Wriphe.com: The Blog Archives

My dreams lately have been full of shootings, stabbings, and death, but I wouldn't say I was having nightmares. Any outright horror in them has been subdued, like in a classic Hollywood crime story. I generally feel tense, not afraid. Using the language of movie genres, maybe I should call them suspense-mares.

One thing they seem to have in common is that many are set or begin in Victorian houses chock-full of bedrooms with dark-stained wood wall paneling, well-worn hardwood floors, cast-iron beds, chamber pots, and ornately carved fireplaces with roaring fires. And when I say houses full of bedrooms, I mean exactly that: the only rooms in these houses are bedrooms. Even the hallways, stairwells, and closets seem to have been adapted to bedrooms.

To be clear: these houses are not scary to me. I'm not trapped; I can leave the building any time I want. And I almost always approve of the tasteful layout, furnishings, decor. I'd willingly live in any of them. (Though, as my family will attest, I have unusual taste in residential architecture. Mom has long called eclectic houses with outdated designs "Walter Houses." Finances aside, I've never been able to understand why anyone would want to live in a house that looked like anyone else's.)

According to a quick Googling of the dream symbology of bedrooms, "a bedroom in a dream symbolizes your private inner self." Okay, if you say so. But what if it's all bedrooms all the way down? Am I just an especially deep person? Or so narcissistic that I'm just a Droste effect of navel gazing to infinity?

If my brain is trying to tell me something, I wish it'd just come out and say it.

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Breaking news! My 2002 Oldsmobile Intrigue, which cost me $1,728.86 in mechanic bills to keep running in 2024, has already cost me an additional $1,254.43 in the first six weeks of 2025 alone (for valve gasket covers, power window assembly switch, and wheel bearings). And it *still* needs that new set of tires. This is becoming a problem.

My first car, by which I mean the first car to which I held the title, was a 1985 Crown Victoria Country Squire station wagon. Mom gave it to me when I went to college. (She bought herself a Mazda Miata. Mid-life crisis much?) I drove it until the transmission broke. It wasn't the only thing on the car not working, and I made the decision to sell it rather than spend thousands I did not have to repair it. We all loved it, and in hindsight, I might have done things differently, but maybe not. I'm sure I really thought I was making the best decision I could at the time.

My second car was a used 1990 Honda Acura. It soon developed a leaky sun roof that was more expensive to repair than the Country Squire's transmission. I didn't fix it, either. Eventually the cabin smelled of mildew which I tried to hide with vanilla air fresheners. You can begin to understand why my fourth car was an open-top 1995 Jeep Wrangler.

(Honorable mention to my third car, a very '90s burgundy and beige pregnant egg, a 1992 Chevrolet Caprice Classic, which I inherited from my late grandmother. I didn't keep it long before selling it to my father after he wrecked whatever his latest car was. I borrowed it back from him for a 24-hour road-trip down to Jacksonville for a Jaguars/Dolphins Monday Night Football game on October 12, 1998. That trip is most memorable for B) the terrible headache I had on the entire 8-hour drive home because my poverty and anxiety kept me from stopping to get anything to eat, and A) my yelling "I'm going to kill him" at the highway patrolman who pulled us over for a broken taillight. The "him" in this case was Dad, who had assured me the car was in perfect condition for driving, but the cop certainly didn't know that. Thankfully, my companion on that trip, Matt, has always been a fast talker, and we're both white.)

The point here is that I really need to start thinking about throwing in the towel on the Oldsmobile. Is it time I draw a line in the sand? How much is too much? If I have to be spending so much money on a car, I'd rather be spending it on the Jeep.

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Questions from Hannah, part 2:

Why do you like cemeteries so much?

Because they are awesome. You can keep your forests and "grand" canyons. I'll take a cemetery any day.

Cemeteries are a reminder that the world wasn't built for me, that life only has the meaning we give it, that the journey is always more important than the destination. Memento mori!

When built right, the Victorian way, cemeteries are a delightful combination of storybook and park, usually filled with a bunch of spectacularly crafted art. As a bonus, most living people treat cemeteries with a serene reverence you don't find anywhere else, so cemeteries are simultaneously full of people and very quiet.

Truthfully, I think the idea of burying people in boxes in the ground is kind of ridiculous, but I love, love, love the stone monuments left above ground to mark their territory. If nothing else, those tombstones say "I was here," and that sort of yelling into the void of eternity speaks to me. What is a tombstone but a very succinct and enduring blog post?

And why do you call them cemeteries instead of graveyards?

Because that's what they are.

In the modern Western tradition, a graveyard is a type of cemetery that is on a church grounds while a cemetery is a community's common burial ground not necessarily connected to a specific church. For example, my town's local burial ground (established 1833) is officially Oak Hill Cemetery, though there are plenty of churches around here with their own much smaller graveyards. It's my experience that cemeteries are often more welcoming to visitors (and usually contain more delightfully ostentatious monuments) than graveyards, but I've been in plenty of delightful graveyards, too.

Personally, I can't say as I like the word "graveyard." A yard of graves sounds so very bleak, while there's almost something celebratory in a "cemetery." I like both of those much more than I like the euphemism "memorial park." The government should make you explicitly declare if you have a park full of corpses.

Looking at Online Etymology Dictionary, it would appear that both "graveyard" and "cemetery" have historically referred to more or less the same thing, so their use prior to the 19th century probably derives from whatever languages were spoken by a region's ancestors. And I suppose that maybe you live somewhere where "graveyard" has remained the preferred term, which is fine by me. Regional differences are fun!

You often mention the fact that you work at night and sleep through the morning; is your brain really more alert in the middle of the night?

I do think I do my best coding and most often find myself "in the zone" between 1 and 3AM, but I don't know if I would say that I am especially more alert in the darkness than I am in sunlight — I'm no vampire. I really like the late night because everyone else is asleep. For one thing, it's useful for my work: coding is easier without distractions, and it's easier to update websites, databases, and video game files when they aren't being as widely used. But I chose my occupation, not the other way around. I just like being the only person around. It's like the entire world becomes a cemetery, and you already know how I feel about that.

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Knock, knock.

Who's there?

Henry and Louis.

Henry and Louis who?

This is no joke! Just let us in, already.

If you adopt a puppy, the fun never stops. Neither, apparently, does the rain.

Louis bolted out the door while I was letting Henry into the yard solo to take care of his business, and when the pair of poodles eventually decided they were tired of rolling in every mud puddle they could find, this is what they looked like when they finally asked to come back in.

I don't think I've ever mentioned it here on the blog, but once upon a time, while I was running an errand in downtown Newnan with July and Victoria in the Jeep, a car pulled into the parking space beside me and the woman inside said she just wanted to say hello to the girls. "I breed poodles," she explained. "I used to breed whites, but now I only breed dark-colored dogs. I'll never have a white poodle again; it's just too much trouble to keep them white."

That's proving especially true for Henry. His favorite color is Georgia Red Clay.

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2020 killed my dog.

July, R.I.P.

July beat cancer for the first time in 2016 after having her toe amputated. She beat it a second time when she had a portion of her ear removed in 2019. This past July, she had a mammary tumor removed. Three times seems to be the limit.

In late October, she got wobbly in the legs. We crossed our fingers that it was a spinal problem. She initially responded to treatment, but she took a turn for the worse about two weeks ago when she lost even the ability to stand with assistance. It was downhill from there.

So long as she was lucid and had an appetite, I felt it was my duty to support her however I could — I couldn't justify killing my dog simply because she had become inconvenient. But I realized late last night that we had probably reached the end of the line. (I'll save the gory details except to say that cancer can be a real bitch.) I had her euthanized this afternoon, and she died in my arms.

For the better part of the past decade, July had been my shadow. Her sister, Victoria, wanted to be near me; July *needed* to be near me. She followed me everywhere and complained to whoever would listen when she couldn't see me. I can't blame her. Who else was she going to get to take her for walkies or hand her a slice of pizza?

I already feel like I'm missing something when I walk into a room and don't hear the tappa-tappa of toenails trailing behind me. I keep looking for baby, and she's not there anymore and never will be again. That will take some getting used to.

Thanks to Kelley for bringing her into my life and thanks to Mom for being a substitute Walter when necessary over the years. Thanks to her vet, Jeff, for helping me keep her around as long as we did. (Fourteen years is a good, long life for a standard poodle!) And especially thanks to July for doing your best to make 2020 bearable for as long as you could.

In happier times

I loved my girls.

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Saturday was Donald Trump's 100th day in office. Even friendly Fox News reported that President Trump failed pretty badly at implementing candidate Trump's "100-day action plan to Make America Great Again." Governing is hard.

I was prepared to write a post about what a failure Trump is according to his own professed metrics, but I'm not going to. Not only have you probably heard it a hundred times elsewhere already, but I'm no longer certain that Trump is such a loser. Recent news reports agree that the man has accomplished something no other president has ever done: Trump installed a Coca-Cola dispensing button on the White House Resolute Desk.

The Resolute Desk is 138 years old. Built from the timbers of the H.M.S. Resolute, the desk was a gift from Queen Victoria to President Rutherford B. Hayes. It was placed in the Oval Office by Jackie Kennedy, and has been used by most commanders-in-chief since. However, it took master builder Trump to perfect it.

Technically, the button isn't new, and it doesn't dispense Coke by itself. (We're talking about the White House, not a 7-11.) It's the butler call button. All Trump has done is issue specific instructions that when a taxpayer-paid manservant responds to his summons, he should always bring a glass of ice-cold liquid perfection. That's true leadership.

Frankly, I'm glad to hear that our president has a Coke dispensing butler. I doubt Trump knows how to open a pop-top can, and I sure wouldn't want him to cut himself. He's got to play golf this weekend.

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We have finally, mercifully, almost reached the end of 2016.

It seems every other website is taking a look back at what you, the reading public, must want to read. Far be it for me to deny the public what it wants, so let's look at the most-read posts at Wriphe.com in each month of the past year (per Google Analytics).

January 19: Poodle cartoons are always popular, especially when I'm making jokes about amputated toes.
February 24: I gushed like a school girl over my love affair with Fallout 4. I have since beaten the game, so we've gone our separate ways. However, I'll always cherish our time together.
March 16: I retired one blog tag and created a new, more appropriate one. (You're welcome, Dan.)
April 18: I ridiculed Georgia fans who attended a glorified UGA football practice session for free. Joke's on me. The entire 2016 season was essentially a practice for future years, and I was dumb enough to pay to watch it.
May 12: Victoria died.
June 15: The conclusion to my 2016 Health Insurance Saga. In summary, I lost.
July 16: I rambled at length about junk telephone calls. My solution was that we should all pay more for phone service. Remember, if telephones were illegal, only criminals would have telephones.
August 11: Chewie died. (2016 was a terrible year for dogs, too.)
September 23: Hmm. September 23? I don't recall anything happening on that day. Nope. Nothing comes to mind. Let's move along.
October 23: An addendum to my 2016 Health Insurance Saga. In summary, I lost even worse.
November 9: I expressed my, er, dissatisfaction at the outcome of the presidential election.
December 2: I reminded you that deer are the enemy. I trust that you didn't need that reminder. How many did you kill this season?