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I spent too many of my addled high school and college years staring at Roger Dean paintings. Staring at these, you could get lost in reveries of microscopic subway networks, elven mineshafts, fossilized toothpaste. You want to figure out what made them, and why they live in the tide pools of Malibu. They are an invitation to wonder.
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Faith is an odd, powerful force – a combination of yearning and belief in the unbelievable. Prayer cards are little faith amplifiers, allowing you (if you believe) to draw on the faith of dead saints whose faith was more powerful, and to ask for them to help. They’re tools for bootstrapping yourself to grace with more effective prayer. Here’s what you’re supposed to say to St. Francis Xavier (namesake of my Catholic high school) when you want something in the world:
Prayer of Saint Francis Xavier (attributed to Fr. Marcello Mastrilli, S.J (17th cc.)
Most amiable and most loving Saint Francis Xavier, in union with thee I reverently adore the Divine Majesty. I rejoice exceedingly on account of the marvelous gifts which God bestowed upon thee. I thank God for the special graces He gave thee during thy life on earth and for the great glory that came to thee after thy death. I implore thee to obtain for me, through thy powerful intercession, the greatest of all blessings – that of living and dying in the state of grace. I also beg of thee to secure for me the special favor I ask. In asking this favor I am fully resigned to the Divine Will. I pray and desire only to obtain that which is most conducive to the greater glory of God and the greater good of my soul.
Feast Day: December 3.
And maybe that’s one of the problems I’ve had with organized religion – people believe that God can change their lives on earth. I’m cynical enough to believe in an observant God rather than an interventionist deity. (S)He went to all the trouble to set this huge, complex organism in motion, and sat back to watch. You’re on your own in the world, blessed with the family and friends you deserve, and you have to make the best of them and everything else. A little four-color, gilt-edged card of a long-dead saint waving a cross around may be an anchor of faith for some folks, but it’s just an artifact to me.
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It’s begun. Pentax denies it but you know it’s only a matter of time before film technology vanishes. With it will go shirt-pocket axes like this Olympus XA, a little fistful of Swiss-watch precision. Designed and built in the early 1980s, it’s about the size of a pack of cigarettes, comes with a teensy little flash unit and has a quirky 35mm lens that captures crisp, bright images, then viciously vignettes their corners like a bad case of cataracts. Shooting with it reminds me of my Dad‘s old 1950s-vintage Zeiss Ikon 35mm rangefinder, which he bought in the Navy PX and let me use. Two images appear – a yellow ghost of your picture floats in the viewfinder and you shift the focus ring back and forth until the images reconcile – and you squeeze the button in a split-second flood of excitement, anticipation and hope.
This 
Fossil tech, the earbone of a giant. Fifty years ago, thousands of operators huddled at thousands of switchboards, plugging and unplugging calls from millions of jacks at the Bell Telephone Company nearest you. The nationwide American Telephone and Telegraph conglomerate was as close as anyone had come to building a nationwide monopoly without inviting antitrust litigation. It wasn’t until the mid-80s that lawsuits from a put-upon public finally brought down mighty Ma Bell and splintered her like an enormous, brittle tree, her branches taking wild, chaotic root in the hundreds of telcos that have sprung up since. Chances are, if you called information back then, the operator was talking on one of these. Like everything else Bell made, it is extremely durable and thanks to the (now missing) wire headstrap, reasonably comfortable. My first six years as a newspaper reporter, I was on this stupid macho head trip, convinced that only obit writers and women wore headsets for interviews, real reporters crunched the phone ‘twixt shoulder and ear while typing and drawling from the side of their mouths, “Uh-huh. Yeah. Yeah. Is that riiiight.” After a lovely bout of crippling neck spasms and trips to the chiropractor, I relented, and began using one of these while at the 
Squirt guns were forbidden in 6th grade. It didn’t stop me from collecting them. I had two favorites – the “secret” gun shaped like brass knuckles cast in plastic that was army-man green (you could make it all the more secret by snapping off the knuckleguard so that the only thing visible was the nozzle peeking up out of your fist); and the “sneaky” model, whcih had a little pivot wheel on the business end that you turned at a 90-degree angle so you could look like you were innocently aiming the gun away from someone until you soaked them point-blank. This month is birthday season among our kid friends, which means an endless parade of goodie-bags into the house, bearing trinkets, gadgets and crap. This one has teeth.
Chrome-plating came into vogue as a protective measure, rust-blocker, bulwark against time. Before long, it was appropriated as 
Utter destruction and evil in the palm of your hand. What sets this apart from the vast majority of 
This is made of the very thing it represents. This represents the very thing of which it is made. Symbolic cannibalism, the Ourobouros myth made wood. Just as pop will eat itself so too does meaning applied to something rob it of the potential for meaning something greater. Perhaps someone at the wooden trainset factory cut this by hand from a sheet of half-inch pine with a coping saw, sanded it smooth, hand-stained it and painted it with three coats of clear lacquer. Maybe it was die-stamped and triple-dipped by machine. No matter. It’s just a tree. And it’s just a “tree.” And it’s “just a tree.”
I was a theater geek in 
In 
Here’s another amulet of urban protection, rendered useless by my faulty memory. It’s difficult to say how many of these I’ve owned over the years, for school lockers, bikes, gym lockers, strongboxes. Without the combination, it becomes a sturdy paperweight, thumb-twiddler, hammer-in-a-pinch. Back when I used them full-time, I wish there had been something like Master’s new 
Immense in the imagination, the 
The 
Magpie compulsion moved my fingers to gather copper brads, steel bearings, red wire and brass fittings and fill a test tube with them. That I had test tubes to spare is damning evidence enough of the relentless subroutine commanding the part of my brain that collects heavy little objects. But the fact that I had corks to fit them – and that I then contrived to drill one out and fit it with a Bic Stic ballpoint insert is proof that I have a certifiable tinker’s curse. I can stop any time I want.
Back in college one night, we saw a wall of smoke coming around the corner on Halloween. Being a wannabe photojournalist at the time, and thinking, “fire” I grabbed my camera and ran – straight into a cloud of tear gas. Needles in the eyes, claws in the lungs, I doubled over, immediately capacitated along with about a dozen other people who had fallen victim to someone’s asshole idea of a prank. I spent the next half hour coughing and weeping the shit out of my system, sucking down Cokes at the pizzeria. Cops have some pretty impressive nonlethal weapons at their disposal. Here’s another one: Fired from shells that fit standard-issue riot guns, these don’t incapacitate, but they definitely sting and deter. I’ve never experienced them first-hand – these were fired at a press-and-public show-and-tell day for the Ventura County Sheriff’s station in Thousand Oaks a few years ago, along with bean-bag projectiles, which are shot from fat 37-mm shells from the police equivalent of grenade launchers They had teargas shells, too. Fortunately, they chose not to demonstrate those.
Somebody in a factory somewhere peeled two cast-vinyl frog halves out of a still-hot mold. The air reeked of curing toxins, raw polymers. She glued them together with adhesive or heat, and took up a spraycan or an airbrush to dust the top of the thing (along with all of its brothers, maybe laid out on a tray) with lurid, poisonous red. She let them dry a bit, maybe while pouring the next batch of vinyl, and then returned; she considered the red trayful of red frogs, the red under her nails, the smell of it in her nose, for only a second or two – likely, her boss was counting her output – and then grabbed a brushful of black: quick socks for the feet, and a couple dozen spots down its back. On to drying and packaging they went, and back to the cycle went she – mixing the vinyl again.
The aesthetic of brushed aluminum and blackout metal is as distinct a flavor of modern physical culture as gingham and daisies, bakelite and chintz, mahogany and stained leather. A wave ripples through me as I write this, and I flash on alternate molecular realities – strawberry roan gelding motorcycles; rocket gantries of hardwood and stucco, carpeted with bokharas and kilims; tricycles of flesh, bone and hair, and sneakers of diamondplate steel. Quick – an earthquake renders the earth around your house into Jell-O – literally. Liquefaction soil becomes dessert, a sticky-sweet confection into which the foundation of your 30-ton house begins to sink like the spoon in a playful child’s bowl. What do you grab before you bolt – the album of family photos rendered in colored sand? The satchel made of baseball mitts? Your 3.2-megapixel digital-zoom canteen? Your herbed salt-pork laptop containing your life’s work and your exhaustive research records on the mysterious transmogrification of all matter? Maybe you grab the last real thing you can see – a hard, cold, efficient little pocket telescope – so that you can bolt to higher ground and watch from safety as the house sinks beneath the shimmering green surface with a wet, sucking roar.
Too meek for bones through my septum, too square for even tattoos at that point, I was a square, square newspaperman, covering murder trials, city council meetings, disasters and defense contractor fraud for the 
There was no archetype before this one. Not Rossum’s Usuform Robots, not 
A Navajo silversmith cast this in sterling silver. The Dine (DIN-eh) as they prefer to call themselves, make a living doing business with each other, ranching, running stores and schools and businesses – and with tourists crossing tribal lands, by selling crafts like this from roadside stands in and around Monument Valley and the Four Corners area. From the tourist’s side of the equation, it’s a tiny glint of cunning grace in the dusty, ragged glory of a southwest road trip. From the artisan’s viewpoint, one I can only guess that it’s a symbol of considerable significance, crafted with industry and art, in a form that’s easy to duplicate and sure to sell for a good price.
This is an artifact from my time 
I am an inveterate disassembler. After building a veritable fleet’s worth of 
Finding these rooted me fast, stabbing a map of the gargantuan Darwinian cosmos with a tiny pushpin labeled “you are here.” The 
There is something narcotic about playing 
My very good friend, Steve Marquez, a sharp, funny, intensely humane reporter for the 
He is Russian, I think. Sure, he’s a 
The U.S. military detonated at least nine nuclear bombs on little 
Mystery takes peculiar forms. Sometimes it’s the center of war or religious zealotry. Sometimes it’s an upperclass strange-o in a deerstalker hat and houndstooth cape poncing about with a magnifying glass. And sometimes mystery glints from your palm as an almost impracticably small, yet completely functional tool. This might have been a manufacturer’s sample, or it might have been exceptionally useful in a shop specializing in building miniature balsa-wood architectural models. It is exquisitely machined, with a drop-forged, hand-finished body and a cast-nickel set screw that controls the sharp steel ruler’s ability to slide. And it sings – of dado, miter, rabbet, dovetail and joints that might have been.
These have the feel of a Hammacher-Schlemmacher wannabe – a must-have gadget for the avid sports fan or optics freak. You can picture him sitting there with a pair of ’em on at Dodger Stadium, replaying the braying marketing boilerplate in his mind between innings – “Hundreds of uses! For birdwatching, auto racing – and at any sporting event, enjoy the sensation fo being right on the field!” He reaches up to fiddle with the diopters, swiveling the well-greased objectives to bring the pop fly into sharp focus in the precision-ground glass lenses. Congratulating himself on his savvy purchase, he turns to his buddy – Hey, did you see (extreme blurry closeup of nosehair) GAAAAHHH!” They came in a hand-stitched leather case lined with red felt.
Miranda turned 2 last August, and we had a pirate birthday party – little eyepatches, telescopes and riches for all. The stuff is flashy, shiny gold pieces, cast-molded and plated with the same mirror-bright stuff they put on lowrider hardware. The inscription is beyond cryptic: AVAG CO BEPSIG CHINA a declaration of fealty to the hollow-eyed, corkscrew-maned ur-Grecian god thereon. These things are all over the house now.
Who doesn’t love the Mini-Mag? It’s teensy, shiny, waterproof, virtually indestructible and throws narrow-to-oceanic beams with all the candlepower its single ittybitty AAA battery can muster. This is actually a sort of corporate gift that I designed the logo for, to be given away at the 
This extraordinary electronic musical instrument/noisebox handmade by 
These four men were very tight, probably somewhere around 100 years ago. They had adventures, hard jaws, snappy clothes, and a little folding money to spend on fripperies such as keepsake photographs. This one is about 3.25×2.25″ and I found it for eight bucks in an antiques shop in southern Oregon. Flaked and rusted at the edges, the emulsion soft and creamy to the touch, it carries a mythic power and intimacy that speaks of wild times and brushes with the law.
I spent the afternoon as Mister Plumber. The odd, unkillable odor in the bathroom had grown too fierce to bear, and I had to pull the toilet to replace the wax ring I apparently mis-installed five or six months ago when I put down the linoleum. Always a thrill. After scraping all the stinking wax from around the reeking hole of the downpipe and bleaching the crap out of the floor and every gasket surface, I put on the new ring, caulked the rim of the toilet foot and every joint between tank and bowl and mounted everything back up again. Less smell now (though still some – maybe the seat needs changing.) I then turned to the friggin’ tub train, where the mechanism’s become hopelessly jammed. I pull it out – and true to the cut-rate tacky cheapest-possible-materials aesthetic of the previous homeowner, the whole thing’s made of goddamn 
This is a weird, weird object, a stocking gift from my lovely wife. 
Supernovas, star clusters, constellations, nebulas, amoebas, colonies of light, iridescent visual noise all clamor for attention inside this two-pound chunk of handcrafted glass, a gift from my folks a few years back. This sort of thing used to be called a “paperweight.” But that was before we climbed down out of the trees and moved online to grunt and posture and draw our own likenesses on virtual walls with digital feces, forever forsaking the piles of papers now blowing willy-nilly about our desks. This thing would deliver only a glancing blow in a hand-to-hand combat with a burglar, I’ve often thought while basking in harmful VDT radiation late at night. But if I got a chance to line up for a good shot, I’d probably be able to give him a rollicking headache before he got his screwdriver in me.
Made an indeterminate number of years ago by the Reed Small Tool Works (!) of Worcester Mass., this exquisitely machined device measures the width or diameter of just about anything from 1/1000th of an inch to 1 inch. Its English-only scale speaks of the American industrial age, before the tyrannical sameness of the metric system and the pixelization of all design, when men would turn out solid, crisp machinery on lathes, presses and forge-fed steam-powered anvils. Goantiques.com says it’s worth 
So much wonder in such a tiny thing: clockwork, little rubber tyres, a flywheel-driven motor, Bauhaus chassis, porthole-style wheels. This is one of a series of about a dozen clockwork toys designed by Brazilian toymaker Chico Bicalho and made by 
Creeping out of some long-forgotten Disney picture, the ghoul is a perfect caricature of the ominous, an everyboogeyman. He skulks forward on half-bent knees and thick-soled clodhoppers that peek from beneath his heavily draped shroud, his three-fingered (and one would assume leather-gloved) hands menacing, ready to grab and ravish. He is made in China. Get down low enough and look up at him and dread pours off him in waves with a low, throbbing negative energy. But he’s just a little rubber fellow, not two inches high. He has an alter-ego, who I’ll blog on later.
The 
I’m feeling rather sympatico with this object today. 
Retrenching today, pulling in all tentacles, checking for bruises, briefing the crew, counting cans in the fallout shelter, inventorying ammunition. This skull was a self-chosen birthday gift from Kristina a few years ago. It’s a thing of exceptional beauty and efficiency, though it is not heavy physically, weighing just a few ounces. She said tonight, “I’m really impressed you’re making a concerted run at 
This is one of 
I found these for a buck-fifty in 
Pliers – cutters – file – small screwdriver – tweezers – big screwdriver – Phillips screwdriver – canopener – knife … fetish object. It folds to a small, dense block of articulated titanium and clips to a keyring. It is a perfect machine. Okay, so it needs a serrated blade or a corkscrew. It is utility and adaptibility distilled to gemlike proportions. We visited 
