The incident involved a frog. We lived in a house at the end of a canal, and among other marvels of sea-creaturedom I saw countless frogs, some of them blooming out of tadpoles and others seemingly born fully-formed.

Leopard frogs were a favorite of mine. I still get a little pique of excitement when I think of how brightly colored they were, and how fast and far the Leopards could jump. Other frogs waddled around in a comparatively slovenly manner but to me the Leopard was sleek and smart.

Enter, then, what remains the biggest frog I have ever seen. As big as a basketball this monster sat like a water-filled balloon outside the garage, on dirt behind a bush, not moving and not even seeming to think. Its broad, frowning mouth reached from one end of its body to the other and its motionless eyes stared, seeming to follow me even as they seemed not to move. Its too-fall feet seemed like irrelevant nubs, like insults. How could they lift something so disproportionately huge?

This was not a fun frog. I could not play with it or watch it jump around. I waited for it to return my stares in a sentient-seeming way. I tried to imagine playing with this unwieldy beast, and visions of trying to roll this blubberful blob around in the grass or on the driveway didn't make me laugh, they made me sour. In my squeaky little voice I muttered "Oh fuck you" to this mass, summoning all the disdain a 2nd-grader could muster.

I stepped away from the playless, warty globule, feeling defeated, feeling I had been schooled with a blunt, ugly lesson, feeling like I must have owed this frog something for it to have made such a crassly torpid appearance in my little life.

Like anything digital, the success of a digital piano depends first on its convenience, then its quality. Digital photography overwhelmed film photography in large part for its convenience, this in the same way that digital audio formats will make plastic compact discs obsolete, and this after said CDs made LP records a relic -- though I believe this latter shift was less of a response to consumer demand than to the needs of the recording industry.

Digital pianos have seen a far slower rate of progress compared to other digital products. This is because the convenience that they offer has not yet become a footnote to their quality. Quality is still poor, though digitals offer other features that make them useful and fun. Yet, as other observers have said, it is simply astonishing that digital keyboards and piano-like instruments have been around for decades and yet there is not a single such instrument you can point to and say that that defines the standard for non-acoustic keyboard instruments. Digital pianos carry the stigma of compromise. Digital pianos are disposable and must be replaced regularly (the marketing term for this is "upgraded") to keep pace with rapid obsolescence that is synonymous with gadgetry.

"Real" pianos rarely appeared in the context of an upgrade scenario. Practicing Liszt concerti on a spinet might suggest an upgrade is in order but for the most part a pianist who blamed their problems on the instrument was just making excuses.

Like a lot of kids at the time I tried to swim like that, my only payoff for the effort being the cackles of my sister, who thought (rightly) that I looked ridiculous. I thrashed and wrangled in the water, never staying fully submerged in the shallow end of an Olympic-sized swimming pool at the University of South Florida.

I can swim but not well. I lied about it in grade school, knowing I could not swim but imagining the ability would natively arise from my bones. In the 3rd grade the Physical Education coach announced that the class would swim in the pool. I was asked if I knew how to swim, and I must have said yes, either intentionally lying or simply not knowing -- I don't remember which but I think it was a mix of the two.

I swam in the Mekong River in Laos but that was different. There were others around to guide me and, in the Mekong where we swam, one did not just swim shark-bait style. It was more like a big hot tub, and while it was deep enough that one could drown it was too shallow and too rugged for the type of swimming one does in pools.

That was my revelation that hot Florida day, when I jumped from a diving board into the shallow end of the school and nearly drowned. I got my footing on the floor of the pool and stood in the water, the coach shouting "Thomas, I thought you said you could swim." "I thought I could" was my response, and it was not a lie. I did not know that swimming in a pool would be so different from swimming in the Mekong. I did not say that, though, as the other 24 kids in the class listened in on the conversation. Everyone stopped. Thomas couldn't swim.

My grade school evidently had no time for this, so I had to go to a program at a local college. This coincided with the airing of Man From Atlantis and as my swimming skills improved my enthusiasm for Patrick Duffy's unique swimming motions reached imitative heights. I failed, of course, but I wonder how many others succeeded in this unusual movement.

It was not in an English or Literature class, though, where my knowledge of krill was the tonic that sated the confusion that filled the room when the teacher asked us what whales ate.

He asked the question more artfully, I think, but the he asked this question to show that enormous whales do not generally eat enormous things, but oodles and oodles (and oooooodles) of tiny things.

The question was asked and I saw the others in the class flipping madly through their class notes and textbooks, whispering "What the hell do whales eat? Huh?"

Confidently I raised my right hand and, with the knowledge of one about to deliver a shocking bolt of news I raised both hands in a half-halleluiah gesture and said "Krill."

Every single student turned to stare at me for a moment. The teacher was a bit chagrined, not because I knew the answer but because no one else did.

This was a science class but I knew the word from crossword puzzles, not from studying.

A call-in discussion about printers prompted a college professor to call in and say that she requires her students to have printers in their dorm rooms -- as opposed to using a printer at the school's computing center or at a copy shop.

A printer (and more significantly its expensive and over-packaged cartridges) was described by an on-air guest as an unnecessary expense for college students, but the college prof. called to disagree. She said that her students' quality of writing and scholarship improved dramatically when they proof-read and edited documents by taking pen to paper versus editing on screen. You only think you are editing on a screen, she said, and you are not really writing as well as you think you are.

I think about these things a lot, that these cheap plastic keyboards and the digital output they produce are insignificant tools of the craft that establish little connection between the mind and the product.

Another radio commentator last year dismissed Internet blogger death-threats against him as "hyperventilating at the keys", a phrase that could have been applied to the earliest BBS malcontents as easily as today's drive-by insulters who routinely litter comment boards with disembodied anger.

Is it fraud, though? Does lack of depth in public discourse rise to the level of fraud? Does the culture of digital-only content -- an environment whose anger is typically vanquished by in-person debates on the same subjects -- does this digital-only culture constitute intellectual fraud? What about bogus research scooped up as fact by thousands? Is it fraud to seed public web sites with seemingly harmless nonsense and watch as that nonsense travels?

A college cutie of mixed heritage, she claimed not to know all the nations and cultures represented in her DNA. She knew she had Cherokee, Japanese, and Mediterranean in her bloods, but other nationalities were mostly speculation. There was talk of a British ancestor who married an Egyptian, and through that a purported connection to old, old, old money. There was also known to be Eskimo blood in the lineage but details were sketchy.

That was her story. It was her only story. She repeated it faithfully, with faith to who I do not know. She never embellished by adding other exotic nationalities or peoples. I suppose embellishments were unnecessary but to me it seemed like an inevitable temptation to lie. One must keep their lies in order, though, and I do not think Diana had the self-referential complexity for maintaining a swarm of lies.

She was beautiful, though, and at that age beauty still influenced my infatuations. In her litanies which outlined her heritage I tried to dig deeper, to find more, I listened for fresh nuance and distraction which would allow me to change the subject, to take another path. The farthest afield I got was her dreams. but her dreams were routine, the stuff of textbooks, dreams which expressed common anxieties and everyday concerns.

One night I felt a breakthrough. She stood and walked to the kitchen sink. She turned on the water. When she turned on the water it leaked from the faucet, down the length of the fixture to the Hot and Cold dials. From there the water crawled along a crack in the countertop and it somehow leaped to a table, where it splayed into a veined lightning-bolt formation, dispersing itself in several directions and eventually slowing and stopping its growth.

It did not grow wisteria-like but the water's spontaneous sprawl was the spark of romance for which I hungered. To me it expressed Diana's character, or the character I longed for. She let the water leak in this way, I thought, as a tacit signal of deep meaning, as a wordless representation of her winsome character. Words, I decided, were inferior tools for her.

A newspaper advertisement from a car dealership listed several vehicles for sale, with specifications for each. 4-wheel drive was one feature. AM/FM/Cassette was another.

But one feature stuck in my mind as being excessive. That feature was "Ice Cold Air". At 13 years old I thought to myself "Who needs 'Ice Cold Air?' We, as a people, do not need 'Ice Cold Air' in our vehicles."

I imagined myself standing up for this cause, embodying the common-sense antidote to this particular excesses of marketing and American language.

Ice cold air, I would explain to a grade school auditorium occupied by my 3 followers, is too much. Icicles form on the windows, obstructing your view of the road. Your breath is smoky-looking vapor. To simply drive to the grocery store on a hot day you need a winter coat and thermal underwear. And are our vehicles designed for 100-degree weather on the outside and 30-degree temperatures inside?

I would wait for a response from the audience. There would be none. I would thrash in my mental cud, unable to fit it in my mouth for clearer articulation but never backing down from my conviction that car dealers advertising "Ice Cold Air" promote decadence and

As a child I had fantasies of myself as a politician or self-appointed activist hunting for micro-issues, starved for unique problems to solve. Matters of excess seemed particularly easy prey for me, and I find that today I still see conspicuous wealth and concentrated abundance as targets of derision.

The fantasies endure, though -- fantasies of educating the public about how tummals of Ice Cold Air in your vehicle will suffocate you with its wastefulness.

Today I imagine summoning the articulata to describe the fringes of waste that litter every human dealing, every social and mental transaction. Everything generates waste. Every thought, every gesture, every deflection of memory.

My mind wandered far and deep on some of those long drives. Among the smells of cow shit and polecat I remember certain structural elements of the Interstate that seemed exciting or evocative to me. These were new developments, new roads, new styles of open Interstate designed to accommodate the future of the Tampa Bay area's ever-growing automobile traffic. I heard stories of traffic solutions (proposed and implemented) from big cities of the world and I imagined Tampa with triple-decker Interstate passages and underground tunnels connecting Bayshore Boulevard to Lutz.

There was one road division I found poetic. I can not remember where it was but it was miles-long stretch of Interstate somewhere near Tampa. For several miles the a 2-lane road became 3-lanes, and then split into 2, like a hydra. The second 3-lane road was called the same as the one from which it split. Its destination was the same, and even the exits were shared. It was, nevertheless, a completely separate piece of road, a passage used by those ghostly companions of the highway whose lights in your rear view mirror guarantee something -- what that something is I never could tell -- and whose travels are still the same as yours though they use the newer road.

The table is flimsy. I warn visitors not to pound or lean heavily on this table. Despite its appearance of strength I suspect that these 2 hands (and those 2 hands of he who sold it to me) assembled this platform in such haste as to make it a perilous platter.

As with most of my affairs I would probably need to build this thing at least twice before I got it right.

The expression "built with my own two hands" has always rung hollow to me. I may have first been introduced to the expression at summer camp in 1978. After a rabble-rousing series of song-singing and foot-stomping in the cafeteria the camp's Director diplomatically delivered a speech in which he praised the enthusiasm of us campers and the counselors who so energetically sang Native American tribal songs and chants, but he suggested we be careful about how much abuse we gave to the building. "I built this cafeteria with my own two hands," he said, suggesting with self-deprecation that this should not give us any particular confidence in the integrity of the structure. "I don't know if these walls are designed to withstand the kind of energy you men showed last night."

Indeed, it was an exceptional outburst. The walls and floor and roof of the cafeteria shook as each group of camers took its turns singing its song.

There were four groups of campers, each named for an Indian tribe, and each group had a theme song that invoked its name. The tribes were (in order of the members' ages) Chickasaw, Cherokee, Catawba, and Tuscarora.

My favorite song was the Catawba. The words, usually accompanied by hand-clapping and foot-pounding, were:

MMM, mmm-gawa, Catawba got the power! Sing

Repeat ad lib. At the cue of the camp counselor the song ends with:

PEACE!

For some of the chants a camp counselor would lead the singing -- in the style of a miltary drill sergeant who sends out the first line of a song as the members of his platoon respond with the next lines.

This question-and-answer format gave the Chickasaw chant a distinct character. A 20-something year old camp counselor would, with his deep basso voice, shout out "WE ARE CHICKASAW!" and in response a chorus of 10-year-olds with squeaky, pre-pubescent voices shouted "WE ARE CHICKASAW!" The deep-voiced leader would next say "MIIIIIGHTY MIIGHTY CHICKASAW!" and the youngsters joyfully and high-pitchedly responded with "MIIIIGHTY MIIGHTY CHICKASAW!"

The diving pool appears to be abandoned, though it conspicuously abuts the wildly popular Astoria Pool at Astoria Park.

The filth of the diving pool sits in blunt contrast to the adjacent and immaculately maintained Astoria Pool. While one can assume that the city at least bombs this diving hole for West Nile Virus, mosquitos and other disease-transmitting pests I find it amazing that such an apparent disease-pit is allowed to fester so openly, so hideously, and in such close proximity to a public pool.

The diving pool could have been slated for renovation had New York been awarded the 2012 Summer Olympic Games. We did not get those Olympics, and after brief flurries of attention the city returned this diving pool to its place as a rotting footnote.

The Astoria diving pool does not seem to represent an income opportunity or a revenue stream for the city. Because of this I fear that something bad will have to happen before action would be taken to remove this standing water. A drug-fueled loner might have to break in to this lightly-secured area and dive from the platforms into the muck -- crushing their head and causing severe injury -- before attention would be turned to this obvious health and safety hazard. While none among us wish for such calamities to occur we do, nevertheless, see eyesores like the Astoria Diving Pool as a virtual invitation to such misfortunes.

I recently dug up a small screwdriver, which I used to pry slides out of metal wrappers trapped inside Argus and Airequipt slide magazines. Normally those slides come out easily but sometimes they do not. Rather than use my precious bare hands to force the slide out (a gesture which can cause slides to bend or become otherwise damaged, not to mention cut my hands) I found a tiny flathead screwdriver that has served little other purpose in its 15 or so years under my rule.

Are Tools such as screwdrivers under their user's rule? Computers and other devices are sometimes called tools but I generally feel those "tools" guide and even control the jobs their marketers say they help us accomplish.

Computers and software environments frame and even caricaturize much of the work produced on them -- and they deliver myriad distractions in the meantime.

One with even cursory experience in certain softwares can tell at a glance what software was used to produce a document or a web site -- and this without the residual "Sent From" taglines and "Powered By" follow-ons that litter so much digital communication.

Hammers and screwdrivers, on the other hand, are more anonymously utilitarian, and their reputation or name would rarely assert itself into a finished product.

As I rarely handle tools I usually find it distracting or even nerve-wracking at first to pick one up. My hands tremble as I try to place a screwdriver into a tiny screw. Removing the back of a computer a few months ago I thought at first I would never get the screws out because I could not get the screwdriver to settle in to the first of 4 or 5 screws. I quickly got used to the environment, though, and by the 4th screw I was hoping for more. I had confidence after a rocky start. That is, in a nutshell, my relationship with tools and even with much of life. Nervous at first, my confidence increases as I build a rapport with objects and living things, but for the most part I feel owned by these things. My confidence increases not so much in myself as in my understanding of the tools' capacities and their designs.

I became a fan of Ben Katchor’s Julius Knipl, Real Estate Photographer the day I discovered it in 1990. I landed in New York in October of that year and quickly discovered the New York Press, a free weekly newspaper that carried Katchor's Knipl cartoons. If you have never seen them then you are missing something not just beautiful but which exquisitely captures the sadness which some of us understand saturates the world.

Ben Katchor is, as far as I know, the only comic artist to receive a MacArthur Genius Grant.

I always found the name of strip's main character to be a little awkward. It provokes titters, no matter how deliberately I enunciate the K in ”Knipl". I find myself saying "kuh-nipple" or "ka-nipe-ul" in efforts to avoid saying anything that sounds remotely like "nipple" but, like any written correspondence which refers to the New York Public Library as "NYPL" it is simply unavoidable that lingering adolescence will intrude.

Just recently, in fact, I attempted to introduce Katchor's Julius Knipl to an older man at the Old Town Bar near Union Square. Our conversation -- which came about because of a comics convention happening in the city that day -- had seemed seasoned and adult enough until I tried to pronounce "Knipl", falling once again in to the  nipple trap. The old man looked at me, cock-eyed, asking if I had just said what he thought I said. I attempted to spell the word but he was unimpressed, and moved his genteel attentions to the drunk woman sitting to his right.

Knowing the thoroughness of poetry which infuses Katchor's work I guess I should not have been surprised to learn that “Knipl” actually means something.  “Knipl” is, according to a reviewer, an untranslatable Yiddish word meaning “the handful of change or small bills required to get by or just get home from some unforeseeable urban adventure.” Since discovering that definition I stash my knipl in a pocket when my wayward wanderings lead me away from this spot.