Kage did it herself. Tell a story and hope it sinks into someone’s mind, and in the meantime take some contentment from knowing you at least wrote it all down …

Of course, memory itself – though it was her servant and playmate – was not enough for Kage. And that was why she was also a skilled and ruthless patron of EBay, Amazon, The Vermont Country Store and old book merchants. When Kage found she could buy back a lot that had vanished from her personal past … well, she didn’t go nuts, because it was all much more careful and thought-out than a mere mania. But she brought the full force of her research skills and OCD energy to the hunt.

She found amazing things. Somewhere, someone – several someones – had saved Beistle paper decorations in perfect condition for every holiday on the calendar: Kage got them all. Not just the scratch cats and pumpkins she had loved – oh no, life-sized skeletons, polychrome witches in embroidered gowns, every avatar of Thanksgiving and Christmas imaginable. New Year’s cats and foxes, in tops hats and monocles.

Books she loved and lost as a child; candies, ditto. Buying candies on EBay is, of course, insanely risky – but Kage managed to find small companies that were making old candies fresh and new! Or could be bullied into it by a determined letter campaign. The letter campaigns were especially successful in getting someone to manufacture something everyone in the world had loved. It’s why I am still able to wash my hair with cloned Herbal Essence Shampoo – the good stuff, the green one that smells like a rain-wet garden.

Following her example, I timidly reached out into the aether this week to see if I could assuage a sudden, irrational craving. Do you, Dear Readers, remember Moon Pies? Chocolate, strawberry, vanilla and banana. (But the banana was vile, and tasted like recycled Nyarlathotep.) The inside crust was made of some weirdly wonderful hybrid of shortbread and graham crackers, and the marshmallow was divine.

Sometimes you can find them, singly or as miniatures or in the loathly banana flavour. And probably stale. I despaired! But then I went hunting …  What I now happily possess is 23 fresh, chocolate, full-sized double Moon Pies. There were 24 when I sat down to write this, but – you know.

Memory is sweet. And it tastes like Moon Pies …

Kage Baker’s last novel set in in the Anvil universe was The Bird of the River. It was composed three or four years before she wrote it, in the the bar of a nice hotel where we were spending the weekend for a science fiction convention. I knitted, she wrote; we drank Singapore Slings and gin and tonics, and plotted out an entire novel in three days.

It was in the Missouri side of Kansas City. It was a lovely convention, but it was decidedly a private party – the conventioneers were delighted to come together to celebrate, and it was a climate of in-jokes and nursery games. Kage,as the Guest of Honor, was duly included in all the fun and games, but no one was really explaining them – they were having too much fun themselves. And Kage was perfectly happy to be left to her own devices between her GOH responsibilities, so everyone involved had a great time.

And Kage, as was her habit, talked a fan into taking her to a local museum.

In Kansas City, there is an astonishing museum. It’s dedicated to the steam ship Arabia, which was sunk by an underwater snag in the Missouri River in 1856. She sank with over 200 tons of cargo aboard her, a cornucopia of domestic and small industrial goods destined for the western wilds of  the Missouri Territory. She was judged unsalvageable and her position soon forgotten. And she lay unfound for over a century, intact and full of cargo.

This was aided by the fact that one of the properties of the Missouri River is that it changes course constantly. In these modern times, hydro-engineers try to keep it to its bed, but the riverine urge to travel still alters the water’s course all over the adjoining lands. By 1986, when a group of intrepid treasure hunters set out to find the Arabia, the maps all indicated she was probably entombed – in a corn field.

And so she was. They dug her up, and the museum was built to honor and house her, and show off the treasures of her cargo. It’s an astounding snapshot of what the smallholder on the edges of American culture wanted and needed to survive just before the Civil War. Everyone should see it, re-enactors especially. At the very least, explore these sites:

http://www.1856.com/

http://glswrk-auction.com/102.htm

http://www.pbase.com/hockingphotos/steamboat_arabia

You will learn more about 19th century America, which will be good for your souls and be marked in the positive column of your karmic record. You will also see precisely what Kage saw, that inspired her to write The Bird of the River.

The plot and characters came out of her head, itself a chest of Oriental pearls. And she set it in the Anvil universe, because she wanted to use some exotica that wouldn’t have fit into Missouri very well; river gods, demons, aristocratic vendettas. She felt the Missouri River was too wholesome for those.

“Now, if it was New Orleans and the Mississippi,” she mused, toying with the light-up red trolly car on the end of her pen, “gods and demons would fit right in. Assassins and vendettas – vendetti? – would work too. But this river is more Norman Rockwell and less Maxfield Parrish. The Arabia was a working boat, full of practical stuff.”

“Three thousand rubber shoes are your idea of practical?” I asked. I was remembering a display case full of shiny black shoes, all sizes, mostly brogues and Mary Janes, all made of new-fangled Vulcanized rubber.

“Not all in one place, no, you silly. But sold up and down the length of the river? Oh, yeah.”

In the end, she couldn’t fit those rubber shoes on the feet of the Children of the Sun. But she was still determined to make her Bird of the River a practical ship. So she made her a maintenance vessel; and to honour the Arabia, one of her main tasks was to be cleaning up hidden snags … and drowned headless noblemen, and scuttled pleasure barges …

It spun out almost effortlessly over the three days there. Other bits of it arose from the countryside we crossed by car when the convention was over, driving across Missouri from Kansas City to St. Louis – past towns built of white limestone of the edges of rivers running to join the Missouri, through thunderstorms and fireworks factories, past the enormous whirling confluence of the Missouri and Mississippi rivers. The story acquired funnel clouds drawn in the margins, and home-made barbecue sauce stains from a river town engulfed in oaks and hickory trees. It was written over Kansas City steaks and hot weather drinks with umbrellas in them.

Add some of all of that, and the green humid perfume of the rivers, and you’ll come close to what it was like when Kage first came up with the story. Or you could water your garden and go sit in the midst of it on these warm afternoons, a Singapore Sling to hand, and re-read the book.

Because Summer will be here soon.

Kage Baker admired those possessed of the barbecuing gene.She didn’t have it. Neither do I. We owned a grille, but it was usually used for rituals or experiments that required an open fire. They rarely involved dinner.

We both liked barbecue, though, so we usually had to wait until talented guests came over. Or we patronized barbecue restaurants. Sometimes we just broke down, and courted smoke inhalation and those weird meals where pieces of perfectly normal meat end up somehow simultaneously raw and charred …

There is usually at least one person in every family who has the barbecuing gene. If you grew up in one of the statistically anomalous families where no adults did, you know what a miracle finding out what good barbecue tasted like can be. Anne has the gene – so does Kimberly. But of course, neither of them was in charge of the grille until they were grown up .

I still recall, in vivid detail, the Albacore Who Would Not Be Cooked.  Do you know, Dear Readers, how freaking huge an entire albacore actually is? It easily stretches over two grilles,  with an interesting gap between where the wind can gust up and produce sparks, smoke and flaming fish. That was a project of Daddy’s, involving an entire tuna and some 8 hours of barbecuing which resulted in what was basically warm sushi: one humungus sashimi strip 4 feet long. Oh, and pizza for dinner.

This all comes to mind because it is now barbecue season. The entire neighborhood smells deliciously of just-lit charcoal, one of the most Pavlovian-reflex smells I know. It drifts over the streets from everyone’s back yard. Even if you know they are dreadful grillers, or are barbecuing something horrendous like tofu dogs and zucchini, the smell of newly ignited coals is wonderful.

It means summer. Today, it means Father’s Day, of course, but the entire sensorium of summer accompanies it – those days when cold soda, and novelty ice cream (Fudgesickles! 50/50 Bars! Rocket Pops!), and all the watermelon in the Western Hemisphere magically fill the refrigerator and you can eat with your fingers for days on end.

Last night, Kimberly produced really high-end hamburgers and hot dogs: nothing peculiar or fancy, like those unnerving looking meals in ladies’ magazine – just really quality ingredients of a simple meal. Nathan’s hot dogs. Harris Ranch beef. Homemade cole slaw with pineapple added, baked beans enhanced with secret spices. Divine stuff.

Tonight, in honour of my brother-in-law Ray, it will be steaks. Kimberly barbecues astonishing steaks; eating them calls to mind Odysseus’ sailors feasting on the white cattle of the sun – but with no nasty godly side effects. There will be creamed spinach and garlic bread. And the smell of the charcoal, spreading the perfume of forges and black powder and really good food, all tangled up together.

No wonder we still cook over open fires. No wonder the talented barbecuer is a domestic divinity. Even vegetarians do it, as enthralled by the smell of coals and smoke and hot food as any drooling carnivore. It’s just … right. You know? Summer is a season of ritual meals wherein we all worship the miracle of fire.

And then we get to eat it! Pretty magical, pretty cool.

Kage Baker pretty much agreed with that old axiom – that the road to Hell is paved with good intentions. You can’t really deny that many and many a catastrophe has struck as a direct result of someone trying to do the right thing.

Of course, that doesn’t mean you shouldn’t try. Good intentions are a fine thing. And certainly, bad intentions rarely yield solutions that bring joy to lots of people. The thing to remember, though, is that if you are doing something with good intentions – well, make sure the people you do want to please or improve know about your plan. make sure they want it. Make sure it really will work for a wider good than you, the instigator, getting a wodge of cash or a nice warm fuzzy feeling.

This inattention to the details is why your grandmother gives you Sue Barton, Student Nurse books when you say you want to be a doctor. It’s responsible for a huge spectrum of gifts that are “just like” whatever you wanted, like the electric guitar your Uncle Jim bought at a pawn shop instead of The Guitar Center on Sunset Strip. It’s how you can vote for a park and get a parking lot; vote for a Little League field and get Chavez Ravine. It leads to wide releases of beta versions of software, just so people can have ’em right now!

It underlies all political moves. Somewhere, even in the steaming 7-layer dip of pork, favours, kickbacks,bribes,  etc. – someone actually had the very best of intentions.

I’ve been dealing with updates to my computer programs all morning. They are good programs, I use them a lot, and cautious research and double-checking indicates that all of them so far have been legitimate. No viruses, no Home Users version of Stuxnet: nope, just plain old updates to plain old programs. Someone figured it was a good time to send them all out, apparently.

The problem has been that every time one installs, my system overall grinds to a stop. I don’t say Yes to anything unless I look it over; nothing updates automatically. That usually saves me from the most egregious beta versions; all those additional add-on tool bars that reduce your visible screen to a strip 2 inches high … but not today. All the crap in the world was waiting today, and it all pounced at once.

And even though it is neither very hot nor very windy here, the power keeps going out. They’re only seconds-long brown-outs, but it’s enough to cold-cock the router. And, since the computer has been in the constant midst of updating some damn thing, it takes 20 minutes to get everything synched up and running again.

And the old lady cat – who has never, ever, in two years evinced the slightest interest in my desk – decided to run off the little black cat (who knows the sharing rules) and roll like a maddened tigress on my keyboard. Five hundred words went to the Twilight Zone. I am choosing to believe she was merely being affectionate, and not out to deliberately drive me insane.

So, despite my own good intentions – which involved writing, writing, writing – I have gotten nearly nothing done. But at least I am back at the blog; and, despite the well-meant efforts of the entire freaking Universe, in a pretty good mood for the first time in days. I have iced coffee, and some neat new yarn came in the mail, and I have several brand new horror novels on my Kindle.

I’m going to go wait out the rest of the day with monster stories. I may be losing power and be beset with Home Shopping Channel toolbars and be hunting for the paragraphs that disappeared under the old lady cat’s striped derriere – but at least I don’t have vampires or antedeluvian beasties in the cellar. So things could be worse.

And, as evening thickens and people here fire up their grills and A/C, it could get worse. The power may fail for good. Best to be prepared with some sedentary and non-electronic pastime.

I recommend the same to you, Dear Readers. With the very best of intentions, I assure you.