Farewell, Catholic Boy

Jim Carroll passed away this week. His art touched me as it did to many, and I will always remember how his first record, Catholic Boy inspired me to live for the day.

He was an athlete, junkie, Pulitzer Prize-winner and rock star. Many called him a punk poet, but that label somehow proves too narrow. As his once-girlfriend Patti Smith did and still does, Jim Carroll used punk to animate his avant-poetry and expose both forms to new audiences.
Carroll left us with much more artistic treasure, but that one record means a lot to me. When I heard "People Who Died", "Nothing is True", or the title track, I felt connected with a master storyteller who lived the dark, rebellious, ecstatic post-disco New York culture of the late-70's and early 80's.

I was born in a pool, they made my mother stand
And I spat on that surgeon and his trembling hand
When I felt the light I was worse than bored
I stole the doctor's scalpel and I slit the cord

I was a Catholic Boy. Redeemed in pain, not through joy...

They Smelt of Krispy Kreme

I was awakened this morning at 3:25 by a strange noise. After rising out of bed and investigating I found evidence that someone had been in my back yard, so I dialed 911. An Atlanta police officer soon arrived, and I explained what I saw and heard.
He said he'd take a look in the back yard. That's when I noticed him walking with a pronounced limp.

Uh-oh, House is on the case!
Parked at the curb, he fumbled around his front seat for almost five minutes, when a second patrol car pulled alongside. The first cop says to the other "I can't find my flashlight."
The second cop loans him a spare light, and both finally join me for a looksee out back. The second cop looks like Queen Latifah, and I doubt that either could break the twenty second barrier in a 100-meter sprint.
The second patrol car is still in the street, blocking other vehicles that might try to venture past.
We didn't find anything unusual out back, but I suppose the prowler used those moments to nab the doughnuts from the front seat of Officer Latifah's car.

Miners and Farmers

I recently completed a solar energy “boot camp” in California. It covered topics ranging from the very technical to the philosophical. Some of the most interesting moments came during these philosophical moments, such as the time when the instructor likened us practitioners of solar technology as harvesters of the sun's energy.

Granted, we are not the end-all, be-all “green” solution to our energy needs, but we can satisfy a fair portion of human energy demand through a relatively benign way of tapping a small portion of the Sun's daily energy delivery.

Contrast this with the way that we currently obtain most of our energy, by digging it out of the ground and wreaking all the environmental damage that comes by way of mountaintop removals, oil spills, mercury pollution, CO2 emissions, toxic mine tailings and fly ash, and nuclear reactor wastes.

Oh, to have more energy farmers and fewer miners!

Let Them Eat Advil

Oh, Man, when my beloved Kountrymen have a collective freakout like the teabaggers had in D.C. last weekend, leave it to a group of culture-jammers masquerading as health insurance company executives and Washington lobbyists to at least make it entertaining.

The Billionaires for Wealthcare infiltrated the teabaggers' march wearing black tuxedos, cummerbunds and monocles, thanking the dazed crowds for doing their dirty work for them.

They waived smartly-produced placards bearing slogans like, You deserve the healthcare you can afford, End socialism: privatize Medicare now, and If we ain't broke, don't fix it.

They smoked cigars, sipped champagne and sang patriotic tunes with their own lyrics, such as (to the tune of Battle Hymn Of The Republic)

We bought a bunch of senators and congresspeople too.

They serve our corporate interests and we tell them what to do.

This gravy train will stop the day a healthcare bill gets through.

Let's save the status quo!

Bravo!

CBS: TV Terrorists

The other night, I joined my son as he was watching TV in our den. We watched a drama called Criminal Minds. At first, it seemed to predictably follow the CSI-Law&Order formula, with a crew of buff twentysomething detectives directed by a token grayhair, assisted by the usual array of slick computer databases which always manage to find the right surveillance photo and then zoom in for a clear read of the the crook's license plate.

Criminal Minds managed to distinguish itself by driving the whole shebang off the cliff of decency.

This particular episode showed the bad guy abducting, torturing and dismembering his victims, and then feeding them to a sty full of pigs.

We turned it off, but not before the disgusting images took root in my mind and haunted me for the next day. How, I wonder, do the jerks at CBS explain their exploitive drivel to their family and friends?

Nerd Rock

My musical tastes tend towards the young, loud and snotty, making my favorite new record all the more unusual. This is solidly nerd rock of a bespectacled band with English accents and funny rhymes like

The Prettiest Whistles Won't Wrestle the Thistles undone.

I love the Decemberists' The Hazards of Love and all the elegance, wry humor and curiosity that it embodies. Listen to this record openly and in its entirety, as it tells an English folk-style tale in a succession of thematic variations. Savor its masterful arrangement of banjo, a children's choir, pedal steel, accordion, electric guitar power chords, and pipe organ. You will fall in love as I did.

Sunrise

I love my new job working as a solar energy system installer completing (with a little help from my friends) my first project this week! An Atlanta homeowner now has both hot water and electricity courtesy of old Sol.

The new photovoltaic system has 14 roof-mounted panels which are connected via a voltage inverter to the house's electrical system. This is a netmetering device, which means that the homeowner continues to purchase electricity from the local electric utility. The panels generate clean, no-cost electricity that displaces an equivalent amount of dirty electricity that the homeowner would otherwise have purchased from the electric utility company. At any given moment when the solar panels are producing more than the homeowner can consume, the extra electricity flows out to the utility grid, and the home owner's electric meter will run backwards!

The new solar thermal system has two panels on the roof filled with thin tubing that uses the sun's energy to heat a glycol fluid the same way a garden hose left out in the sun heats water. Our system pumps the glycol, which can reach temperatures of over 220 degrees Fahrenheit, through a pipe to a heat exchanger in the basement where it produces hot water.

The hot water then flows into an insulated storage tank until needed. Much like a conventional water heater, this tank contains an electrical heating element to boost the water temperature whenever the available sunlight cannot satisfy all the homeowner's needs.

The finished project is pictured here. The homeowner intends to remove some or all of the tree so that the panels are not shaded.

My job is to help people and organizations satisfy their energy needs using economical, environmentally-sound solar technologies. This week I worked on my customer's roof installing the panels, feeling the sun's intense warmth and an urgency to do more to capture it for our benefit.

I love this work!