Resinating digits

"No way... I can't believe I missed that." J stated matter of factly as the three of us hovered over the morbid find. He scanned his hand across the asphalt and magically invoked a sprig of alder to inspect it further. The dried white tip of the finger bone was bleached by the sea, with slivers of sinewed flesh barely holding an oval of fingernail. A small remnant of skin pulled taut and dried reminded me of walking the beach after spawning and seeing the dead humpies lying in the sun.

"I'd guess it was a right pinky by the angle." He picked it up by the bone end, his other hand produced a ziploc bag expertly snapped open with a flick of the wrist, and dropped it in as if he'd been CSI unit trained or something.

He hadn't been trained in anything more than his own form of amateur taxidermy, which mostly consisted of a series of small insects. Kodiak really isn't the hotbed for etymological discoveries, aside from some monster brown spiders that appear in sinks and bathtubs in the spring, not much exists larger than a dime... but he had a pretty good collection of what you could find. Little tiny resin cubes of black beetles, snout beetles, creepy sand fleas, moths, an inchworm, a ladybug and the biggest of all a monster dragonfly sat in a row on a shelf above his desk. We used to tease him incessantly, but being J, you couldn't really tell if he even caught you were talking to him most of the time.

His family moved in to town from Chiniak, when we were in the fourth grade. His dad had a job with fish and wildlife and spent most of his time outside with the fish and wildlife, so we rarely saw him. His mom was a toss-back from the 60s, and as their first child, she named him J, just J, "There was something cosmic about the letter..." she'd say.

He resembled closely Moose from the Archie comics, or Dauber from Coach for a more recent reference. Large, oaf-like, and blond, he didn't get picked on much because of his size... even if he was a little slow on the banter. (He says that happened when he got hit in the head by a block when the crane slipped a couple years back... me and Four remembered him from elementary school however, and not much had changed.)

He is a gentle giant though, the only time we've ever seen him get really fired up was after he'd had one too many harassing substitutes freshman year. Each year it was the same drill the first day of roll call, he expected it... "J, no it doesn't stand for anything. Just J." Mid-year a vicious cold had traveled around the teacher's lounge and sent our English teacher home for a week, the third sub was this mousy brown haired lady who other than her wardrobe didn't seem much older than the girls in the class. She pushed her thick brown owl-like rims up and down when she hit his name, and asked "J... now what does that stand for?"

"Nothing. It's just J," droned J.

"James, Joseph, Jack, John, Jacob?" the sub listed off in a Rapunzel-like lilt.

"No. It's just J," he replied irritated.

"Jebadiah, Jeremy, Jason, Jermain?" she continued, "Johan..."

"J. It is just J.... Just Fucking J." he stood, hit the desktop and clattered back down in an earthquake.

A silence rippled through the room at the shock, as the mousy sub shrunk below the lectern. The quiet was quickly followed by a volley of people chanting "Fucking J", Four and I laughed ourselves out of our seats and somehow into in-school suspension that day.

"So F-ing J, what are you going to do with the finger, shouldn't we take it to the cops?" I asked.

"Nah," said Four, "people lose fingers here all the time, I'd bet they'd just toss it in a pile with all the other lost and found stuff. Let's see if we can find where it came from ourselves."

So as we parted that evening, J took the finger back to his desk, painted it with a resin lacquer to seal it, propped it into place with pins and poured it into its own cube cast.

Back to blogland / a commercial break

I'll get back to a continuation of my saga eventually, now that all my people have left and I can actually sit at my own computer for five minutes. For now a few thoughts on the topic of health care.

With people fired up on both ends of the spectrum, pros and cons and propagandist statements, I'm pretty much lost as to what the plan they are debating over is anymore. Like any committee based creation, you are almost guaranteed to have a hodgepodge of extra sticky notes upon sticky notes with people's special interest addendums and some interesting experimental guesses to work from. I tried to read the thing, but wow, there is a reason I never went into law or politics. I wonder if the people responsible for voting on the bill made it past the table of contents?

Of course after I watched Michael Moore's Sicko, I was all for a universal healthcare plan, or moving to Canada if it came down to it. That is until I reminded myself that using only a few examples can skew the results. (More appropriately one of SO's friends' link made the actual reminder:)


Likelihood is the actual bill will get stomped down before it clears the system, and not much really will change, which isn't really a great thing. Change is needed for a majority of people, I'd think, few people are happy with their current care. What we really need is to find a single supergenius and give them the chore to come up with a perfect plan.

Universal health might not be the correct direction (and yes I realize that isn't really on the table right now). The best opposition for it was the fact that when people are given things for free, they take advantage of it. Free becomes Cheap.

Makes me wonder, despite the extrapolating a small data set part of it, whether the people using the ANCSA started non-profits (like KANA) as their primary healthcare provider are happy with the service they receive as a mini-universal system - or whether they run into the same nightmares of waitlisting services, and delayed surgeries that they mention happen in England and Canada.

It would be utopian if we could follow in a path of medical service where you don't get charged 15000 for a small procedure... if we received free preventative health care, and free preventative dental. For example: I don't mind paying for the fault of my own neglect, but I could have gotten that cavity filled and gotten a decent flouride treatment if I wasn't capped on my family dental plan and couldn't afford the visit at the time. Now I have to shell out $800 out of pocket just for the crown. My own fault, my own neglect... if the money hadn't been on the table, I'd have dragged myself in there.

Well back to my regular non-programming....

Bucket butts and the finger

Looking up from my station at the corner of the lot, the sun had burned off most of the fog bank and was sneaking through a ray or two on to the blacktop. Instantly it seemed we were being enveloped by some spiritual realm, the wet ground drifting smoke from the underworld, and bald eagles flocking to the trees at the top of the hill. It was all a beautiful and surreal moment, bucked by the slap in the face of a slight breeze wafting the scent of BioDry. There's nothing like the smell of rotten fish guts in the morning.

Four's grandfather was the person responsible for teaching us anything we needed to know about anything. He was a short and solid Native man with only small spears of white sticking out of his shock of wild straight hair. His brown hands were working-man weathered, thick and callused, but surprisingly nimble when it came to detail work, like tying flies or crafting sculptures out of driftwood and beachcombing flotsam. His patience was extraordinary as he taught us how to tie and tighten a clove hitch, measure within a millimeter by eye, and keep the same strand of twine rolling the length of the patch.

For small repairs, we'd just crawl around on our knees to dart in a knot or two within the mesh. For more time consuming repairs, or to relieve knees and backs, Gramps built this easel-like structure to hang sections of net on and we'd sit on overturned buckets for hours. When you'd finally rise, you could still feel the bucket ring embedded into your flesh. "Bucket Butt!" was the interjection shouted quite often as the either affliction struck, or someone just needed a break.

(I wonder if the street musicians in the city with drumsticks performing tribal beats while using the same white buckets have or suffer from the same term. If ever I go back there, and see them, I'll have to remember to ask.)

"Bucket Butt!" shouted Four, as he meandered over to the net tote. "Might as well pull the end of this out anyway."

He grabbed the tote that had maybe 30 feet left of gillnet within it and pulled it backwards. Reaching the dirty plastic bottom, he set the tote aside and inspected for any damaged pieces. This part was pretty clean as far as repairs go, the ends seem to get less battle scars, the exact middle is where the majority of holes appear. No one has been able to explain to me why that is. Scanning over the segment, pulling out pieces of sea debris, leaves and whatever else settled to the bottom of the tote, Four shouted to us excitedly, "whoa... check this out!!"

Dashing quickly over the three of us hover in a circle around Four's find. "So what," says J, "just a chunk of fish spine."

"Nope," Four states in a matter-of-fact tone, "what we have here is not a fish spine, fish don't have fingernails."