Spike's Ego

Interview (Maybe?) Questions

2010-04-29T09:33:00.000-07:00

4/29/2010 12:03 PM – 12:26 PM

Oh, Lordy. What I want, what I always want when I sit down and write these things is a cigarette. It’s the 6 years or so of repetitive action. Sit, write, smoke. That’s the order. I just got home from what I don’t quite know what to call it. Normally, I would be sitting in the stairwell going through a smoke or seven.

I mentioned to one of my co-workers that I enjoyed woodworking and wished that I could do that instead of washing dishes. She said that I should talk to her dad, because he runs a cabinetmaking shop. So I did. It got delayed a couple of times but today was the day when it finally occurred. She wasn’t exactly clear about whether we were just going out to the shop to see it or if I was interviewing for a job. It is now two hours later and I still don’t know. Don’t get me wrong – Dude was cool. I’m just not sure if we had an intense conversation or a job interview. And now my head is very fuzzy and I want to take a nap.

If it was an interview, I don’t have a clue how I did. I’m pretty sure the dude didn’t consider that the point anyway. He used the phrase “military-industrial complex” both ironically and in earnest. He asked me what I wanted and I was pretty sure he wasn’t asking in a “phrase your response in such a way as to make this job that I’m considering you for sound like a goddamn answer to lifelong prayer.” I hate those interview questions. “No. No, really. This position of scrubbing floors with my fingernails is everything that I’ve ever wanted my life to be and I believe that I was genetically designed for just this task. If I didn’t have to pay rent, I’d demand that you pay me – that’s how much I love this job.” Fuck you. No. The reason that I’m looking to get this shitty job, and make no mistake, this is a shitty of shitty jobs is because I don’t want to be homeless and I feel very bad about living off the dole. The cabinetmaking job wouldn’t have been shitty. Probably would have been cool. I’m probably not going to be working there. Or maybe I am. Maybe I got hired and just didn’t realize it. So what do I want? What sprang to mind but I did not answer was, “I want to live in the woods and be left alone and not feel compelled to answer questions in a way that paints me in a favorable light.” I’m a selfish, hermit bastard most of the time. I do not find this emotionally unfulfilling really. Just financially impossible. If I were to answer questions honestly, the vast majority of people would find me offensive. We live in a fairly civil society. I want to live in the woods. I want to live in the woods and not be compelled to answer questions civilly. Or at all. That’s what I really want.

People that Write Things are People that Suck

2010-04-21T06:04:00.000-07:00

4/21/2010 8:39 AM – 9:01 AM

Now this is how the instants are supposed to go. I have nothing in particular that I want to write about and I just woke up. It’s a fuzzy gray sky outside. I am, of course, thinking about cigarettes. Non-smokers just don’t appreciate how awesome smoking is.

There is a possibility that I’ll actually finish the workbench that I started last year sometime this summer. That’s good. Something to look forward to. I have to do my laundry today. I need to remember that. I should actually work on writing something. It’s been a while since I’ve done that. And I need to run. Two hours or so from now. So I should have some breakfast. Know what would be awesome? A cigarette. That’s what would be awesome. Stupid universe. I’ve been listening to books on CD a lot lately. Actually, books on MP3. They fill the time well.

All of them have been non-fiction. It’s weird. I don’t really like listening to fiction being read to me. Or maybe it’s just that switch that’s happened in the last few years where I prefer to read non-fiction to fiction. This, for someone that says he wants to be a novelist is probably not a great thing. But I’ve read interviews with writers that don’t really like to read. Which, honestly, I can’t understand. It might be that I’m too easily drawn into the emotions of fiction. If a story is any good, it’s going to have some compelling emotions and it’s easier for a writer to take a reader convincingly to a dark place than a happy one. I don’t even like to watch dark emotion movies anymore and they only last for around two hours. I’m much less likely to commit to eight, twelve or sixteen hours in a nice long novel because the vast majority of novelists think it necessary to kick their readers in the balls and say, “ha! Existence blows! Vote Democrat.” Damn do I hate politics that differ from mine. Especially in the hands of people who can wordsmith well. You’re not convincing me. You’re not actually convincing anyone. The only people that will enjoy that are the people that already agree with you. Sigh. And the exact same thing could be said about me when I do it. Okay. Woodworking next it is.

Run, Poo (again) and More -er Than -est

2010-04-19T06:51:00.000-07:00

4/19/2010 9:27 AM – 9:48 AM

I’ve been waking up early the past week or so. Since a few days after I quit smoking. I’m guessing that the two are connected, but I can’t be sure. It’s also been more spring-ish and I’ve been running every day. Those two might be the reasons as well. Can there ever be a pure experiment in real life? For that matter, can there ever be a pure experiment in a lab?

I woke up at 6:30 this morning. I wondered if I should go running. I did. It took about an hour and a half for me to wake up and get dressed but I was out by 8. About 10 minutes in, I realized that I had to poo. I thought I could hold it till I got back home. By minute 14 of running (I walk for about 10 minutes at the start), I had to divert to the bathrooms that were on the back side of Cass park, near the dog run. I don’t know that I’ve been in a bathroom that scary in a while. Didn’t matter. I had to go. It might have something to do with the three large bowls of salad that I ate yesterday for lunch and dinner. Well, three bowls of salad and two large pieces of chocolate cake.

I’ve been able to get away with only the first poo lately, but today was definitely not that. Later, I will go to the store. Stores actually. I need to pick of a few items from a few different places. If I ride my bike, it won’t take as long, but I’ll have to ride through town and I won’t be able to listen to my podcasts. If I walk, it will take a while but I’ll be able to listen and I won’t have to think like a vehicle. The non-smoking is most annoying at work. I have fewer things to look forward to. It used to be that I could remind myself that in an hour, say, I’d get to have a cigarette when I took the trash to the dumpster. Now I just take the trash to the dumpster. The moments that I look forward to now are lunch, illegal (not really but sort-of) break before final push, and going home. Those that say pleasure is an illusion are idiots. Pleasure is delightful and real. It’s just that some pleasures sometimes need to be put away. “–est” is an over-used suffix. I’m just as guilty of it. I like my hyperbole. But there’s a lot more -er’s than there are –est’s.

Spike's 50 Favorite Movies

2010-04-13T10:00:00.000-07:00

Since John asked -

This is a list that I've been working on for a few years and it evolves as time progresses.

The requirements for it are fairly simple - 1)Limit the list to 50 (just because that makes it more fun); 2)Only one movie per personally defined "category" (note that there is only one Marx Brothers movie and only one Meg and Tom movie, both of which would see more representation on the list if that limit weren't in place); 3)I must have re-watched the movie at least twice (at least 3 viewings total) by myself, by which I do not necessarily mean "alone" (though that does tend to point out movies that I really like) but "of my own volition or impetus."

These are NOT necessarily the movies that I consider "Great." These are NOT the movies that I think should go on "the Ark" to be preserved for future generations (though a few of them are). These are the 50 movies that, if I was stuck on the Ark for who knows how long, I think that I could handle watching exclusively and repeatedly.

I still don't think that it's 100% honest. Right off the bat, I can tell you that my favorite Charlie Chaplin is not "The Gold Rush" it's "The Immigrant," but "The Immigrant" is a short and, in this configuration of the list, only full length movies are allowed, and I didn't want to get stuck on the Ark without any Chaplin, so "Gold Rush" which is my favorite Chaplin feature length (though not most respected, that'd be "City Lights") made the list even though it's probably only a personal 2nd tier.

There are some movies that I have loved intensely for a while and would have easily made the list a few years ago but, for one reason of another, don't seem to stick at the moment ("Fearless," for example, my second favorite Jeff Bridges movie). Maybe they'll return later. Maybe they'll fade entirely. There are some currently on the list that I'm m not sure if they'll last another year ("Mumford," - but I do love it so and it's my only Kasdan...).

There are so many other things to talk about that go into making a list like this. I could go on for several more paragraphs discussing just my "personally defined categories," and someday, I'd like to write about each movie in depth, but for now, this is just the list and how it stands today.

And so in chronological order and with little further ado, here are...

Spike's 50 Favorite Movies:

1925 – The Gold Rush
1930 - Animal Crackers
1934 – The Thin Man
1938 - Bringing Up Baby
1940 - The Philadelphia Story
1952 - Ikiru
1955 – The Trouble with Harry
1957 - Wild Strawberries
1960 - L’ Avventura
1960 - La Dolce Vita
1961 - Last Year at Marienbad
1965 - Sound of Music
1968 - 2001: A Space Odyssey
1970 - M*A*S*H
1975 - Monty Python and the Holy Grail
1975 - Picnic at Hanging Rock
1977 - Star Wars: Episode IV – A New Hope
1978 - Gates of Heaven
1979 - Alien
1981 - My Dinner with Andre’
1981 - Raiders of the Lost Ark
1983 – The Big Chill
1984 - A Sunday in the Country
1986 - Ferris Bueller’s Day Off
1986 – Stand by Me
1987 - Evil Dead II
1987 - Moonstruck
1989 - Crimes and Misdemeanors
1989 - When Harry Met Sally…
1990 - Joe Verses the Volcano
1993 - Groundhog Day
1993 - Much Ado About Nothing
1993 - The Nightmare Before Christmas
1994 - Clerks
1994 - Pulp Fiction
1994 - The Shawshank Redemption
1995 - Before Sunrise
1996 - Microcosmos
1998 - Dark City
1998 - The Big Lebowski
1999 - Mumford
1999 - Office Space
2000 - High Fidelity
2001 – A Knights Tale
2001 - Spirited Away
2001 - The Royal Tenenbaums
2001 - Waking Life
2002 - Lilo & Stitch
2003 - Finding Nemo
2004 - Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind

The Three Brands and the Rollies

2010-04-13T09:12:00.000-07:00

4/13/2010 11:42 AM – 12:10 PM

It’s been 70 hours since my last cigarette. It’s mostly just really annoying but I have had odd little flashes of anxiety that I haven’t really experienced in many months. I’ve been listening to David Sedaris. The day after I quit, Ben and I drove up to Rochester to meet up with Ben’s parents and pick up the dog. We listened to “When You Are Engulfed…” up and back.

I have not listened to most of the book, so, happily, I’ve had something to distract me for the last couple of days. In my experience, there are really only three brands of cigarettes – Marlboro, Camel and Newport’s. Everything else was just decoration. I smoked Camels, as did most of my smoking friends – artsy, hipster, weird kids. Marlboros were smoked by frat boys and the assorted white people that didn’t want to pretend they were poor urban black kids but weren’t hipster kids. Newport’s were for poor urban black kids or those that wanted to pretend they were poor urban black kids.

But those were just the brands – the packaged, pre-rolled, filtered cigarettes. There is a little more variety in the hand-rolleds. On the low end were Bugler, Tops, Kite and Roll Rich. The Roll Rich has been harder to find lately, but Bugler and Tops have been moving in a big way since the State decided to help us help ourselves even more. On the upper end were Drum, Samson and Bali Shag. Drum was my tobacco of choice, its normal, boring blend. It was in the middle in terms of its moisture. When you got it, it wasn’t overly moist like Samson or dry like Bali tended to be. I learned how to roll cigarettes by watching a kid (actually, the kid that I bummed my first cigarette off of) roll joints. I spend a lot of time thinking about cigarettes. This is the first time that I haven’t relied on a “you’ll be able to smoke in X amount of time.” There are benefits. But costs too. Day three of the rest of my life. Goddamn I hate clichés.

Farewell, My Beautiful Stupidity

2010-04-10T09:57:00.000-07:00

4/10/2010 12:27 PM – 12:53 PM

Sitting next to me. Right there, about 8 inches away from my left hand. It’s the last cigarette I’ll ever smoke. If I don’t fuck it up. I’ve fucked it up before. But there it is now and I might not. I am 34 now. I was supposed to have quit two years ago. So here I am now. It’s a beautiful day outside.

One of the things that I read that I’m supposed to do is make a list of all the things that I won’t miss about smoking. There isn’t much. Bad lungs for running. Throat nuggets in the morning. The burnt taste in the back of my throat and on my teeth and tongue. How little I can smell. Constantly stuffed-up nose. I liked running to the store in the rain at two in the morning for a pack of smokes. I like spending my money on such a wasteful enterprise. It’s my money. Which is in the same spirit as why I started and kept smoking. My money. My lungs. My body. The government and church can go fuck themselves. This is my stupid little life. It still is.

But this stupid little life of mine is getting older. The small body of mine has been smoking for 14 years. Most of it with unfiltered, hand-rolleds. Twice the punch. This last cigarette isn’t a hand-rolled. It’s a Camel 99. As close to what I started on as they carry. Well, it would have been a Camel Light 99, but those are too weak for what I like now. I smoked my first cigarette in Southampton, Long Island sometime in the fall of ’94. I was at the first college of my choice. I had started to pull into my shell by then, planning my escape. Planning to go home. The power went out. I bummed a cigarette off of the kid that lived next to me. He smoked Camel Light 100s. Later, he told the small group of my acquaintances there that I had bummed one and they thought it was funny. I was a good kid still then. I lay down on the couch in the dorm’s public area. There were no emergency lights in that part of the building. Someone had left the door open. I looked out the doorway and smoked. “This is something Hemmingway would do,” I thought. A man in himself. A man has to grow up and make his own choices. Not his mommy. His dad is dead. Not his pastor. His God never really says anything. Not his government. Sure as fuck not his government. Fuck them all. Men smoke alone in the dark and think about Big Things. Ha. Stupid little boy. Beautiful stupid little boy. Times up. Out to the porch. The Last One. And then the work of throwing out everything that marks me as a smoker. I still haven’t given up on our stupid dream, little boy. We just need to find another way to get there.

I Dreamed of My Father Again Last Night

2010-03-24T10:07:00.000-07:00

3/24/2010 12:39 PM – 1:00 PM

I dreamed of my father again last night. Perhaps I’ve been dreaming of him frequently in the last few days, perhaps this is the first time in months. I don’t know. Since the panic attacks, I’ve tried to forget my dreams upon waking. The terror of immortal immolation given unbridled freedom by my unconscious imagination is not something that I like to hold on to.

They’ve been getting better over the last few years. The dreams, I mean. When I do remember a dream, it’s usually the normal dreams that I have had for most of my life. There was no terror in my dream of my father, just sadness. When I do remember a dream that belongs to a series, for a little while, I remember the series. I remembered the progression of my Father Dreams as they have been for a while. Those few that read the first draft of the Desert Novel know that a few years after my father died, I started to have dreams where I discovered that my father hadn’t really died, but had instead been forced to pretend to die because he was a spy and if the Bad Guys discovered that he was alive, they would have used my brother, myself and my mother to blackmail him.

These were fairly simple wish-fulfillment dreams. I understood them on waking and enjoyed them. My father and I would have spy adventures and he would help me find the Girl as well as foiling the Bad Guys. What I remembered upon waking and will hopefully forget again soon, was that the dreams started to change a few years back, even before the panic attacks. It turned out that my father had, in fact, died and by some unknown power, been brought back to life. In the dreams, it seemed that he had been brought back to life unwillingly to do some task. Whatever it was, he did it and now was just waiting to die again, which, for some unspecified reason, was expected to occur very soon. In the dreams, I have discovered that I too am dying and seeking some cure or comfort, I sought my father out. Last night’s dream, I found him again and asked him for help. He didn't. He didn't really refuse, he just didn’t really care. He didn’t want to be bothered. He’d done his part and just wanted to be left alone to die. He wasn’t angry. He wasn’t sad. He just couldn’t be bothered as he made his way through a flea market, looking at things that he might want to buy for his apartment. I don’t believe in dream symbolism anymore. As dreaming creatures, I think we’re too dynamic to be put in such plain boxes. I don’t think that it means anything. It was just sad. Somehow, I knew that it was just a dream and so I left in disappointment and disgust. And then tried to seduce a girl on the fifth floor of an antiques store. I ran for eleven minutes straight today. I’m writing the instants. I sat. I’ll go to work in less than an hour. Doing is doing. Living is living. Dreams are just dreams. It's all they can be.

Running, Poo and Meekness

2010-03-19T08:59:00.000-07:00

3/19/2010 11:31 AM – 11:52 AM

I went running forty-five minutes after I woke up today. That’s a good way to do it. I wish that I could be getting up earlier but it takes me a long time to fall asleep after I get home from work. One of the people in my department quit last night. Not my crew or shift, but I don’t know how they’re going to work out filling in the gaps.

The down-side of running that soon after I wake up is that I only have the chance to make my initial poo. I have two poo’s in the morning: the initial poo and the substantial poo. On the way back to my house on my run with only a block or so to go, I almost had the second poo. But I didn’t. I made it home and all was well. Hopefully, my body will adjust. I just finished sitting. I haven’t sat for about four days, but I’m up to fifteen minutes. After about ten minutes, the mind starts to calm down. It’s a pleasant feeling. I feel a bit fuzzy though. That’s not the best thing for my job. Whoosh. My job. I’m starting to want a new one real bad. They’ve got me hooked with the medical insurance though. How do I go without it, now that I’ve got it? Even though they’re most likely going to be making a lot more money off of me than I’ll get in return.

If I wasn’t paying for insurance, my second loan would have been paid off by now. Not that I realized that until after I’d started buying insurance. Habituation again. And my strength training is starting to feel drab, despite the fact that I’m still not quite to the solid know-what-I’m-doing level. I’ve started looking at new exercises though. Considering that I can’t even do one real pull-up, I’ve been considering pull-ups. Maybe a whole body-weight routine, but body-weight exercises are limited in some areas. So maybe mix-and-match. According to my scale, I’ve been putting on weight. But there are always those fluctuations in body-weight. That’s why you’re supposed to only weigh yourself once a week at the same time of day. But I’ve got the scale now, why not use it? Because it’s not really informative. I know this. What is meekness? I was talking to my brother about this a long time ago. My brother said that meekness was something like a solider with a BFG treating a crowd with kindness as he passed through it. I said it wasn’t like that. I said it was more like a person without any kind of G passing through a crowd knowing that that crowd could tear him to shreds at any second. But maybe my brother was right. I don’t know. I was just thinking about it while I was supposed to be just counting my breaths.

Running, MFA, Work - That Sort of Stuff

2010-03-10T09:19:00.000-08:00

3/10/2010 11:56 AM – 12:16 PM

I ran for the fourth time today. I continue to be amused by the detail that, despite the fact that I’m running intervals, my total pace is about the same as it was when I could run for three miles without stopping. Hopefully, I’ll be back to three straight miles by the end of May. Maybe mid-May. And maybe I’ll be faster than I was.

I think that I’m going to forego the calorie cutting for the most part until my body is used to vigorous daily activity. I’m just too tired by mid-way through my shift at work. Plus, it would be nice to add some muscle mass and that doesn’t really happen if you’re on a restricted calorie diet. One thing at a time. Baby steps. I was looking at MFA writing programs today. If I got into Cornell’s, they would pay me to learn to write. And that would be super-sweet. The last time I wrote an instant, it was Saturday. It was a bad day and I ended up writing for almost three hours about how crappy it is to have my job. It is. The job itself isn’t bad. Professional dishwashing is dishwashing. But it’s horrible how bad management can make a fine job crappy.

I’m getting tired of being a low-level worker. Not there’s anything wrong with it, in a moral sense, but the arbitrary whims of bosses is tiresome. It was different at the library. That was a low-level job and was, on the face of it, more stressful than dishwashing. But there I had good management. I had people higher up than me that would help and listen to me if something was going wrong. I could improve. I can’t really get any better at this job and my boss insists that I can. Offering no advice or encouragement, he writes nasty little notes, implying that I’m incompetent. Nothing that he could be forced to back up. If there’s one thing that he’s clever at, it’s his ability to dodge getting in trouble. Mostly. He keeps getting trouble for not working while he hits on the girls at work. The malicious little bastard in me gets to laugh aloud. There is this thing about trying to be a better person that is quite difficult – which parts are the things you can change outside and which are the parts that require you to change your insides. You’d think it would be easy to tell. You’d think it would be easy to do. Ah well. I’ll think more about it. I’ll sit. I’ll pray (in my own weird way). I’ll lift heavy things. I’ll go for a run. I’ll write. I’ll go to work. Someday, I’ll die. Narnia awaits. That’s what I tell myself. I’ve questioned my religion for 18 years. I think doubt has taken me as far as it can. I’ll try faith for a while.

First Run Again

2010-03-03T08:29:00.000-08:00

3/3/2010 11:07 AM – 11:27 AM

I went running for the first time today in almost thirteen months. It wasn’t bad. It was a wusses interval training – run for two minutes, walk for two minutes. Still, I did 2.3 miles in 35 minutes, that’s a lot better than I did the first time I went running three years ago. I have discovered, however, that I need to change my morning shake for running days. Running with a fiber-heavy meal in your gut is not so good.

Actually, during the run, it was fine. The trouble arose after I’d gotten back and cooled down. So, I think the running day breakfast shake will be coffee, yogurt and honey. Then have the Fiber 1 in the post-run shake. Experimenting is fun. I’m a little wired. The only muscles that are currently sore are my quads right above the knees. What this will do to my lifting tomorrow, I am curious to see. I found a good exercise plan online – three days of lifting a week, three days of running a week. Two of the running days are interval training, the third is the Long Slow Run. For the next month or so, however, it will be fine to just get out and go. I was getting antsy to start running. Next, quit smoking.

The quitting is the hardest. Not even just the quitting smoking. My personality is to feel guilty for wasting time, so it’s easier to add good things to a schedule. The stopping of doing bad things doesn’t have as much emotional pay-off. And, Lordy, the first cigarette after cool-down is awesome. Perhaps better even than the first cigarette-with-cup-of-coffee. But that will have to go. I was calculating how much weight I need to lose. They recommend that I weigh something like 160 for my height. I don’t think I dipped below 185 in high-school and my body-fat percentage was well within the healthy range. My goal is to drop down to 185 by next March. That’s 51 pounds in 52 weeks. That’s the healthy way to do it. Then I was thinking that my birthday is coming up in a few weeks, and going with that, I realized that I was shooting to weigh 185 on my 35th birthday. Yes. In a year and a few weeks, I will be 35. What this means, I don’t know. I know that the healthier you are, the longer you can remain “youthful.” And, being a dude, I can have babies up until the day I die. Provided everything stays in working order. But this is much older than I thought I would be to be where I am right now. It’s not bad. It’s not what I was expecting. I suppose that it’s like sitting. You do what you think you should do. You’ll get distracted. When you remember, you start again. And you see where that takes you.

The Dishwasher Gets All Political up on Climate Change

2010-03-01T06:45:00.000-08:00

3/1/2010 9:20 AM – 9:41 AM

This morning was a day of a very unquiet mind. I spent yesterday doing nothing that was needed. Surprisingly, I didn’t watch any TV. I watched 2012 with Ben-n-Amy last night, but that was it. In regards to that movie, it was stupid but fun. The Arks were cool.

The movie was a general End-of-the-World movie. As opposed to the preachy, If-Only-You-Weren’t-So-Greedy-and-Had-Only-Voted-for-More-Democrats End-of-the-World movie. I hate those. Here’s the thing, I’m not a denier but I’m not an alarmist. I think that Global Climate Change was and is an interesting phenomenon. I do think it’s real. I even think that mankind has had some effect on it. The problem with the freeze-all-economic-progress-or-we’ll-be-sorry Climate Change is one of depth of field. If we were to only judge the state of the climate based on a few of the last few months, we might see a cooling trend.

That’s wrong, of course. More data! More data! That should be the shout of the true scientist. So we pull the camera back and look at the last 100 years. Well, look at that, we’re warming, just as predicted. Pull it back a few thousand years and, oops, we’re still warming, we started long before the industrial revolution. Pull it back 125,000 years and we get a picture of a valley, of which we’re crawling up the further side. Pull the camera back so that we can see the last 500,000 years and we see up and down, up and down, up and down, up and down. Where were the evil polluting factories 300,000 years ago? There weren’t any. Climate Change is still a new science. It doesn’t know why. Or maybe it does, but it doesn't know which. There are several theories as to why our planet has been going up and down, up and down for the last 500,000 years. The Hockey Stick portion of the graph is a very, very, very tiny part of it. If we had never come to be, the Hockey Stick probably wouldn’t be in the data. The global temperatures, however, would probably still be going up. The Centralized Command and Control Oligarchy lost the battle for the commanding heights to the stupid/wise emergent frenzy of the trading crowds. But the Oligarchy will not give up. They will merely seek new reasons to rule. It is their nature. And mine to oppose them. Stopping the End of the World is a pretty good reason. Even if they can’t actually do it.

The "And Sin Not" Part

2010-02-27T05:31:00.000-08:00

2/27/2010 8:05 AM – 8:27 AM

I’m writing almost according to schedule. I woke up at 7:20 this morning. Without sleeping pills, I fell asleep by 11:20 last night. Yesterday, I went to work feeling a little sore from shoveling, by the three hour mark, I felt a lot sore and very tired. But I made it all the way through the work day. I only got pissed a little.

It might be easier, as far as instructions go, if we were told to “be not angry.” But it doesn’t go that way. It goes, “be angry and sin not.” I still don’t know how to do that. It might be easier to simply resign ourselves to the situation and say, “oh well, no point in being angry.” Actually, that is what I do a lot. I find myself mad and, usually not liking the feeling, I try to distract myself and get back to a more resigned state. I might still do that for a while. But there is a point where you realize that you’re not just being pissy for no good reason, something is wrong and some action should be taken.

If it’s my fault, I can look at it and try to figure out how to change. It might take years, but it’s possible to work on it. But when the fault doesn’t lie with me, I have no idea what to do. My boss is not a very good boss. He’s not evil. He just wants to do what little he can and then get the hell home. So do I. The difference is, I’m not paid to manage anyone other than myself. I work hard my whole shift. Do I waste time? Sure. Everyone does. It’s not an excuse. It’s a statement of fact. But I act like my job is my job. I work hard and come home and try to earn my paycheck. For the past 6 years, every job that I’ve had, my boss has appreciated that fact. I’ve gotten good reviews. I don’t at this job. I do not know how to deal with this. I don’t like being angry but I don’t know how to change the situation other than leaving. At first, I thought it was just me. I worked hard to get the extensive list of things that need to get done, done in the eight hours that I’m scheduled to be there. It doesn’t fit. At some point, about six months ago, I said, “fuck it. I do the job and ignore the boss.” So I do. But the boss is still there, being a bad boss and telling me, in a very round-about way that can be denied or asserted depending on the situation, what a horrible job I’m doing. Be angry and sin not. “Sin not” seems to imply that one should act, just not sinfully. This is a tall order, and I do not know how to start. Well, poo.

Ben Writes the Last Part

2010-02-26T09:47:00.000-08:00

2/26/2010 12:26 PM – 12:44 PM

I shoveled snow for two hours last night. Shoveled snow and then salted. When I got back to the place where I started, it needed to be shoveled again. I clocked out and went home. When I got home, I did my cool-down routine, stretching. Yesterday was a lifting day. It had just gotten to the point where I could feel only a little tenderness the day after.

My body now is a series of long, broad aches. I am not, however, incapacitated. The achiest bits are my hips which is a result of sleeping in my bed for ten hours. Crappy mattress, but it’s betting than nothing and, provided I don’t sleep more than eight hours, it usually works fine. I woke up about an hour ago. I drank coffee, smoked and went poo. Then I sat and then I was here. The sit went well. I read in one of the billions of Zen books that I used to read about a guy that wasn’t given any instructions. He was just told to sit on the floor, look at the wall and not say anything for thirty minutes.

He ended up being one of those guys that get Zen equivalent of a black belt. I’ve read lots of books by those guys. Don’t think a whole lot of the thing. I don’t know if you really can learn anything by sitting and trying to just sit. Feels good though. Calm and strong. Okay. Okay is good. I keep drifting off here as I’m typing. I have to go to work in an hour and I’m just writing. Ben just came in. I guess I’m done.

Writing a letter to my future self. Your body now is nothing but muscle. That’s the good news. The bad news is: it’s destroyed the world. Everyone is dead. Even you. Unless you’re reading this. Then you’re our only hope. Our fate is in your hands, dude. Our fate is in your hands. End transmission.

The Only Way to Feel Like You’re Running

2010-02-25T07:44:00.000-08:00

2/25/2010 10:19 AM – 10:39 AM

It’s snowing outside. Really snowing. It’s a snowday day of snowing. I just sat and I got that weird sit buzz/fuzzy/fluid thing. I think it’s the first time since I started sitting again. My rules are less this time. Sit. Stare at something though half-closed eyes. Count your breaths.

When you realize that you’re not paying attention to counting your breaths, start from one again. Do this until the bell rings. When the bell rings, count your breaths to ten. Say a prayer of whatever comes to mind. Get up. Put your cushion away and go on to what is next. I’m only at ten minutes. Someday, I’ll work it up to a half hour. I should probably do it before I go to bed. This is fine. This is good. Do you get it – it’s really, really snowing. In a few hours, I’ll go to work. In a half hour, I’ll start my lifting session. I didn’t work on editing today. I didn’t work on it yesterday. I did sign up for a doctor’s appointment yesterday and start to fill out the paperwork. I did watch the latest episode of Lost this morning.

I spent some time yesterday reading about getting in shape. One website asked what you wanted to get in shape for, positing that it was good to have a goal. I don’t really have a thing to get in shape for, not a project anyway. Well, other than the whole life project. I want to be a writer. I want to live in a cottage in the woods. I want to read good books and watch good movies. These are things that I know or know some things about. I do know a little of what it feels like to run three miles up a hill and then three miles back down. Your leg muscles hurt on the way up. Your knees hurt on the way down. Between the near constant thoughts of how awesome it would be to stop, there is a subtle ecstasy of doing something as hard as that. I have not yet fully lost myself in a run for the whole run. I’ve lost myself for little parts of it. It is odd how much running can be like sitting. Now to figure out how my whole life can be like running and sitting. Beautiful girls, beautiful girls, somewhere out there, somewhere over the next rise. And maybe the girls aren’t girls. Maybe the girls are only girls. It will be a while before I’m fit enough to even get those little snippets of running being running. When I stop, it’s because I find that I don’t need the running. It’s for a little while only that you can get away with it, but it feels like you can get away with it forever. But one day you wake up and you remember that the only way to feel like you’re running is to be running.

Cheapest, Fastest, Doing Fine

2010-02-24T06:19:00.000-08:00

2/24/2010 8:57 AM – 9:17 AM

I’m trying to remember all the things that I have to do today. There aren’t too many. Since I haven’t started running yet, I’ve got an hour and a half of free time. I have to schedule a doctor’s appointment. I guess they ignored the email. Download last night’s episode of Lost. Work on editing the novel. If I finish by the 28th, I get to do Scriptfrenzy.

I sat this morning and considering that I realized halfway through that realized that the volume was turned down on my computer and so I would have to keep looking to see the end instead of having it just jump out with a “ping!” it went well. For some reason, I woke up last night just as my computer was restarting after an update instillation. Not wanting to be startled awake by the start-up sounds, I turned the volume down. Of course, the headphones were plugged in, so I didn’t need to. But I was only half-awake anyway, so it made sense at the time. The novel edit is going weirdly. I am somewhat concerned with the fact that I’ve only noticed two sections that really need work.

For something written so fast, I expected there to be a lot of deep, serious reworking that needed to be done and I am suspicious of the fact that I’m not finding them. Ah, well, this is only the first edit and hopefully, I will find them in the second edit. Or, better, I will discover in the second edit that it’s fine. Now that would be awesome. And suspicious. Very suspicious. Yesterday went well, the kid at work that irks me only managed to do so at the very end of the night. I have discovered that it is important to eat breakfast on the days that I lift. Well, eat breakfast or not wake up until a little bit before it’s time to exercise. My stamina faded after the first four or five sets. And I need to consider re-arranging the order a little more. I’m hoping that I’ll be able to pay off the Houghton loan by sometime in April. It might require the delayed rent thing that Ben said I could do. Then we’ll see. I’m thinking that, at this point, it doesn’t matter what degree I come out with. After I pay off Houghton, just find what credits will transfer and then pick a degree based on that. Cheapest, fastest. In case you were wondering, it’s very gray and a little snowy outside and the trees seem to be doing fine.

Movement in the Lighter Extremities

2010-02-23T10:11:00.000-08:00

2/23/2010 12:50 PM – 1:10 PM

So it is later than normal to be writing the instants. I neglected to go to bed as there were pressing matters on the internets to attend to. That would be a joke. There are few pressing matters on the internets. I then neglected to get up on time even with my alarm reset to give me 8 hours of sleep. And then, this morning, there were more pressing matters on the internets.

Someday, when I finally come to be the type of person that gives up things for Lent, wasting time on the internets should be in the list. Ben said that he’s planning on quitting smoking in the next week or so. I’d guess that I should as well. Amy will be gone that weekend and two angry boys hanging about the house might be more than even a Mennonite could handle. And they have a fetish for torture. I lifted weights today. This is the start of week three of strength training. If I had picked up running, it should have started yesterday, so I guess that I’m waiting till March. Perhaps to coincide with the quitting of the smoking. It’s my Monday, and despite the fact that I did very little useful today, aside from lifting, sitting and starting my laundry, I feel good. Probably the poppy seed tea. But I did call my mom yesterday and we talked for an hour and a bit.

I admire people that can charge into life and do it. My brother has three kids and is looking to adopt another few. He has a career in the military and a dream of what he wants to do when he gets out. I sit here and look at statistics. The probability of a marriage surviving until the death of one spouse is one out of two. That’s probably the wrong way to word it, technically. The probability of someone making a living as a writer of books is worse than that. I do not understand. I understand so very little and even less of what I really want to understand. I want to have faith. Faith is generally acknowledged as a key component of a healthy outlook on life. I want to believe. I want to believe but I don’t want to be an asshole to others or dishonest with myself. I don’t see much wrong with being an asshole to myself and dishonest with others. That would be a joke. Mostly. It’s definitely gray outside. The trees are fairly still. Some movement in the lighter extremities. No animals that I can see. But I feel fine. A shower, a change of clothes and then off to work. Tomorrow, I’ll work more on the novel. I’ll go to be on time tonight. Someday this will make sense. There, a crow flew by.

Farm the New Land

2010-02-20T06:15:00.000-08:00

2/20/2010 8:54 AM – 9:14 AM

To be able to look at ones actions without judgment and act. Maybe that’s what sitting is about. I don’t know. It’s my Friday. I sat. For some reason, the last couple of minutes went well. To be able to look, and with reason decide the best possible course based on the data available and then do it. That would be good.

The last three days were jarring session of daunting emotions. Wednesday was the day of wrath, I spent nine hours angry. Thursday, I was peppy and upbeat. Yesterday, I was sad. The sadness eventually went away, around six or seven, but still, that was seven or eight hours of being sad. Oddly, it felt comfortable. Or, not oddly at all, it felt comfortable. Sadness was the dominant emotion of my twenties. So far, fear has been the dominant emotion of my thirties. I hope to God that it isn’t for the next seven years. That would make for a miserable decade. Youth is wasted on the young, they say. I can see what they mean, but I don’t think you can truly know what youth is until it goes away. I’m still young, I guess. But I’m not twenty.

And what’s today going to be? It will probably be good. It’s my Friday. I’ll lift today. I’ll have poppy seed tea. All of these things are good indicators that my inclination will be to be in a pleasant mood. I guess that I’ll need to start running next week. I don’t want to try to go through those Wednesday and Fridays without that little extra kick that exercise gives. It will suck. It doesn’t really work the first few times. But I’m in upstate NY. The gray lasts a long, long time. If I enjoyed the gray when I was a kid, there has to be a way for me to learn to enjoy it now. Even when I do give up smoking, there should be a way for me to like it outside on a cold overcast day. Running puts you out there. It lets you be there in the air beneath the sky. Even in February, there is something to see. Sometimes, I do wish I could hibernate the gray January through April, but those are living too. I believe in God, somehow, at the moment. Where that came from, I don’t know. Feels good, Man. Far above, beyond the trees across the street, two birds flew by. When the settlers arrived, they had to have so much more than the needed. The first few years, they had to learn to farm the new land.

Black Crow, Gray Sky

2010-02-19T06:57:00.000-08:00

2/19/2010 9:35 AM – 9:54 AM

It’s a solid gray out there today. I feel fine though. I sat. Successful as compared to the rest of my sits. My muscles are a little sore today. Which is good. Hopefully, they won’t be that bad when I’m working tonight. This morning is for filling out forms.

I’m getting antsy for running to start. The doctor’s office hasn’t called me back. I’ll need to get in touch with them soon. There is always that thin, reoccurring nag that I want to be left alone. It isn’t really true. Sometimes it is. There’s a bit of stupid within me that demand that the universe roll according to his whims. I suppose that one good thing about being poor is that it beats that fellow down quite a bit. Hell, I’ve only called into work due to being sick once since I started working there. And that was because I actually was sick. Maybe I have figured out how to work, finally. I don’t know. I was thinking about how if I went back to Houghton to finish my degree, I’d have to fill out that form and write those essays. I’ve written two novels. It shouldn’t be hard. But it seems daunting.

I haven’t worked on the novel this week. I’m have the odd sensation that I don’t really care about it that much. Which is crap. I get into it once I’m there. And If I could actually sell the thing, I might be able to pay some bills. Problem is, I’m not really sure how good it is. I like it, but I’m not excited to get back to it. Which doesn’t really prove anything. I’m not excited about much since I stopped having anxiety attacks. That’s the tradeoff. Doesn’t matter. How I feel about existence doesn’t change existence. It was more fun when I would have a soul-changing epiphany once or twice a week. But they didn’t actually change much. Going to work and getting paid. That changes things. Paying bills. That changes things. Lifting weights regularly. Running regular. They change things. Daydreams don’t change things. Exquisite visions of what it means to be human don’t change things. Washing dishes does. I’m afraid that I was right when I put on my cynics mask and proclaimed that, given multiple possible choices, the most boring one is probably right. Boring is what you make of it, some say. There’s truth in that. Lots of crap too. We seem to be around 85% machine. People that can change their attitude talk about changing your attitude. People that can’t don’t. A black crow flew across the gray sky in my window. It breaks up the monotony.

Hit with Rock Repeatedly

2010-02-18T10:45:00.000-08:00

2/18/2010 1:22 PM – 1:42 PM

Is it a matter of stochastic probability or subconscious impulse? I’ve been thinking about it and all the girls that I have been genuinely attracted to have come prepackaged with live-in boyfriends. I know randomness and I’d put the weight in its corner. But I’m not ruling out the other.

I just finished lifting and had my first meal of the day. I’m jittery and typing faster than I normally would. I spent nine miserable hours at work last night and now I’m set for another eight or nine in a half hour. This is aggravating. I’m paying my student loans and it’s taking a chunk of my paycheck. Now I’m paying for medical insurance and it’s taking a bigger chunk. I have to pay another student loan back to Houghton itself that I haven’t paid anything towards in eight years. It just keeps getting bigger. If I want to be able to go back to college, I have to have a better job. If I want to get a better job, I have to go back to college. Fucking dilemmas. At least the Pixies just came on Pandora. I’ll thumbs up this track when I finish this little bit of writing. There has to be a way out of this. I don’t want to be thinking about this for the next nine hours.

Fuck bunnies. I’m getting old. I keep telling myself that you’re never too old to start over, but it’s different. Lord, I want to hit something. That’s just the testosterone and sudden influx of sugar talking, but still, here I am, fucking caught and not sure how to proceed. Oh. Another angry post. At least it’s not mopy. Well, it’s not mopy as I’m writing. Mopy has a soft, pliable quality. I just want to hit something. If my luck had been excellent, I would be in my cottage by now. If my luck had been better, maybe I would have forgotten about that dream. Maybe I would have never had it. Maybe I’d be taking pictures of the little fishies around the Great Barrier Reef right now, praising Jesus and bemoaning the destruction of the environment. I end up with self-loathing honesty instead. A dishwasher in an upstate New York college town. Fuck. If I knew how the fuck to sell out, I’d do it. Some nice, boring, speaking-in-tongues girl that mom would like. Some collar and tie office job where I get home at a real time of day and can pay for a goddamn car and mortgage. Bible studies on Wednesday, Sunday school every Sunday from 9 to 10. No swears. No beer. No smart books. No honest movies. Brain-dead and happy. Just drop the fucking bomb down the mine shaft and hit with rock repeatedly.

02/17/10

2010-02-17T07:20:00.000-08:00

2/17/2010 9:58 AM – 10:18 AM

I did sit today and my muscles don’t feel too sore from lifting yesterday. I overslept which is weird because I actually woke up before my alarm clock went off and turned on the coffee. Then, two and a half hours later I finally got out of bed and started my day. I sort of want to start running today, but I’m not going to. March, I guess.

I’m thinking about marathons again. Of course, I’m not actually running, so it’s easy to think about them. If I started running in March, I’d have about eight months to build up to it. Maybe the Wineglass. It’s home. It’s mostly flat. That’d be nice. My life would be seriously abbreviated if I started to train for a marathon. Well, it would be in the two months leading up to the race. I have many things going through my mind since yesterday morning. After this, I’m going to go look up college degree programs again. Daydream a little. I need to get a hold of the student loan people. They didn’t with-draw my payment last month. I’ll have to set that up again, I guess. I need to call my mom. I need to eat less crap food.

It’s cold outside and the sky is a light gray. It makes the trees look darker. I’m not to the point where I’m insisting that it become spring tomorrow. I’ve actually been enjoying the winter days. Part of it is that the days are finally getting noticeably longer, despite the cold and snow. No word back yet from the doctor’s office. I hope it’s not like it was in Buffalo, where they simply never responded. But this time I’ve got insurance and I’m going to get a check-up, damn it. I’m almost coming to peace with the fact that aside from the new guy on the morning crew, I’m the only person that busts his ass at work. I need a new job. I say that and yet I don’t apply for any. I look, but I don’t apply. So much effort to be told: “we like your enthusiasm but we’ve decided to go with someone who has experience.” Sometimes, I’m startled by how much I loathe the efficiency of a system that I consider most desirable because of the products of its efficiency. There is an odd contradictory set of ideas in my head – I want a better job, but if I start to look for a better job, it feels as if I’m giving up on the idea of being a writer. But a better job wouldn’t necessarily take up more time. Might take up less. And I might finally be able to afford a car which would finally free me from the whims of those with cars. Or, rather, let me participate more freely in the activities of those who do have cars and still be free to leave when I wish. Or cruel reality. Trees are moving. Think they’re planning to attack.

It's My Monday

2010-02-16T06:43:00.000-08:00

2/16/2010 9:17 AM – 9:39 AM

It’s snowing and it’s my Monday. I failed miserably at keeping to my new weekend schedule. I’ll try something else. Switch the lifting days to Tuesday, Thursday, Saturday. When March comes, I’ll try to add running. I didn’t sit today. I overslept. I didn’t call my mother. I didn’t clean.

But if there’s anything to learn from sitting that applies to everyday life, it’s that, know what you should be doing and finding yourself not doing it, you simply return to what you were doing without expending to much energy on self-recriminations. Self-recrimination is simply another way of not doing the thing that you are supposed to be doing. Every day. For the rest of your life. That writer that started running when he was 33 and is still running almost 30 years later, he probably failed, at first. And maybe this is what the Jesus Year is supposed to mean for those of us that aren’t God incarnate. We have figured out what we’re supposed to be doing and the rest of our lives is trying, every day, to do it.

Sit, write, exercise, work, study, read, socialize – that’s what I’ve got for a daily plan so far. As I was falling asleep last night, I was thinking about the things that I don’t have that I could have. House, wife, real job, truck – these things, I want but don’t have. Is it in the waiting and doing? Or is it in the doing more? I don’t know yet. I just know that if I want at the end of the day to feel as if I haven’t wasted the day, I have a certain bare minimum of requirements that need to be done. And yet I so rarely get them done. And yet I’ve known that I need to do them for a long time. A few are new. New in the sense that I didn’t figure them out until at least two years ago. Here I am, wrestling with the questions of being, not really fully being. But how many are aware of being? Is there any need for it? It doesn’t necessarily help in finding out how to live. I’ve come to doubt much of psychology – it’s too much a smart atheist’s religion. But how many philosophers had fathers die when they were young? But that’s a cartoon. Good for a giggle, hard to draw meaning from. So after this, editing. And then lifting. And then work. No wife yet. No house. No truck. No real job. But hope that this all adds up to something.

Maybe after Soup

2010-02-14T09:41:00.000-08:00

2/14/2010 12:16 PM – 12:39 PM

I suppose that it’s late now for writing. I like to have it done before noon. Before eleven preferably. But it is a Sunday (which is my Saturday) and I like to do so very little on my first day off. I have one day a week when I don’t feel particularly guilty for wasting a morning and I should revel in it. I began the day right. Up at 9. Sit for ten minutes. Drink coffee. And then the internet…

I wasted time on the internet, looking up this and that, but then I did actual work for a bit. I looked up my insurance company’s web site and found a local doctor. Actually, what I ended up finding was a local association of doctor. I emailed them requesting an appointment for a general physical. I was hoping to have quit smoking for at least two weeks before doing that, but I’ve been paying for this insurance for a month now and seeing the gouge it’s left in my paycheck without seeing any reason for having it. So, off to the doctor’s I will go and he (or she) will tell me what I already know: quit smoking, lose weight, exercise regularly, eat healthier. I’m only 33. I’ve got time to fix things.

I finally figured out a good weight-lifting schedule. In a few weeks, I’ll take the first run of the new season. Every day for the rest of your life. That is a large statement. Well, I hope it is. No more smokes. Every day. Exercise. Every day. Sleep enough. Every day. Write. Every day. Sit. Every day. There are a lot of Every Days left. I hope. There is falsehood in the dictum to live every day as your last. Truth as well, but falsehood dominates. There are a lot more Every Days than there are Last Days. It’s cold and cloudy and there is snow on the ground and I wish I wasn’t such a coward. I wish I could go for a long walk. Or a long run. I wish I didn’t need an excuse to go outside and look and smell. But it is warm in here and there are many things that need doing. But perhaps I shall anyway. Maybe after a nap. Maybe after some soup. The trees across the street, their branches touch. They get more physical contact than I do. They don’t care, of course. They’re trees. This isn’t Avatar. The planet doesn’t give two shits about who walks upon it or what they do to it. We’re the weirdoes. Projecting ourselves into the rocks and calling them brothers. We’ll be brothers when we’re as dead as they will never be. But the thought is comforting. Maybe out into the cold. Maybe on a long walk. Maybe after soup.

Any Number of Old Ladies

2010-02-12T05:36:00.000-08:00

2/12/2010 8:12 AM – 8:32 AM

It’s reminding me of the old days back in Buffalo. I’m tired and waking up is something that someone else should do. But it’s me and my life, left alone, I’m still in my own company. I sat, which is good, but I’m fuzzy and I didn’t make it to a solid three count.

I guess it’s just walking. I guess it’s just getting up and doing the list of things that you know that you should do and doing it every day and hoping that eventually it adds up to something. It’s cold today and the sun is shining and that means the sky is blue as blue. My body is a vaguely connected series of aches and I keep thinking about girls and how old I’m getting. No worries, which is great, just a curiosity of some unspecified sort. There are so many things to do and not enough time to do them all and still get enough sleep. I haven’t been watching TV for a few days. Well, not since my days off. Even if I follow my list and do all the things that I need to, well, maybe if I did that, I wouldn’t feel bad about watching TV.

“I keep thinking about,” is a good phrase to write. It means that I’ve been thinking. I’m always thinking, but thinking doesn’t mean as much to me as it once did. I’m curious if this would make me a better or a worse philosophy major. I was always in a state of ambivalence when I saw people that found their school work interesting but not particularly meaningful. If it wasn’t meaningful, why would I put any effort in it? If it doesn’t actually contribute the project that is being a human being, why give it more than a cursory glance? But they did their homework and didn’t struggle over every little bit on minutia at the question’s core and they handed in their papers and got good grades and worked as TAs and went on to grad school and I washed dishes and doubted the meaningfulness of everything and didn’t have enough money to buy more than crackers at the dollar store for lunch for a week. “I don’t think it’s worth it,” I would tell my younger self, “but I don’t know for sure. I haven’t died yet.” And after I’ve died, who knows? Holden’s creator is dead now. Holden doesn’t give a goddamn. Holden is a bag of bones. Holden is worth any number of old ladies.

Experiments in Being

2010-02-10T06:21:00.000-08:00

2/10/2010 8:58 AM – 9:18 AM

So everything went wrong this morning but it was all fine. I am occasionally shocked by how much my life revolves around this computer. One little install and restart that didn’t go smoothly and I’m lost for an hour, trying to get my day back on track.

I sat today for the first time in months. It went badly in that I couldn’t hold my thoughts for more than a beginner’s three-count, but it went well in that I felt calm and the sitting didn’t give rise to any anxiety attacks. I hope, oh how I hope, that the worst of the fear is behind me. I don’t know that I’ll ever risk smoking the weed again, but that was never my favorite drug anyway. Sleep is still the best drug. It’s snowing out. Really snowing. Not blizzard, just steady and thick. At some point, I’ll go to work. Before that, I’ll work on the detective story and I’ll lift some weights. Maybe I’ll actually do some housework other than laundry.

I’m getting old. I know that if I pushed it, I could risk another ten years of unhealthy living before the risk of heart attacks really started. But that isn’t what I wanted. This style of living was supposed to have been concluded, at the latest, by 32. I’m 33 and I’ll be 34 in less than two months. I rarely look at the marks of where I was supposed to be anymore. It doesn’t help and it usually makes me saddened with my own ineptness at being. But I know where I hope to be. I know that there is a mismatch between what we feel and what we think, but that mismatch doesn’t require that we become enfeebled in our being. You have to acknowledge it and find the tricks that let you progress. Quit smoking. Lose weight. Exercise daily. Eat healthy. Those are the four cornerstones to what I hope comes next. I’m acting selectively on those things at the moment, but they’re there. I know them. I have some idea of how to experiment. Experimenting takes up so much time, but it’s more reliable. Each of us is our own little science project, what works for one may not hold for the next. Probably won’t. But we can see the experiments of others and try them on ourselves. Even with my shredded faith, I can sometimes see the stuffed tiger on a snowy day.

Unfortunately Absurd

2010-02-09T06:05:00.000-08:00

2/9/2010 8:38 AM – 8:59 AM

It’s a Tuesday which is my Monday. I haven’t been writing these things. Laziness is part of it. Another part is simply that I don’t really want to write about the things that I have been thinking about. They’ve been either petty or depressing. I’m trying to be good, but I don’t even know what that really means.

I’ve been thinking about the things that one reads on Wikipedia, how they seem to drift away. But not everything. Most things, but not everything. They had a chart up that compared and contrasted the four schools of thought that emerged from Kierkegaard’s ruminations. He ended up with Theistic Existentialism. Which Camus considered a kind of philosophical suicide. There was also Atheistic Existentialism, Absurdism and Nihilism. I’d been thinking that my leanings have been towards Nihilism lately, but, according to that chart, I’m closer to Absurdism. Absurdism’s response to the great questions is “maybe.” That’s about as far as I’ve been able to take it lately.

I wish I could go as Kierkegaard did to a belief in the goodness of the Divine. A goodness that is not our goodness, as our goodness is rooted in the genes and experiences of the mind that resulted from those genes. Our mind, amazing as it is, cannot even begin to imagine the experience of the Divine mind. But the starting point of accepting the unknowing of the Divine requires a leap of faith that is to acknowledge the existence of the Divine. There cannot be rational arguments for or against the Divine because reason is bound to and emerges from this existence. We don’t have those colors in our crayon box. I don’t have enough faith for that leap. And so, again and again, I find myself slapped back down to the Absurd. Which, for noobs, is not the normal use of the word. It’s a philosophy term after all. They never are. Maybe. I’m tired of that word. But that word is the only thing that I can use. Maybe.

Another on Writing and God

2010-01-05T06:40:00.000-08:00

1/5/2010 9:12 AM – 9:33 AM

And New Years is over and a wonderful time was had by all and I am tired and my joints ache and I am getting old and I’m looking forward too much to the first day back to work poppy seed tea. It stopped snowing a little while ago. I’m cold and I want to go back to bed except that I know that too much of this will mean that I will feel fake.

There is only one requirement they say. There is only one requirement for a writer, be they good or bad: you can’t not write. So there is that. They don’t stipulate how much time you can go for before you need to write again. I think the best I’ve managed is a year and a half since I was eighteen. The time is passed where I can become a master of some other form. I might get good at something else. I might learn to sing and play the guitar. I might learn to draw comics, as I’ve always wanted. And they might be Good Enough. But to be a master of these things, of anything, they must pass with you from youth to adulthood. They must be a part of the grit of life that clings beneath the fingernails, forever etched into the enamel of trouble’s memory.

I’m not real. Of course I’m real. On the days that I can’t believe in God, does he still consider me? Or is he like my old pastor, washing his hands of us failed experiments? The girls that I’ve loved, are they still real even though I kissed only one of them? Of the ones that I kissed that I did not love, did it stain as deeply as I feel it did? Am I become the vampire boy only to discover that the ability to attract consists chiefly in the fact that I don’t give a shit if I do or not? I’m not real, of course. I’m real. And these are stupid words but they keep with the spirit of the Old Ego. Those that I admire don’t realize that they hate me. I don’t hate them. I wish them joy. And failure. Keep something for yourself. In the infinite emptiness of space (of which we are a part), the true population is always zero whether someone is alive to see it or not. It’s not that God is real. It’s that I can’t imagine anything is real if God isn’t watching it. It comes back to the top, like a good essay should. It’s not that you have to write. It’s that you can’t not write. I thought it meant a shaking of the fingers. It means the turning of the globe. I am become the fool again. Like I always will until the creeping mud reclaims me. It’s all I ever wanted.

The Throwing of the Snit, Vol 42 (with duck)

2009-12-18T08:39:00.000-08:00

12/18/2009 11:16 AM – 11:36 AM

Well, it’s finally cold here. I’m cold. My room is fine but the regular trips out to the stairwell to smoke creeps into my skin and lingers. I’m tired and grumpy. I want to go to sleep, but if I did that, I would have really completely wasted the morning. I was up by 8, but I spent the morning on YouTube and Wikipedia. Researching things that I’m only mildly interested in and have nothing to do with what I’m working on.

Grr. Grumpy Spike. Empowered to be sullen and dull. And the sun is shining and I have no reason to be grumpy. I haven’t written, according to my stopwatch program, in three days. I actually like the new project but I’m having trouble doing what I need to be doing – getting up, putting ass to chair and writing. I actually got up on time today. I put my ass in the chair. And then I did nothing but goof around on the internet. Aside from this stream of whining, which I have been engaging in frequently in my head, I’ve been thinking about love. It isn’t really there, you know. Not like death. That was me making fun of myself by the way. My humor is lost if I’m not there to be overly dramatic in person. It is fun to say the most horrible things that you can think of in public and be amusing with it.

I figured out a long time ago that no one really want to know what you think about things really. They want you to be amusing. Dance fat monkey. Dance. See. Grumpy Spike. Sullen and dull. So what magic can I whip up to save face? That’s the problem. Not just boring, I’m running on empty. Grr. Hot soup. Hot soup is the answer. Hot soup and hot shower. Together at last. Together forever. So I walk into this Duck Store and I say, “I’d like to buy a duck.” And the clerk says, “What kind of duck are you looking for?” And I say, “The kind that makes you happy.” And the clerk says, “Oh. In that case, you might want to try the Highly Improbable but Thoroughly Entertaining Daydream Duck. I’d recommend you have a side of fries.” The duck was tasty but ultimately impossible. You wanted more within a few minutes of finishing. What’s duck like? It’s like you want more duck. The clouds are rippled like old nylon batting, fallen from an over-used department store pillow. More adverbs! More adverbs, he cries. But adverbs I have none to give, Ebenezer. Circling. Circling the words. Circling the words, always looking for the joke. The one thing that makes unknowing palatable.

Small Worlds

2009-12-15T07:04:00.000-08:00

12/15/2009 9:37 AM – 10:01 AM

And so now I’m going to be listening to some hipster music. Well, I’m going to try anyway. Not at the moment. At the moment, I’m listening to nothing but the quiet crackle in my headphones. When I was working on the detective story, I listened almost exclusively to pop dance music. It has a driving beat and doesn’t really capture the attention. Perfect.

I think that hipster music is music written by musicians for musicians. The rest of us get the occasional scraps of accessibility, but to really get into it, you have to be at least at a 4th level remove from the non-musician. Doesn’t mean it’s not good. As far as I can tell, it is. But people that are obsessed with music listen to it a lot and want to create it. For the most part, music is in my background acting like a sheet between me and my boredom. Since I moved from Buffalo and don’t have that 50 minutes of walking to work to dedicate to giving an album its 3 good listens to, I haven’t listened to any new albums. I’ve listened to some old albums for the first time, but mostly, I’ve been catching up with “classic” rock singles, because I wasn’t allowed to listen to it as a kid.

At a certain point, it becomes more difficult to be the noob. Maybe as my co-workers get steadily younger. I fake knowing. Mostly because it just saves time and ridicule. I’m not bashing ridicule, by the way. A light-hearted ridicule can be a good spur to action, but I’m getting old. I’m not old by current standards, 70 is, after all, the new 60, but in my line of work, the grunts of which I am a member are usually younger than me. With my brain, I should be better employed. Or I should be in the loony bin. The wash is that I’m a dishwasher. The problem with my upbringing, any tightly closed upbringing, is that, unless I was going to stay within the confines of the childhood world, most of the things that I had packed into my brain became useless. I’m too restless for that, so out here in the average world, I’m one step behind the rest. Even philosophy, universally accepted, is a self-referential world. Maybe that’s why I liked it. So we’ll try again with the hipster’s earwigs. Because self is all I've got. Because nothing is more self-obsessed than a hipster.

No. It's the Universe That's Weird. Stupid Lions...

2009-12-12T09:40:00.000-08:00

12/12/2009 12:14 PM – 12:35 PM
It’s sunny out. Quite sunny but the sky isn’t that perfect crystal blue that means it’s really cold. It’s cold, don’t get me wrong, but not that really, really cold that makes the blue really blue. A plane just flew through the tree. It was a very small plane apparently, as it didn’t hit any of the branches. It flew very slowly for a very small plane.

Despite the sleeping pill, it took me forever to fall asleep. And now I’m up late and will be able to squeeze in about twenty minutes of writing. I might have to attempt the impossible and try writing after I get home from work. That is not the time during which my brain works. Nine hours of sleep, I think that’s unnecessary. But there are no babies to make me feel that it is, so I sleep. Or I could just do what I know needs doing and wake up when I’m supposed to and write and be really tired for a week or so until my body re-acclimatize to the new schedule. But I wrote a book! A short one! That’s two novels in my life time! Two more than most people! But that will slowly change. At least amongst the educated classes. To fit better with my demographic, I should be thinner and in better shape. And married.

On the married thing, I think I’ve still got a few years before I become an outlier. Which means more time to play at being a novelist. Well, if I married a girl eight years younger than me, I could probably get away with the 5-years-before-kids thing and that would give me another seven or eight years of playing. I froze there for a second; the strange confusion of the idea of being someone’s parent disoriented me. I almost ran into the lions that were sitting this chase out. Stupid lions. It is still weird to me that people that I know and did wonderful stupid youthful things alongside are issuing forth our replacements. And it has been this way for a long time. Long before my grandparents were born. It feels like there should be a universal system in place in which people that do stupid kid things are stupid kid things and people that admonish stupid kid things should remain people that admonish. That stupid kid things transform into people that admonish is just weird. Seriously. It’s weird. It’s not the occasional “whoops! We made a baby!” This is something that happens over and over again to most people. I'm 33 and I sleep in a twin-sized bed in the “big room” of my upstairs “apartment” in the house of my college roommate and his wife. This oddly makes sense to me. I’m a stupid kid thing. I’m not weird; it’s the universe that’s the weird one.

Writing, Dishwashing and Monkeys (Stupid Monkeys)

2009-12-11T09:36:00.000-08:00

12/11/2009 12:09 PM – 12:30 PM
Oh. Right. Here’s this thing that I’m doing. So I didn’t even bother to set my alarm last night. I woke up at 11 after not being able to fall asleep until sometime after 2. This is bothersome. If I take the sleeping pills, I’m lousy tired even after I wake up, if I don’t take them, I don’t fall asleep. But here I am now. I watched “Bones” and drank coffee. Oh, and ate a maple frosted doughnut.

I haven’t worked on “real” writing since Wednesday and that was only like a hundred words. This new project is confounding me. In my head it veers back and forth between The Chocolate War and this YA fantasy that I can’t remember the name of but I read it as a kid. The one that I read that I can’t remember the name of ended up being an elaborate “it was all a dream” thing but you sort of knew it going in. The protagonist went from sometime in the early 20th century to some other fantasy world with magic by way of getting his head dunked in a barrel of water. The end of the book ended with him getting his head yanked back out, no time having passed. But while he was there, he fulfilled a prophecy and became king and did heroics. You know, “low-fantasy” typical stuff.

Or is that high-fantasy bookended by low-fantasy? I never figured that particular genre classification scheme out. Once again, there are a billion things that I should be doing with my mornings in addition to writing. I am not doing anything including writing. A brief rest and then back to work, that’s what it was supposed to be. Bah. I cut myself twice last night at work. Both wouldn’t have hurt if I hadn’t been soaking my hands in dishwater for four hours previous to the incidents. Dishwashing as a vocation has certain drawbacks. I find it odd that people assume that it’s an easy job. I don’t think that there is such a thing as an easy job. The amount of work that I have to do sandwiched into eight hours is not physically possible unless you’re Barry Allen. That’s the Flash. DC. From the comic books. Admittedly, most of the time, my mind doesn’t really need to be fully present to accomplish the task at hand, but it’s still not “a job a monkey could do.” A phrase that I have heard an unusual number of times in my dishwashing career. Often from bosses. Often from non-bosses. Seriously? Then buy a fracking monkey. For the initial laydown of 10K, you should be able to get ten years of excellent dishwashing for banana’s and the occasional cage cleaning. But I’m thinking about work while not there. That’s a no-no. Back to something.

Stuff and Intellectual Property Rights

2009-12-09T07:30:00.000-08:00

12/9/2009 9:51 AM – 10:16 AM

I really need to get back into the habit of early to bed, early to rise. I’m not up as late as I was yesterday and I feel slowly coming back aliveish. It’s snowy outside but that’s getting melted by the scattered rain. It looks like March outside. At least my bones arent’ cold. Actually, I rather like today’s weather. All gray and windy.

I really need to remember to get good coffee. I’ve been drinking the backup can of Folgers for almost a week now. It takes a lot of cream and sugar to make it drinkable. Which is why I keep forgetting because I make good coffee with lots of cream and sugar. Yesterday didn’t go so great on the writing front. I added about 300 words. I’m behind already. It’s okay though, I’ve got 49 days now. That’s a lot of time. I still have to get the rent. I puttered about yesterday and then it was too late. I have this theory about the future of artistic endeavors. It’s not particularly profitable. Thing is, where would I be if Hammett and Chandler hadn’t done it? And what if I had to pay them for blazing the path?

If a law becomes unenforceable, does it cease to be a valid law? There is a long-standing argument within the libertarian camp about the nature of intellectual property. St. Ayn maintained that all property springs from intellectual property and therefore, intellectual property must be guarded. There are others within the fold that hold that intellectual property is a nonsense phrase. You can own the original painting, but the copies of that painting are not yours. And someone had to invent farming, should we all still be paying his descendants to farm our own land? I still haven’t made my mind up on this one (bit torrenting included). Then there’s the question of medicine – for some reason, people maintain that it’s wrong that pharmaceutical companies make lots of money off of the drugs that they created and tested. Obviously, I say: bullshit. However, once the drug has been created and sent out, there’s a brief stall while others try to figure out what they did, but honestly, that stall is about 6 months tops. Drug companies aren’t’ going to make up the cost of R&D in that 6 months, are they? Don’t know. Just like I don’t know how much pay is too much to pay a CEO. Never had to do it. And my silly little detective story? I emailed it out to about a dozen people. Who owns it? Bah. I don’t know. I don’t know a lot. And I get pissed when people who haven’t done more than repeat a party mantra that they read in an Agitprop pamphlet claim that they do know. You. Don’t. Know. Damn. Nit.

First Day Portents

2009-12-08T07:56:00.000-08:00

12/8/2009 10:31 AM – 10:52 AM
Well, today is the first day of the new project and I’m not sure about the normal world problem that’s supposed to be an echo of the fantasy world problem that the novel presents. And I woke up late. And I’m supposed to go to the bank and get the rent since it was closed by the time I got there yesterday. And I ate all the soup last night so I don’t have any for lunch today. It was good soup.

The project is 65,000 words in 50 days. That was actually accidental. I was just figuring out how long it would take to get to 65,000 words if I was writing 1500 words a day, except for one day a week when it’s only 500 words. Also, I gave myself only 500 words on holidays. It ended up being 50 days exactly. Synchronicity. And they say the age of magical thinking is dead. Wow. I want to sleep. Sleeping is awesome. Yesterday, I slept until 11:30. I couldn’t fall asleep the night before, so it only ended up being 9 hours, but now my body thinks it should be allowed to sleep until at least 10:30. Habituation. This is one of mankind’s saving/damning thingies.

Maybe I have an idea about how to give the hero a real-world problem… Anyway, maybe I won’t even get to it today. Though I probably should. I think YA stuff you need to get to the action pretty quick. This will be weird. No explicit violence, no swears, no sex, what is there to write about if not those things? Ah well, I’m sure it will make for an interesting 7 weeks. And I can’t think of things to write about and I’ve got five minutes left. There is my wart. I don’t know how I could get a wart, five days a week I spend at least four hours a day with my hands in semi-caustic chemicals. The sky is overcast. At the moment, there is some pale yellow that kind of looks like a frozen lightning bolt down in the far corner of my window. When I was waking up, which took two hours, the sky was all red-tinged. I kept thinking “red sky at night, sailor’s delight; red sky in the morning, sailor’s take warning.” Also, “hey, that looks like New Mexico.” It’s always red sky there. No, not really. Only in the morning and evening. Sailors are confused. Especially since I’m not sure what a sailor would be doing in the middle of the high desert. I just went down to put in the second load of wash and discovered that all my work pants were in the bottom of the basket. Dress pants to wash dishes!

On the Agonizing Moment

2009-12-05T10:54:00.000-08:00

12/5/2009 1:38 PM – 1:52 PM

And this will be a short one. I woke up very late today but, for once, I feel rested. It would seem that I get my agony moments in story-making while I’m in the shower. When I got the one from “Angel’s Share” I was in the shower, and instead of writing today, I was going over some old notes for my next novel.

When I was in the shower, getting ready for work, I realized the worst thing that could happen to my character. It was so bad it hurt my soul. If I have one. It was the same thing for Angel’s Share. I wonder if anyone will notice that moment, the one that hurt me to write it? I doubt it. It’s infused with humor. Everything that I do seems to be infused with humor. One of the bad guys in Angel’s Share says that that is the best defense that we have when staring into the face of oblivion. Unfortunately, I think I agree with that. At least today. Hopefully, not tomorrow. The Moment of Greatest Agony is a story concept that I picked up somewhere in the few years, I’m not sure where. It’s just that the emotional climax of a story should occur when the protagonist. .. Crap word for what I’m writing… hero. When the hero of the story has a realization of how crap the crap is and has to make a decision.

And the decision should be bad. Not in the sense of “he made a bad choice and there was a good one” but “he made a bad choice in the face of only bad choices.” But, if the hero is truly a hero, the choice should be the right one. Story-telling, at least the kind I’m doing at the moment is not reality. It’s a ridiculous lie that makes the ridiculous truth embraceable. And this is depressing. Well, this is the Ego. And I’m off to work. Drink well and long.

In the Year 2109...

2009-12-04T08:50:00.000-08:00

12/4/2009 11:21 AM – 11:41 AM
Okay. Now I’m typing. Now I’m just sitting in my chair, glancing out the window, looking over at my sweet new TV. Well, it’s an old TV, but it’s newer than my old one. I paid cheap. Maybe too cheap. I might feel guilty about it for a while. I’m suddenly almost overcome by the desire to sleep. I could. Grab a little nap before work.

I didn’t get much sleep last night. Despite the Nyquil, I couldn’t fall asleep for almost two hours after I got into bed. Which is weird because I woke up early enough yesterday. I wasn’t even super stoked to get the TV today. I didn’t know it would rock this much. But it does. Now I can watch my downloaded TV shows on a TV instead of on my computer. Sweet. It’s chilly but not cold out. The sky is mostly cloudy but it’s not solid. Still a lot of light. Arg. I have so much to do when the weekend comes around. Pay rent. Buy a bunch of household supplies. Clean. Hopefully, buy a bunch of Christmas presents.

And then mail them. I haven’t mailed anything in, like six years. And no car. And what do I buy? So much. I want to sleep. Just thinking about it makes me want to sleep. And I wanted to sleep anyway. Maybe I will. An hour nap. That might be nice. Or it might suck. I’ll get up groggier than I was. Meh. I’m an American living in the 21st century. I have it better than, like, 99% of anyone anywhere anywhen, thus far. So I shouldn’t complain. Of course, if I was born 100 years from now and we don’t do that idiotic “lets freeze the economy so nobody hurts their poor little selves because we are so obviously smarter than the unwashed masses and so obviously more moral their evil profit-seeking employers” crap that we seem to be heading towards, it would rock more. You’ll be able to smoke and it will be healthy. Dishwashers will be able to buy hover cars that drive themselves. A perfect hamburger will cost you only the cost of the wattage that it takes to power the replicator. It will rock. But right now, my keyboard is acting up. Needs new batteries, I think. It’s annoying. It. Keeps. Stopping. Stupid magic keyboard. Man. I want a nap. Naps will not be necessary in the future. You’ll be able to scan yourself and - poof! - a two hour nap. Or you can still do it manually. Ah, the future!

Dual. Screen.

2009-12-04T07:37:00.001-08:00

Yeah. I gots it. And yeah, that's Mythbusters, all hangin' out, looking at my keyboard.

I bought a used TV for wicked, wicked cheap (but still legal). Runs the cable channel's fine, but it had an S-Vid hookup and I thought I'd give it a try. After some shenanigans... it rocks! Now to figure out how to feed the audio out to the TV...

I Assure You, We're Open ...Again

2009-12-03T09:16:00.000-08:00

It's only been... what? A year and four months or so? What's a year and four months or so amongst friends?

Writer's Log: 12-03-09

2009-12-03T08:54:00.000-08:00

Current Project: Untitled Novel
Day: -5
Days Left: 55
Today's Goal: 0
Total Written: 131
Written Today: 131
Time at Desk: 10 minutes

I'm not sure what it is yet, so I don't know what to say about it.

Welcome Back to More of the Same Old Crap!

2009-12-03T08:43:00.000-08:00

12/3/2009 9:30 AM – 9:51 AM

Okay, alright, being up and awake. For a while now. I guess that I’m not going to start Apophenia. That will remain there on the hard drive, waiting for me to pick it up again. No. I’m going to start my children’s fantasy. We’ll see how that goes. I’m not sure, though. Maybe it will end up being something else. I haven’t actually started it.

It’s mostly cloudy outside. There’s this very bright strip of sunlight all along the horizon. I’m recovering from last night – I spent about six hours at work pissed off. Spike doesn’t spend more than an hour pissed off. It was stupid. A Perfect Storm of dirty dishes – pastry piled it on, retail piled it on and there was a little bit of crap left over from the morning shift. I still got out fifteen minutes late, which is right on time for me. There are things that you learn after a year at a job about how to cut corners. You just can’t do it every night or they’ll catch on. The only thing that was obvious that I neglected was the giant puddle of muddy water around the sink. I was too pissy to realize that that would need to be cleaned before I left. When I got home and calmed down, I knew it, but it was too late by then. I’ll probably get a smart-ass comment about it when I go in today.

Oh, fugbutter. Let it go. I know, I know. On to today. I have so much crap to do around the house. Most of it can wait until Sunday, but I’ve run out of some items. I’ve been washing with shampoo for about a week now. Hmm… I could just take the foaming soap from the bathroom sink. That might take it a few days longer… I trimmed the beard yesterday. Right after I took the picture of my NaNoWriMo Beard for my facebook profile pic. It looks good. Hair is still all crazy though. Yeah, this is good. The odd thing about my six hour tantrum is that it was even possible. It wouldn’t have been a few months back. Longer than an hour, and my thoughts would have drifted to the pointlessness of being in a world where we can’t really know anything about God, which would have led to a panic attack. So a six-hour bad mood was a good thing. Yeah. That’s what I’m going with. We’ll see how it goes today. Today, I start something new. That’s always a good thing. Can I finish it by January 26th or so? Yeah. Probably. If I don’t do a lot of crap that I need to. Actually, before I started this new writing binge, I was letting crap slide. I just need to schedule in some housework time. Schedule. Yes. Schedule. The clouds are going by. I need to print out a new calendar. Yes. And work on a new schedule. Is the time up yet? Nope. Still a minute to go. I can’t think of anything more. Here are some words: improbable. Unlikely. Unknowing. Swine. Flu. Tyranny. Tyrannous. Rex. Good-bye.

PSA - Spike's Net Connection Gone 'Til After Move

2008-07-26T07:45:00.000-07:00

Naughty Verizon cancelled my connection a week early, telling me that the Disconnection department "works ahead sometimes." They are still charging me for the connection until August 12th. Very efficient. Anyway, I'll be stopping in at the library (from which I am typing this) from time to time over the next week and a bit to check my email, but it won't be with any of my usual frequency. If you need to get ahold of me use -gasp!- my phone, which will be good until August 1st. Unless the Verizon's Phone Disconnection department also "works ahead" sometimes. Grumble, grumble, grumble...

See you in Ithaca!

Which is More of the Same. But Builds Dramatically

2008-07-11T05:42:00.000-07:00

07/11/2008 7:14 AM – 8:28 AM

I really have little interest in doing this today. Perhaps an effect of not having done it in a little while. But I don’t really feel like doing anything today. I don’t want to read either the Asimov novel that I started or the comic books I’ve brought home from the library. I didn’t wake up in an afraid mood. I just sort of woke up.

I’m thinking about the move lately. That makes sense. Two weeks as of today is my last day at work. Doh – I still have to write my letter of resignation. Later. I’m curious to see what effect the move will have on my mood. Hopefully a good one. Is it enough to move from the city to the town to lift the lingering doubts about existence or is it something that I’ll have to be working on for the rest of my life? Going to Mary’s wedding last week made me think about marriage again. Not that it’s ever far from my mind. Why is love, which is so wonderful, so short on endurance? Why can’t it change everything as I imagined it would when I was younger? Why do we slide back into normalcy? I know the answer that psychology gives – habituation, but why in the metaphysical?

I find the idea of the evolution of human psychology fascinating and terrifying. I’m drawn to it. My nearly overpowering and obsessive sense of curiosity demands that I at least make an attempt to know and understand. But eventually, we run into that wall of unknowability in every field. From an evolutionary perspective, romantic love makes sense, its time-span nearly identical to the amount of time from meeting an attractive mate to the time when the mother can raise a child alone without both of them starving. I hate the idea that this is all we are – moving mud, of no greater significance than inert mud, just mixed more complexly. The deeper you get into science; you see how powerful it is. It can find the reason for everything, but if you push it back, you find that there is no reason for anything. We’re the outcome of trillions upon trillions of rolls of the quantum dice. Our existence is neither inevitable nor impossible. In this story, we are not even god’s bastard children, cast adrift in the cosmos – we’re warmish rocks on the surface of some uninteresting planet endlessly circling an ever-dimming minor star.

To rape or to love makes no difference and no poet of science, no matter how gifted, can light a candle of meaning or mystery in a demon-banished world. We’re meaningless. Our actions are meaningless. Our hopes and dreams are meaningless. The cruelty of self-awareness is meaningless, arising from the void only to fall inevitably back into it without the slightest stirring of the cosmic waters. Vanity of vanities, everything that we value is meaningless, the mere outcomes of a semi-complex, random programming. What we call love is of no more importance than the dust stirred up by a tiny pebble striking the night-enshrouded ground on a moon of Pluto. And where now is my God?

He’s where he was when I lay twitching on the sanctuary floor, having learned to twitch from the Pentecostals who learned it from the Voodoo priestesses who learned it from the epileptics, all of us sure that this was proof of the divine indwelling. There is no proof. There cannot be. We cannot see a hand that holds us, consisting as it does of the substance of our eyes. There is only hope. Hope that love has meaning beyond the mere occasional odd propensity towards the replication of a chemical chain.

I can no longer claim with C. S. Lewis that I was dragged kicking and screaming into the Kingdom. I was stiffer-necked. My heels dug in. My fingers found purchase. The caravan moved on.

And so, alone beneath the darkening sky, I light my candle in the desert waste and say my prayers in the deafening roar of the divine silence.

Let my love mean something. Please, dear God, let my love mean something.

From Time to Time

2008-06-29T08:41:00.000-07:00

06/29/2008 11:14 AM – 11:34 AM

I don’t know that I have any particular thing that I’m writing about. That’s the nice thing about a long, tiring run – it wipes the slate clean for a little while. I did 5.4 miles this morning in 58 minutes. I’m approaching my “mid-week” goal time. 1 hour, three times a week. 1 and a half hours, once a week.

Eventually, I’ll add lifting to the weekly schedule. Sometime, not smoking. Maybe, maybe someday, I’ll add a healthy diet. But that is not the here today. Today is this Sunday. I’ll have to figure out what to do today. Maybe figure out more moving stuff. Maybe I’ll write. Maybe I’ll read, drink beer and take a nap. It isn’t time yet to decide. And the weight of my body is pleasant and the breeze through my widow is pleasant. It is good to be here, even if it isn’t a house in the woods. This is itself and it will change eventually.

Even my hands are tired. My fingers have little tightnesses to them that are not unpleasant. Tomorrow, I’ll go to work. In about a month, I’ll move. Somewhere, across the trees and fields and cities and roads, there is a sea. I’ll sit by it someday. Somewhere, beneath a tall tree in the middle of a forest, there is a patch of damp, mossy earth. Someday, I’ll sit on it. There is a red mesa in a dry and dusty desert. Someday, I’ll climb it. There is a pool in a river, dark and deep and still, hidden by the hills. Someday, I’ll swim in it. There is a heat, thick with water and void of breeze. Someday, I will lie still within it, feeling my breath pass hot through my lips and nose. There is this, the heavy and slow and good of being. Just being. And there is wisdom in stopping for it, from time to time.

From the (Admittedly Small) City, Towards the (Admittedly Imaginary) Country

2008-06-24T04:46:00.000-07:00

06/24/2008 6:43 AM – 7:28 AM

Take a few days off and this gets rusty. I spent the morning reading a book about moving to the country. Oh, that is one of my favorite fantasies: the garden (big garden), the chickens, the turkeys, the goats, the big kitchen, the chopping of wood, the building of things that no one in the city in their right minds would consider building.

It’s a bit tantalizing, almost cruel to imagine myself in the country. I can’t even afford a car. Ah well, a little more hard work, a little less eating out, then a car, then some land, then a garden (big garden), then a shanty. Tin roof. Rusted. I ask myself questions that have no bearing on my now. How deep do you have to dig to build a rabbit-proof fence? Is it still viable to have a hand-dug well? Really, honestly, how much freedom do you have to do the stuff that you want to try out if you’re out in the boonies? As in, could you really build a sod house if you so desired? Not that I desire. I don’t like sharing my bed with worms this side of a coffin. But could I?

Strange dreams these, that still creep in from time to time. And so much resulting from the fact that I really don’t like being told what to do. Even now, having so many good bosses and not chafing under the lash hardly at all, and certainly not at the bosses themselves just the fact that it isn’t my recognizing a task that needs doing, but my need for money. And knowing that, once you get a little above the poverty line, the rise in happiness drops dramatically. It doesn’t fall. It doesn’t really level out. It just climbs so slightly as to require very powerful magnification equipment to recognize it. But there, in the country of my interior, there is a degree of inherently rewarding activity that makes me wonder why anyone would leave it. But that’s an easily answered question. The country of my interior and the country of reality are different places. Growing up, I never raised chickens and my garden work was trivial, if occasionally pretty. But there is something in knowing that if I hadn’t shoveled the driveway (well, I would have gotten in trouble, but aside from that), it wouldn’t have gotten shoveled (well, my brother probably would have shoveled it). But it was my driveway to shovel. The lawn to be mowed was my lawn and if, every spring, my brother and I wanted to push the lawn back into the field a few feet, we mowed the tall grass and no one really minded.

I don’t really understand the impulse to the city. I’m glad some people do. That river of capital, endlessly churning and reproducing and red-tooth-and-clawing gives me cheap used books and thrift-store clothes and perfectly good couches on curbs, but after four years in (an admittedly small) city, and I still don’t understand the seemingly a priori desire for cocktail bars and expensive gyms and clothes that can only be worn for three months. Those girls sure are purdy though. But why would you want to be looked at by so many when it’s so unlikely that you’ll be seen by even one? Does being purdy make it easier to believe that everything will turn out fine in the end? But they are purdy. No denying that.

Ah, well, back to the books. Maybe I’ll actually do some writing today.

Which Contains Many Scattered Thoughts, Including but not Limited to: God, Marrage, Actions and Rain

2008-06-18T04:18:00.000-07:00

06/18/2008 6:23 AM – 6:45 AM

To live a life of quiet contemplation. But with sex. And occasionally, travel. To live as self-sufficiently as possible without passing up the pleasures that this life has to offer. Read, write, garden. Pray. Exercise and meditate. Eat, drink, poo, pass water. Talk. Have Sex. Watch TV and movies. Build, fix, clean. Occasionally take drugs.

I’d like to study some form of martial art, one that’s difficult but possible. I’d like to learn how to draw. I’d like to publish several novels. I’d like to get married. I’d like to build a solid building, one that will last for two-hundred years. I’d like to visit the most peaceful places of the world, ones that you have to walk a long way on your own feet to get to.

I cannot avoid the dark times, it would be wrong, but it would be wrong to prolong them, wallow in them. You need to connect to failing and learn from it. I cannot, if I honestly face the facts, prove to myself that there is a God. But absence of evidence is not evidence of absence. God can neither be proved nor disproved. The only rationale that people can give when honestly confronted with God is: 1) how can God, if he is good, allow evil and 2) people that believe in God do bad things. The problem of evil is old and excellent, but there are many answers to it, some more appealing than others, all of them admittedly difficult. The problem in the second is a fallacy of applying the attributes of a whole as if they were exclusive to a particular.

So. Lesson learned. Move on. I believe in God. I have chosen to do so because I find the idea of blessed continuance more pleasant to hope for than the idea of unjudged ending. If the materialist is right, I’ll never know it. If I’m right, everyone will be pleasantly surprised (except me, of course, and then I will say, “nanny-nanny who-who”). If the exclusivist is right, well, most people are fucked and there isn’t much I can do about it. So. Move on. Why do I like rainy days better than cloudy ones? I like cloudy days, but rainy days are just that much better. When am I grown up enough to have a wife? Is it when I can finally afford to support a pregnant wife and children? Is it when I have a house with a washer and drier? Is it when I finally start to pay my bills conscientiously on time? I realize now, that a wife will not make everything better. Only a little better and my life will be very different than it is now. I will have to find a way to schedule my life around being with her instead of around following up interesting leads. Or maybe I won’t. How does that work? I will still have dark days. I will still have marvelously light ones. But I would have talkin’ and fightin’ and huggin’ and kissin’ and sexin’ and all those other –in’ actions that require more than one player.

And the Results Are in...

2008-06-16T07:54:00.000-07:00

My official time was 31:56, making my pace 10:18/mile. I came in at 689th place overall, and 43rd out of 64 for my gender/age group. So, meh... but not bad for my first race.

On My First Race

2008-06-15T12:27:00.000-07:00

The official race results haven't been posted yet, but I think that I crossed the finish line at around 31:45. That would make my pace 10:15/mile. Not as fast as I wanted, not as slow as I feared. I'm happy with it. My little conceit is that they were counting from the time of the start buzzer to your finish, not the time of your crossing the starting line to your finish. If they'd done it that way, I'd be down to about an even 31. Which is still slower than I was hoping. But I'm happy with it, considering my average pace when I'm out running is about 10:45/mile.

Here's a link to the race site: the Susan G. Komen Race for the Cure. At this posting, the "teams" page is disabled or I'd leave link to mine. My Circ boss, who's an awesome boss, is a breast-cancer survivor, and I was on her and her daughter's team. Her daughter is also a breast-cancer survivor. I found them briefly before the start of the race and said hello, but I went to stretch and get a little water and didn't see them again for the rest of the time. Whoops. Sorry. Thanks Kathy!

I must say that I felt horribly out a place until about ten minutes into the actual running. As the rest of the folks on my team had opted to walk the course, I was on my own, and this seemed to be an oddity at the start line. Everybody had a buddy, even the crazy people that were wearing tiny super-shiny matching runner's outfits and jumping three feet in the air, kicking their own asses with their heels to stretch those quads. I tried very hard to turn away in time whenever somebody did that, lest my incredulous grin betray me for the novice that I am. It was amazing to watch though. Jump-whack! Jump-whack! Jump-whack!

As the time ticked down to the start buzzer, which was actually a somewhat nervous sounding air-horn, I tried to find a place near the back of the line of runners but before the walkers. This was more difficult than I had imagined as the two packs were smooshed together and over-lapping where they met. As one gentleman three or four people in front of me replied to his wife when she asked if maybe they shouldn't be in the back with the other people pushing baby-strollers, "ah, why bother? It'll sort itself out." Shortly after this, I stepped out of line and edged my way in a few yards or so ahead.

I did discover a trick that helped me determine a good place to start. Before the race, anyone that wished to be timed had to go to a little tent where they were handing out small black plastic do-hickies that you attached to your sneakers by lashing them to your shoelaces with little plastic cinch-straps. Like the kind police use on "Cops" when they run out of handcuffs. But smaller. Not, however, a lot smaller. I was left with a small plastic antenna sticking up off my sneaker that reached about five inches up my shin. I discovered after the race that they had a pair of little wire cutters to trim it up for you after you'd attached it and they just used longer cinches so that it was easier to maneuver the strap around your laces before you tightened it down. I, however, not wanting to appear the novice that I am, just let them scan my race tag, imprint the timer do-hicky to my race number and hand it over, before I quickly walked away like I assumed the in-the-know, Big People racers did. After the race was over and I was handing in my do-hicky, I was pleased to see that from the evidence of numerous tall plastic antennas jutting out from the pile of returned do-hickies, I was not the only newbie dork to have run the race.

The trick that I discovered about where to start was that the more serious you were about running, the more likely you were to have a strange do-hicky attached to your shoelaces and the closer you would be to the front. The less serious you were, the less likely you were to have a do-hicky and the further back you would be. Since my goal was to come in at less than 31 minutes (not quite achieved), I figured that I would be somewhere less than the front jump-to-kick-your-own-ass 5.30211 min/milers, but more than the middle I’m-here-for-the-beer-and-sausage 15 min/milers. Somewhere, I was guessing, where there was a mingling of mostly do-hickied sneakers and a few un-do-hickied sneakers but no baby strollers. Unless they were those suped-up, aero-dynamic, three-wheeled baby-strollers. I was going to stay the hell out of those people’s way. And I did.

I found a place to start that was a little further back than I might have aspired to, but this allowed me more of what I have discovered is, thus far in my experience, the greatest joy of racing: passing people. But it’s not just passing people. It’s dodging them.

At the blast of the air-horn, actually the third, the first two being sort of anemic and tentative, I started running. In place. We had to wait for those in front of us to clear out before we could even start to move. Then we got to move and pretend we were running. Kind-of like when a really tall man is “running” along with a very small child: the arms are pumping, the knees are going higher than they would if you were just walking, but your pace is about that of, well, a very small biped. Eventually, I worked up to a shuffle-run that was even slower than my regular long Sunday pace, and that was about the time that I finally crossed the start line.

At about five minutes in and having finally reached a speed that would be normal if I was just sort of taking it easy, it dawned on me that I could have started a little further towards the front. This was when I started noticing that I wasn’t just passing people (and being passed. Frequently), I was having to calculate trajectories and moments of impact and attempting to squeeze into what they call in the space shuttle launches “small windows of opportunity.”

How it would break-down was like this: let’s say that you’ve got someone on your left that’s running at the same speed as you, a group of three in front of you that are going slightly slower and up on the right, someone that is going much slower. You can’t go to the left because you smack into the person that’s keeping your pace, you can’t stay in place because you’ll smack into one of the three in front of you, and if you go to right, you’ll smack into the slow person before you can pass the ones in front. Your options then are to either slow down to the pace of the group until they pass the slow-poke or speed up and try to pass the group before they reach the slow-poke. The answer, of course, is to speed up. It’s a race, fer goodness sake! I didn’t hardly smash into anyone.

By about the fifteen-minute mark, the course had thinned out to the point that these calculations were not a constant thing but still something that one could look forward too with a reliable frequency.

What would amaze me was that even in the last half of the race, from time to time I would pass someone that looked like they were even less physically fit than me. There was a woman, at about the twenty minute mark, who had proportions vaguely similar to that of an egg, beginning at her head and ending at her knees. A largish egg. But she was still running. At the twenty minute mark. Now to really appreciate how amazing this is, you need to realize that we had all started at the same time and as I ran, I slowly increased my pace. I did the first mile in about 11:15, the second in about 10:30, and the last in about 9:30 (negative splits, thankyouverymuch). This means that at the twenty minute mark, around the time that I passed her, she had run a little more that 1.8 miles at a pace of about 10.75 min/mile. That’s a good Monday run for me. It’s sure as hell not easy for someone that tips out that scale at what the government would term “morbidly obese.”

My delight in the latter part of the race arose not just from such empathetic encounters however. There was the matter of smug glee that I experienced on the several occasions that I passed someone that was thin and in tight shiny pants that displayed their firm and shapely buttocks. Mind you, if I had firm and shapely buttocks, I’d probably wear those shiny pants constantly. Which is probably why God doesn’t let me. But the joy that I felt on those few occasions when I left ‘em in my dust was undeniably great and I will treasure them forever.

I did have a nemesis for the race, but as I saw him only briefly towards the front while we were lining up, I must assume that he beat me soundly. He ran without a shirt and had a ring through one nipple and a tattoo around the other. He was muscular, had a dangerously low body-fat index and was thoroughly tan. He could, more than likely, beat me up without breaking a sweat. He was, in other words, exactly what I would be if I were cool. I loathed him at first sight. Luckily, it was also the last. Pssht, I could have taken him. He probably doesn’t even know what an on-line library catalogue is, much less, know how to find the comic-book price-guide with it.

Of the babes that ran, there were many. But me, being me, was awkward and uncomfortable with that much hotness surrounding. I mean, seriously, if you had some confidence, a breast-cancer benefit run would be a great place to meet women. It might be slightly in bad taste, but still, I thought I’d put it out there. It’d be, you know, for a good cause too.

By the end of the race, I was tired and in a little pain. I had a blister spring up on my pinky toe, which I don’t think I’ve ever had happen before, and, FYI, if you really must wear the free, new, sorta-stiff cotton tee-shirt that they give you when you race, make sure you band-aid your nipples first. But the last leg was not without its vicariously malicious pleasures, as when the “in-shape” member of a group turned around to run backwards as he cam-corded the less fit members of his group as they, puffy-cheeked and slack-jawed, struggled towards the end and a kid of about 14 that was sprinting towards the finish-line almost took him out with a forehead to the crotch. That was pretty awesome.

After I’d passed through the finish arch/official timing thingy, gratefully received my free bottle of water, and turned in my timing do-hicky, I walked around to cool down and then found a tree to prop myself against while I stretched my calves. I did an abbreviated version of my cool down/stretching routine, the magic un-self-consciousness of running hard having already faded by the time I got to the part where I make myself look like a horribly diseased cat.

When I’d finished trying to avoid cramps while not looking like a diseased cat, I wandered into the tent area and got myself a free fruit/yogurt/walnut dish, which was really quite good, from the McDonald’s stand and then went over to the food tent where I got a free sausage in exchange for a little corner of my running tag. It was perforated for just this purpose, though it would have been funny to see a bunch of exhausted runners trying to tear off a piece of one of those neigh-indestructible bibs in exchange for some sort of sustenance, any sustenance.

After I’d eaten my sausage and wandered around a little more, never having found either my team again or the beer tent, I decided that I wanted to go home. I was tired. I felt good. And honestly, I really, really needed a cigarette.

On Not Tame Lions

2008-06-14T04:45:00.000-07:00

06/14/2008 7:11 AM – 7:34 AM

And my own personal “God-In-the-Gaps” theory rests in three points in time and came about as a matter of taste: something can’t come from nothing, life can’t come from non-life and consciousness can’t come from non-consciousness. Those gaps will probably be filled. Probably soon. Where then is my God?

He’s where He was when I can’t find any rational or emotion reason to believe in Him, which is the same place he is when His nearness and grace are undeniable no matter how much I wish to doubt. My feeling does not change the nature of God anymore than my feeling changed the fact of evolution back when I was a creationist. The experiments that they’ve done with prayer show, when properly conducted with blinds and control groups, no statistical difference in the results between praying and non-praying. Where then is my God?

He’s where he was when my prayers were answered, the same place he was when my prayers weren’t answered. My state of belief in God’s providence doesn’t change his actions. He does as He wills. He’s not a tame lion. And neither am I. Well, I don’t feel like one anyway. I have no idea if I’m right. I’m not going to convince anyone that my belief is correct. Sometimes I can’t even convince myself. But here is this hand. And here is another. And so I got up early this morning and read and smoked and drank coffee and in another two-and-a-half hours I will be in the starting line at my first race. I do not expect to win the proffered prize for my sex/age-group. I will have run in a race though. All two-hundred and thirty pounds will have made it 3.1 miles on a pair of smoker’s lungs. In public. At a cancer-benefit race. This is no proof of God. This is no proof that I am not a tame lion. But having awakened this morning after a sketchy night’s sleep, I choose to get out of bed and run. I choose to believe in God and the redemptive act of His only begotten Son and of life everlasting. I choose to believe that I am not a tame lion. Proof is not over-rated, but this is not proof. It merely makes me happy.

On the Joys of Iconoclasty

2008-06-13T05:18:00.000-07:00

06/13/2008 7:30 AM – 7:55 AM

Joy is an eager anticipation of the present. I’m not sure what I was thinking about when I thought of that last night. Things had been smoked. But, being now awake and caffeinated, I still agree with it. There are these big things about God that I’m considering in a smoky way, I’m not sure if they’ve coalesced into an actual statement.

The problem with being raised a creationist is that the statement is posed in such a way that you must either accept salvation or science. As the data accumulate, evolution seems far and away to be the lead horse. So one turns to problems of epistemology to sustain one’s belief in God. If I can doubt the whole basis of the enterprise, I can still believe in God. But then in turns into a mucky mess and nothing is knowable except that nothing is knowable. But here is this hand. And here is another.

But the situation is not either/or. It never has been. It is both/and. How, I’m not exactly sure. Perhaps the God who risks. Perhaps the God who waits. When you put the dice in the cup and shake it, you can’t know the outcome. Did God load the dice, predetermining the rolls? Did he touch them in medias res to set the outcome? Did he lean eagerly over the edge alongside us, watching to see what he should do next? But if four, six-sided dice go into the cup, four six-sided dice come out. Here is one hand. And here is another. There is room. There is quite enough room for salvation. And that is rather the whole of it. The dialogue is on-going. It was not the biography of God, as interesting as that perspective is. It was a recounting of the continuing evolution of God’s people’s understanding of him. We shouldn’t have closed the canon. Or maybe we should have, but recognize that our understanding of what it says can, must continue as we continue. God is not dead. It's just that their version of God never actually existed. The grandfathers weren’t dishonest, just wrong. Now they’re dishonest, plucking out their eyes, not because they offend them, but because they offend their grandfather’s rather bad carving of what God is. God was opposed to idols for reasons greater than vanity. For my part, I will learn to dance this dance. Here is my hand, here is my neighbor’s. When I fall from the circle, I’ll just pick it up again. With great joy, I think.

On a Happy June Morning

2008-06-11T04:27:00.000-07:00

06/11/2008 6:53 AM – 7:14 AM

And I’m happy today. It’s not a forced happy. It’s there, rising up from my being. It arrived on the wings of a confluence of events. Those events: I realized that Zen philosophy is crap and I don’t feel so bad about abandoning it (though zazen is still something that I really should do more often), I found a good book by a Christian evolutionist that’s debated Christian creationists, Ben called and we talked about the house in Ithaca and I’m excited about going, I thought of a good project to invest my time in for a few years.

I believe in God this morning. Easily. Faith should be easy. It should be something you just do without having to think about it. It should be like sitting in a chair. You don’t think about it whether it actually exists in a metaphysical sense, you don’t calculate the probability of its ability to hold you up, plotting its strength against time and weight. You just sit in the damn thing and forget about it. Unless you’re using it as an allegory. Stop using faith as an allegory. It’s just faith. A chair is just a chair. Okay, maybe there’s a few things to learn from Zen. I could die very well today. I don’t want to, however. There’s much too much else I want to do.

Science does not rule out God. Are they “non-overlapping magisteria”? I’m not sure. I don’t know if that analogy works. There is a God. He loves me. There is science. It works. That is enough. I don’t want to recapture the beauty of childhood (and I did have some effing magnificent moment in childhood). I want to abide in the beauty of this part of my life. The Spike version of 32. Unmarried. Underpaid. In debt but sort of managing it. Relatively free. Finally getting out of the city. Moving to a college town in the country. Training for a race. Mildly crushing on girls much too young for him and/or spoken for. Writing in his journal every morning. Talking about himself in third person. In fragments. This is an interesting Spike. All of them have been. Sometimes a little too whiny. Sometimes a mooch. Sometimes way, way too afraid. But here. But himself. Further up then, lad. Further up and further in.

Which Is Rebuttals and Concessions

2008-06-10T04:14:00.000-07:00

06/10/2008 6:42 AM – 7:04 AM

Flour, sugar, egg, butter, milk, baking soda – but you can’t unbake the cake. Only form, feelings, perceptions, impulses/actions, consciousness – but still the self remains. The heaps are still one, even when composed of many.

If a negation of perspective will attain peace, so be it, but then we’ve relegated the discussion to fantasy card games, which deck will win out? Up then, up the rabbit-hole down. I am not, and them I am. The mere probabilities coalesce and the me myself emerges, dripping pristine lightning-struck sea-slime. To stop the eye from staring at itself does not change the solid that it can. To stop the eye from staring at itself though, lets it forget its parting.

What dreams? What dreams? What dreams? I was right before. Options one through three: meh, all things considered, tha’d be fine. Option four, right out. So, to live, undead, the eye turns outward, blinks and builds a fire. It doesn’t have to be the best fire. Just the most complicated, most interesting, longest to make. Poof! Light it up and dance as it burns down. Sleep. Wake up. Build the fire again. Sisyphus did not know. Sisyphus did know. Sisyphus learned to like it and the gods were stymied by our accidental eye’s arising. They will have me in the end and call me to account. To them, perhaps, the choice was clear. Down here, all you metaphysics look the same. Fuck ‘em. I’ll believe in Santa Claus and the pink dragon tea-cup orbiting the moon. Presents in shiny paper, everyone’s invited, you’ll never get bored and it won’t cost you a dime. But please, please, kindly Babies, down here just don't be an asshole: pay your fines - we both know you returned those books late.

On the Dreams of a Circulation Page

2008-06-01T05:36:00.000-07:00

06/01/2008 6:35 AM – 8:18 AM

I had a dream this morning as I was waking up. It was one of those dreams that get sandwiched in-between first awakening and actually getting out of bed. What was unusual about it was that it was a dream about work. Not my place of work, but the actual work itself.

In cop shows, there is a difference between a character driven show and a case driven show, thought now they mix ‘em up quite a bit. The case driven shows, “Law and Order” tends to be this type, are often referred to as “procedurals,” as they try to follow the actual procedures that cops would in real life. My dream was a “library procedural,” rather boring, in fact, but the case was interesting and the observations that a free-roaming viewer might take from it could be informative.

Part of my job is to get people library cards. On an average day, I can process anywhere between one card application and a dozen of them. I usually deny about as many. In order to get a library card in Erie County you need two things: proof of signature and proof of residence. The easiest proof is a current New York State driver’s license or non-driver’s ID. Other than that, we can use quite a few different things, but they have to be things recognized by the library system as valid proof. If you’ve got a driver’s license with an old address and no other proof of address, you’re out of luck (if you don’t tell us it’s an old address, you can still get one, but you know, you’re a liar). We follow the rules fairly strictly. The amount of people that come in every day trying to cheat the library is mind-numbing. Soul-numbing too. And that’s what the dream was about in a way. A lady came in and wanted to get a library card. Her address: the lighthouse at the base of one of the legs of the Peace Bridge. As far as I know, there is no lighthouse at the base of the Peace Bridge, but that had to be one of the coolest addresses that would ever come across the desk. In my dream, my mind drifted to what that would be like to live there, but surprisingly, came back to the problem with processing her application. While her actual residence was in Erie County, her mail could not, for some reasons of international neutrality that I don’t think exist in non-dream life, be processed by the post-office in Erie County and was instead handled by one of the counties south of us. There was a special run that had to be taken to get her mail to her and as a result, even though she had mail stating her address as being in Erie, it was C/O of another county. I could not legally issue her a card.

Now, if that happened in real life, I would call a supervisor over who would probably, with a case that bizarre, call in the department supervisor who would tell me to go ahead and process it and issue her a card, but in the dream, there was no supervisor to go to. In addition, she was prickly. In fact, she was nearly the Platonic ideal of what someone who lived in a lighthouse under a bridge should be: she was about fifty, a little short, wore no make-up and had long graying hair that was pulled back into a braided pony-tail. She was thin and muscular and had that tough, weathered skin that speaks of a life spent out-of-doors. Outside of my job, I’d think was pretty damn cool and hot in a middle-age lady sort-of way, but she was flinty and, quite reasonably, didn’t see why she couldn’t get a library card. I however, couldn’t do it. It’s not that she didn’t have proof, but that she didn’t have the right proof.

Once again, there are very good reasons why we need to have the right proof. When you can't check out a book to a tearful kid that has a report due tomorrow but six dollars and three cents in fines, then the very next patron you get is someone who knows the system and has five different library cards from five different branches with five slightly different birthdays and five slightly different social security numbers and has managed to accumulate over a thousand dollars worth of unreturned/declared lost DVD fines on those five cards and then becomes irate and starts yelling at you for refusing to issue them a sixth card with a sixth slightly different birthday and social security number, you begin to understand the importance of those asinine rules. You really begin to appreciate them when you see this type of person once a month and similar patrons of a lesser degree (only one or two cards and only a hundred or so dollars in unreturned items), two or three times a day. And then when a six-year-old comes in with a parent to get a card and you have to refuse them because when she was four weeks old, the little girl apparently got out "Tantric Sex Magic," "Bloody X-Mas Part 4," "Gangsta Bitches," "Understanding God's Seven-Fold Call for Your Life," and "A Guide to Government Small Business Loans," and then never returned them, then you wish that there were more rules.

But the lighthouse lady had none of these flags and I still couldn’t issue her a card. It’s an extreme case and I woke up not long after she started getting really angry with me, but not before I felt that old familiar contempt creeping into my tone when I responded to her. And she was someone that would love libraries: she would love the thousands and thousands of books on thousands and thousands of different topics, and she would love the thousands of CD's with Mozart and Son House and Led Zeppelin, and Deerhoof, and she would love the hundreds of movies with Truffaut and Bergman and Hitchcock and Apatow. She would know it. She would know what was meant by it. She would understand it in her guts. I know she would have loved it.

I suppose I still love libraries too. There’s too much in them that I desire for me not to love them. I’d already spent too much time in them long before I ever started working in one for me to ever shake loose of them. And I’m a good Page: I’m friendly to those patrons that want me to be friendly, businesslike to those that are there only for business, mostly able to put on an unperturbed air in the face of the numerous crazies, bums and bullies that frequent this "Free For All." But I’m glad that it will be over soon.

I read recently that if a marriage is solid, the most common response to the question, “where do you go for peace?” was “home.” If a marriage was on shaky ground, “home” was one of the least common responses. If you had asked me where I went for peace when I was twelve, “the library” would have been in my Top 5. Now, as soon as they tell us that we can turn off our computers and go home, I grab my back-pack, put on my headphones and set out without a backward glance, happy not to be wondering if this next patron is going to be one that makes my hands shake.

Which Is a Pep Talk for Moving. Which Worked.

2008-05-30T04:33:00.000-07:00

05/30/2008 6:56 AM – 7:26 AM

Well, first note that your lungs feel a lot better when you don’t add cream to your coffee, and as the condition of your lungs has a direct impact on your physiological well-being, you might consider not adding cream to your coffee. Plus, that would be one less thing to buy. Along with cigarettes. But one thing at a time. That which presses on your mind is the fact that you went to bed afraid last night.

It wasn’t thick or tough. It wasn’t panic. It only had a few fringes of anxiety. It was just a low-key, nagging fear. The fear arose when you got the email from Ben telling you that he had bought a house. They had a close date. They had a place for you. It was now real. The fear arose in part from sadness, but it was also just fear. You’re sad because you don’t like saying good-bye, and as much as you don’t like living in a city chock full o’ crazies, bums and bullies, you are familiar with your surroundings. This being the longest place you’ve lived in since you were eighteen. You become used to your surroundings. You may not be able to predict exactly what will happen, but you accumulate a set of probabilities. Moving to a new place means you have to reprogram your gut, and that takes time, and that’s a bit scary.

You’re also sad because, to a large extent, you like your job. You may not like the crazies, bums and bullies that form a large psychological part of your job (but a small portion of the actual interaction time), but you love your bosses and your co-workers and your building. You know it, and do love it. You don’t want to say good-bye. But you do have to say good-bye. Perhaps you will stay in contact with some of them, perhaps none. The fear arises from wondering if, perhaps, you are giving up something good but imperfectly fit for, once again, running to unknown but possible pastures. These new pastures may be an even worst fit than this place you are in now and that scares you. But that is always a fear when there is change and change is inevitable. You bite down. You bite down and taste and eat. Of course you’re scared, you’d be a fool not to be, but fear is not the determining factor. To get out of the city. To be in the country. To be with friends. – These are things you wanted before the fear and the fear doesn’t change that. You’ve wanted them, literally, for years. It is an adventure, lad. And what kind of life would you be living if your balls didn’t occasionally shrink from fear? Bah. Fear is sprinkles on the Sunday. You have considered the risks against the desires and the desires triumph. Yes, you’re a little scared, but the world is large, you are yet young and you haven’t even begun to crack the shell. Now, further up, boy. Further up and further in. Towards Narnia and the North.

Which Is Scattered. Again. But Uses the Word "Research" Several Times.

2008-05-29T04:15:00.000-07:00

05/29/2008 6:34 AM – 7:08 AM

Perhaps the downside of silly dance pop is that you digest it so quickly: seven or eight plays and you’ve got the song down. Most of the ones that you love eventually show up in your consciousness again, demanding another few listens, but they do tend to end up at the flavorless stage of the bubblegum pretty quick.

The upside to the downside is that it means you get to go looking for new ones pretty damn quick. Research – the true obsession of nerds like me. I ran last night (it was two-and-a-half miles) and it hardly hurt at all. Of course, I did the “endurance” type running style as opposed to the “speed” type running style. Which basically means I shuffled like an arthritic old man instead of lifting my legs high like a spry young thing. It’s funny running towards pretty girls that run like the runners they are. I feel inclined to imitate their stride until I remember – “wait. That really hurts. Keep running like an old man. Then you can keep running. You’re thirty-two. They’re, like, twelve or something.”

The muscle aches from lifting weights two nights ago really didn’t show up until last night. I’d forgotten that there is a delay when you first start out. My arms hurt. And my boobs. Eighteen years of being bound by childship. Twelve years of being bound by money (and a small packet of certain, seemingly arbitrary moral rules). Then you hit thirty-one and you realize that you’ve had a pretty good run of figuring stuff out and it might be time to apply the data. Not that I’ll stop researching. But you figure out certain things that tend to invoke happiness and other things that tend to do the opposite. And a majority of things that could go either way. Sleep enough. Exercise. Write. Go to work. Eat well, but not too well. Be friendly. Research. These are pretty solid in my “happy inducing” camp. There are probably several other things that are slipping my age’d memory. But not really that many. And of happy things you say, “For the rest of my life.” And that is a very, very long time. Or not. But probably. And it’s better to assume it will be so, or you will be very poor, very quickly.

Which Is Scattered. But Briefly Mocks Vegans. Again.

2008-05-28T03:51:00.000-07:00

05/28/2008 6:16 AM – 6:37 AM

And maybe those things you need are just trust, action, skill and practice. Maybe the rest follow. I like these longer days. I’m trying very hard to be the optimist and not think of the approaching first day of summer as depressing but as, instead, something to celebrate. Maybe with dancing to wonderful, silly music.

Yesterday was the first time I actually attempted to lift weights. It went well, all things considered. I only did two sets and it took a really long time, but now I’ve got the numbers and exercises worked out so the next time should go more smoothly. I’ve just got to figure out how to add daily crunches, hyperextensions and meditation to the mix and I’ll be good. Well, that and quit smoking. I know that I’ve just got to quit and say “no” to myself a lot, but that’s so much easier said than done. Ah, well, things go as they go. I’ll figure it out eventually. Chilly out, but in a good way. My muscles are sore. Running tonight. Two miles, I think. But I’ll need to check.

Moby is funny. He makes disco music (silly dance pop) and then mercilessly slanders it. He’s probably a vegan. But please, veganism is inherently self-defeating. I needent go on. Ooo! I like this song. It uses three different metaphors, none of them really fit together at all, but she just kind of jumps breathlessly from one to the other and then back again. And she has a British accent. Hot. My inherent lightness is more wise than my inherent darkness. Do-be-do-be-do. Life makes sense, we can learn this from observing, but how it makes sense is beyond our grasp. Unless we want to cheap out on the question. Then you have any number of options. Many ending in “ism.” I used to watch Disney films at the Corning library in a small room off from the hallway that had the bathrooms. There was a color to those films, a 70’s color that still strikes me as unfathomably beautiful. They all tended to be about animals dying or undergoing great suffering. I hate those stories, but the world that these stories took place in was amazing. It’s that post-Techni-Color color. It doesn’t really translate to TV. It can only be seen through film on a screen in the dark.

Which Starts with Questions of Cookies and Ends with Questions of Love. Sort of a Reverse Proust. Not That I've Read Proust.

2008-05-27T05:12:00.000-07:00

05/27/2008 6:55 AM – 7:42 AM

And now what state am I in that I think home-made cookies are better tasting that store-bought ones? Unless the store-bought ones are expensive. Some habits of thought change some do not. Old proclivities that I thought quelled rise and then fall away, as if only to let me know that they remain.

But I do not think man a constant thing. At least men of my sort. It is as if we were constructed of fairly consistent boxes, but what those boxes contain changes from day to day or year to year. I find myself in the categorical position of Kant but modified. I’m not drawn to Kant. He was a bad writer, so thick as to be almost nothing more than a set of guts to be read into, a mere augury. But is that neither here nor there? And I ran last night for the first time in four days. I felt both the good effects of rest and the ill effects of ceasing the exercise for even that period of time. One can reach a conclusion by reason and force one to it by will, but the rewards must be emotional, reason counting nothing either pleasant or unpleasant.

I find my self desiring love again. The last case came and went without much comment. But I would deign that a matter of inaction on my part. It is one thing to play with a love as a pretty thought while one is alone, quite another thing to pursue and make it known to the world. Or even the object of one’s affection. But for now, I am content. Twenty-eight years of study and I still don’t know what the she that is She should be. The general survey of the pertinent text would leave one to hold: similarity of basic intelligence, similarity of basic world-view and SOP, and the ability to disagree without becoming vicious or disdainful. The last is one that we can work on, the first two a result of genetics and experience. But still there is that need to know that you do have to work on it. There is a girl I know who finds much wrong with the world and will speak at length about it. Never once have I heard her admit that the fault was her own, even for matters soon forgotten. I, self-important as I am, at least can see that the problem is often a matter of my own indifference or perspective. And I know a girl who sees much wrong, but finds it to most often be a result of her own inadequacies. That is inaccurate as well. The world often is as it is and we are often what we are. We must learn to accept this. The problem that arises is that love requires, yes, acceptance where differences exist, but also a similarity that allows for that trust which guides one to intimacy. I suppose that there have existed millions of perfectly good marriages since marriage began which didn’t require more than a cosmetic smudge of intimacy, but I haven’t been waiting twenty-eight years for that. At thirty-three Montaigne married. At that same age both Jesus and Alexander died. The hard questions that I began asking of love at seventeen, I still ask. Which comes first, the bird or the nest? Beloved movies aside, of what value are you? Should you bring peace or challenge? Do you pull up, down or not at all? Will you add strength to my life or merely add weight to it? What do you cost? Is there a point after which you will not arrive? How do you arrive? How is it that you leave? And how do I make you stay? But perhaps these questions are mere academic sophistry, asked not to gain knowledge but to stall for time. Yes, I put it on a pedestal, but everyone should have something up there, else we become crude and cheap things, our lives those nasty, brutish and short things of the pessimist’s imagination.

On Plate Licking

2008-05-26T06:42:00.000-07:00

05/26/2008 8:41 AM – 9:03 AM

And the things you realize as pertaining to yourself sometimes catch you off-guard. I am, in the center of things, a shallow creature. Which is to say, prone to enjoy things that are of no importance and do not endure. Three weeks later and I’m still savoring insubstantial dance pop. Like I did when I was fourteen. And nineteen. And, secretly, twenty-five. Which is not to say that I haven’t delved into the deep things (and looked stunningly handsome as I did so), but the deep things, once seen (or unseen, rather) do not sustain. They are stale, low-fat, low-salt crackers.

Or perhaps even less. To stretch the allegory to beyond it’s breaking point, the deep things are below the things-as-they-are and as such can offer no nourishment. They’re not even the healthy, tasteless crackers that mothers buy when they’re feeling fat: they are merely the plate that the food sits on. “Aha!” says the clever one, “I have reached the actual substance of the thing! It is bland and empty! I will now commence with existential despair.” Well, you know, feel free. But no, actually. You just pushed the food out of the way and are now licking the plate. That fatty, salty, sugary cheap thing that you scorned so dramatically is the actual food.

So put the food back on the plate and eat, you sullen child. Of course it’s vanity! Searching through your burger and fries, exclaiming constantly, “Vanity! Vanity!” Arriving at a plate now empty (having flung your food contemptuously to the floor) you proclaim with your smart, important scowl, “All. Is. Vanitas.” Very good. Having emptied your plate, you arrive at an empty plate. Importantly. It might have done you better to eat your way to bottom and order another round, but, yes, you were very important-looking as you judged. I applaud your excellent performance piece. I will not, however, be voting for an NEA grant on your behalf. This fat little boy with glasses and a bad haircut sitting next to you at the counter, reading a comic book and tearing up at the mountain of troubles that Peter Parker has yet again to endure, I prefer his performance. True, he gave little thought to the food, yet when he did, he thought it very good and having reached an empty plate, as anyone who sits down at the counter will find they do, he was full. Well, he was after he had the peanut-butter Sunday. And another root beer. And he licked the plate too. He thought no one was watching, but I saw him. He’s definitely a fatty.

On the Philosophical Assumptions Underlying the Constitution of Spikelandia

2008-05-25T05:01:00.000-07:00

05/25/2008 7:09 AM – 7:30 AM

And hopefully this won’t end up like yesterday – just going on and on and not finding a resolve. But maybe there is no resolve in following such emotions through. You can’t really do anything about politics. Everyone wants political freedom to be limited to their own perspective.

So. The first principles then, the First Principles of Spike, all without a generally recognized proof but containing personal warrant: 1) I exist, 2) Existence exists, 3) Other minds exist, 4) God exists, 5) God is good, 6) Life is good, 7) the primary activity of existence is pursuing happiness, 8) the first ethical commandment is “do no harm,” all other ethical concerns spring from this.

These cannot be tested or proved and holding things to be self-evident only works as a starting point for statements of intent. Which is fine. What then do I intend? I intend to establish a personal country with its own constitution and set of laws which do not change despite the machinations of political creatures that rule the Outerlands. The territories of this sovereign country encompass both the fields of Allegiance and Outlaw in varying degrees as what passes for law in the Outerlands fluctuates regularly. Let the laws we lay down in this interior constitution be few and rigorously followed. Do you want to do it? Will doing this cause harm to another mind? If the answer is “yes” to the first and “no” to the second, your ethical concerns are removed and you may proceed to the questions of personal utility. Can you do this? Will doing this interfere with any previously establish goals? If “yes” to the first and “no” to the second, proceed to the theological. Will this piss-off/make-sad God? If “no,” proceed to the legal. Is this contrary to the laws of the Outerlands? If “no,” commence, if “yes,” ask “can I get away with it?” If “yes,” commence. See, that didn’t end up like yesterday at all. It’s always better to be a rat pirate bastard than to try to convince people that their politics are just polite tyranny.

With Tummy Aches and Politics

2008-05-23T04:25:00.000-07:00

05/23/2008 6:48 AM – 7:10 AM

And how long will it take for the tummy ache to leave? At what point do I actually go and see if there might perhaps be something that requires magic pills to fix it? Expensive magic pills. What would the Stoics do? Would they go to the hospital and accept the large debt as the inevitable or would they sit home and accept the annoying pain as inevitable, perhaps believing that it’ll clear it up on its own?

Another few days. Money is a dear commodity. As Willow said: “they cherish their most prized possessions: their possessions.” Lovely day out. Cloudy but not dark. A little chilly but not out and out cold. Apparently the crazy/bum/bully that harassed Stephen in front of the apartment a few weeks ago was at it again this morning – yelling at someone that wouldn’t fulfill his demand, “Just do it! I’m not a bum! I’m not a bum!” Crazy bums are crazy. And this one’s a bully too. Why can’t we carry tranquilizer guns? Because Big Mother loves us more than we ever could. I could just punch him in the lip but then he could sue and I don’t think God likes it when we disappear people.

But that is not the better thoughts that wake us up and embiggen us to make real the day. That my logic does not command is well documented. That my emotion does not convince is likewise noted. But my stubborn nature and quietly raised left eyebrow has been shown to anger on occasion. That my speech is slow unless silly and my thoughts muddled unless re-rewritten does not always belie a mind devoid of much-reasoned opinion. Ah, well, neither red nor blue yet have the camps at ready. Though when which-ever side actually builds them, I’m sure that the other will sight it as a reason for their revolution. And then, when empowered, promptly adopt them for their own purposes. Either way, I’m pretty sure they’d have a nice warm cot waiting for me. But I am prone to delusions of grandeur. Whether it is fear or love that is sighted, power is the power to put people in camps. But it has always been that way and the fall of Rome wasn’t felt by those that lived there, just the historians five-hundred years later. Whether the world is waxing or waning, we must wait until we’ve long been dead to discover – lovers will still love, those that morn with still morn, those that are happy will still be happy and those with a tummy ache will still wonder when the appropriate time to see the doctor is.

On Desiring. And Needing to Poo.

2008-05-22T04:43:00.000-07:00

05/22/2008 6:47 AM – 7:12 AM

Oy. I’ve had stomach/poop pains since yesterday afternoon. I’ve discovered that if I manage to poop, the pain goes away for a while. Or if I’m running, but that doesn’t last as long. I haven’t quit smoking yet. I will soon. I’m listening to silly dance pop almost exclusively. My mood is noticeably better. Though I did have another half-asleep anxiety incident this morning. It’s never when I’m fully awake or completely asleep. But I went back to sleep and it was gone by the time I got up.

For the first time in a long while, I had the inkling of longing this morning. It’s one of those early summer, chilly, rainy days and for some reason, I felt a twinge of longing for Cape Cod. Longing is oddly not depressing. And it’s definitely not fearful. It’s somewhat pleasant. It makes me want and wanting gives me something to do here in this life. I want those subtle emotions back. I don’t want the depression. I don’t want the panic. I want to be alive and human and here, a real boy. “Only one flight leads to the bull’s-eye: a thousand can miss it.” But it is one thing to aim for the bull’s-eye, another thing to find it in the first place.

I don’t think they're right about the extinguishing of desire, unless “extinguishing of desire” is another one of those religious code-phrases for something other than what it says. "I couldn't be a part of any revolution that wouldn't let me dance." But I’ve said that before. Why do I return to things? Because I always find objections and having sifted the objections, I return to the premise to see if it still stands. Or maybe I'm just baiting. There are different kinds of desire, as there are different types of emotion. An abiding desire, a desire that can always be called on, even if sometimes it is only an echo of itself, that is a desire to follow. The desire of the moment, that cries out loudly (buy the godamn bag of Doritos!), it is somewhat painful to deny this desire, but a sleep or two later and it dissipates. The desire that does not dissipate, no matter how many sleeps, that is a desire to take seriously. Not that you shouldn’t buy that bag of Doritos now and then. Probably not when you’ve got the anti-poops though. What desires remain in me that have lasted the years? And of those, which are not symbols for something else, but things-in-themselves? And that is a project to set for the day.

On Montaigne's Skin

2008-05-21T04:17:00.000-07:00

05/21/2008 6:18 AM – 6:40 AM

And waking up this morning, it is cloudy and I feel good. And this matters, and this matters not in the least. I’m finally reading the “Essays” of Montaigne. This morning I read the one “On Sadness.” It’s on both deep sadness and deep joy and he gives examples of how both have killed people. He then says, “Violent emotions like these have little hold on me. By nature my sense of feeling has a hard skin, which I daily toughen and thicken by arguments.”

And yet few would say, on reading the “Essays” that Montaigne was a man devoid of warmth. Perhaps what I am experiencing at this point is just the passing of the passions and a learning of the deeper paths of contentment and doing. I would say that I definitely could use a little thickening of the skin. St. Ayn, a thick skin if ever there was one, was secretly prone to acts of private silliness – dancing to her “tiddily-wink” music, waving the satin streamers that her husband had bought her for her birthday. Silliness, a forgiving humor, and deep affection that while it doesn’t explode can be depended upon – these are good emotion to cultivate.

Emotions that overwhelm are for people whose bodies produce an ungodly amount of hormones – excellent for sending into battle and making babies, but not very good for much else, certainly not planning a campaign or raising children. The people that write “Essays” or build “Falling Water,” people that do beautiful work that takes a long time, past the point of excitement and into sustained attention, focused until actual completion is achieved– these are people that make a 7^th generation difference. Being alive and apprehending the job that one wishes to do and then engaging in the unexciting, daily tasks that are required of completing something difficult and complex and good – this is an emotion that effects. I am not a mystic. God does not speak to me in visions or voices. He does not prove his existence, no matter how deeply I feel the need. I have faith in my chair. Let God then be like my chair, only remarked upon when something unexpected occurs. To attempt to capture the nature of God is to attempt to prove the existence of other minds, better leave it to the mystics. In the sane, it is accomplished by a faith that turns invisible, like cobwebs in twilight, but it remains part and parcel of being human nonetheless.

Of Question and Plume

2008-05-19T03:49:00.000-07:00

05/19/2008 5:57 AM – 6:36 AM

And then I’m so damn afraid. I don’t know what is right anymore. I don’t know what’s true. I don’t know what’s worth the risk. I’m the servant that buried his coins, so scared of the wrath of the master that lent them. What, in the end, is worth the risk? What is that thing that’s worth dying for? What’s worth risking damnation? What can stand up to a lifetime of scrutiny?

I knew once what was worth the risk – my white plume. But now I can’t say that it matters as it once did. Well, it matters in moments when I feel strong and able. It matters when I’ve had a long, good run. It matters when I’ve written a few words that I think are true, that I actually believe. I don’t know what I believe anymore. Everything is in flux, nothing is solid. It feels as if it’s all just guessing without any solid evidence, just whispers of things that might or might not be the case, of no greater importance than celebrity gossip. Where is my spark? Where is that thing that withstands the tumults of existing as a conscious creature?

There has to be a point. There has to. The universe is too lazy to make a living thing that thinks. There is no cosmic need for me to be here, so I must have some reason that has nothing to do with a universal necessity. Something cannot come from nothing. Life cannot come from non-life. Contemplation cannot arise from the unthinking. To be the creature that I am, aware of myself and my death – I must exist for a purpose. In the past, I thought my reason reliable, but pushed far enough in any direction and you realize how much it is set in void. So faith, we must assume, but what faith? And what flavor of that faith? And how much dedication to that flavor? There must be a map. Existence does not flicker in a way that we can perceive, no matter what the swami screeches as he stretches out his hand to beg. The Matrix of reality cannot be escaped, only the constructs of man. And perhaps that is a better interpretation of that movie. Meta-Matrix speculation is fun but in the end it’s just a rather hackneyed fantasy story. How then should we live? And fourteen year later, I’m not sure I’m any closer than I was at the beginning of the questions. But I asked them. By God, I’ve asked them. I guess my plume is still there.

In Which the Text for Today's Sermon is Taken from Psalm 10:17&18, if You Wish to Follow Along

2008-05-17T06:35:00.000-07:00

05/17/2008 7:47 AM – 9:18 AM

This morning I was reading Psalm 10 and the first, like 14 out of 18 verses is this totally clichéd, hackney description of a villain. I was all like, God, Dude, this has that cool Hebraic poetry thing going on, but, really, the subject and carry-through is crap. Then I got to verse 17, the second to last.

It goes thusly (in the NKJ): “Lord, you have heard the desire of the humble; you will prepare their heart; you will cause your ear to hear.” Now the reason that this stuck out is because it follows this rather long, scenery-chewing description of a black-hatted bad guy, but I like the verse because it is somewhat mysterious. “You have heard the desire of the humble,” – that’s cool to me because it is “desire” that is used, not “prayer.” “You will prepare their heart,” – and that’s just plain freaking mysterious. How? For what? “You will cause your ear to hear,” – I know, I know, it’s poetry. It’s an exaggerated description of a fairly normal occurrence, but it’s still a striking image – God causing his own ear to hear.

The thing about my panic attacks is that they made me face the emotion that my viewpoint of utter helplessness put me in. Helplessness is not a good position for a creature with a brain to be put in – from rats to humans – they’ve done experiments – repeatable experiments – when you’ve learned that nothing you do matters, you don’t do anything to avoid shocks even if the situation has drastically changed – like how giant elephants can be held in place by a small rope that they could easily snap. After years of being chained with big effing chains, they learn that if they can feel that pressure on their leg, nothing they can do will free them. They’ve learned helplessness. And that’s actually the psychological term for it: “learned helplessness.” You can look it up. They did really mean things to doggies. To which doggies I am grateful. Run thou amidst the Elysian fields, sweet Fido.

Anyway, for someone that is innately a “do-er,” a stoic worldview is actually wise. They act for the feeling of being in action – the outcome – meh – sprinkles on the ice cream. That’s a wise place to be in. For someone who is more outcome driven (like me), the end result is more important than the mere path taken. If killing pagan babies was an absolutely-God-told-me-in-person-and-left-me-this-signed-document way of getting into heaven, well, strap on the pipe bombs and point me towards the nearest day-care. Luckily for the world at large and pagan babies at near, I’m also a skeptic. God would have to tell me in person and leave me this signed document and even then I’d want a personal tour of this “heaven” that lets in people that blow up babies. One of those unscheduled, unsupervised, hidden-camera, search-the-back-rooms tours. I do however tend also to require this of commands such as “you’ve just got to be kind.” So I’m not such a favorite of the blow-shit-up pastors or the be-nice-to-crazies-bums-and-bullies crowd either. I live here in a Serious Story on Serious Earth (that’s a comic book reference for those that didn’t get it) and I won’t be fooled again (that’s a… well, really, you should know that reference. Seriously).

God seems to like the do-ers. They are, statistically, more happy, a lot more happy, than ruminators. The race is not always to the swift nor the battle to the strong nor justice to the righteous nor riches to the hard-working nor honor to the wise – the person that noticed this was no doubt seriously depressed. But the runner that races because he loves to race. And then wins. He’s got the whole kit and caboodle. Yes, there’s something great to be said about the stoic view, but, goddamit, babies, outcomes matter too! (that was a horribly mis-contexed Vonnegut reference; in fact, its message is almost opposite the original) What would it profit a man if he should enjoy his whole life and lose his soul? What would it cost a man if he dutifully hated his whole life and had no soul? How cool would it be if he enjoyed his whole life and got to go to Narnia after? Grr. Arg. (Buffy reference) These questions matter. These questions blow. The black-hatted man is myself. And his victim is me.

And hope, when acted upon produces faith and faith calls forth in that calm, quiet voice that stills the troubled waters. So.

Lord, you have heard the desire of the humble; you will prepare their heart; you will cause your ear to hear and do justice to the fatherless victim that the black-hatted man may oppress him no more.

So, whatever humble is, make me that.

(Implied Proposition) Thursdayish

2008-05-15T04:10:00.000-07:00

05/15/2008 6:38 AM – 7:03 AM

Whoop. Up and away. I ran last night. I do this quite a bit of late. Four times a week to be exact. For the last five weeks. Sweet. But I don’t seem to be losing any of my tummy. But I do feel better in everyday life. Pretty sky out my window. A little chilly, but not bad.

My writing has slowed down considerably of late. Except for the instants. I’m surprisingly dedicated to them. Ya’ll get to see like, one out of five. Oooo, warmy colors on the houses, clouds parting. I’m slowly prepping myself for the move. Starting to say goodbye without saying any words yet. Happiness becomes a matter of character in its predictable rhythms, and less a matter of personality. But a pleasant personality still works for many situations. You hold on for the first part of the drop and then throw your hands in the air and whoop as you near the upward turn.

Moving, the half-life of romance is six months. The half-life of the honeymoon state is eighteen. It takes on average, eleven weeks for a habit of exercise to become normal. So I’ve got six and a half to go. And sometime soon (soon being very difficult to define), I’ll have to give up the smokes and figure out how not to think about them all the time. Oooo, cramp in my left pointer finger. Weird. Normalcy is this, delight in small things, the absence of anxiety, working, looking for beauty, reifying the action of God in these. We are silly and impossible creatures. What is man that thou art mindful of him, and the son of man that thou visitests him? Thou is a good word. So is art. Visitests is more problematic but still pretty in a clunky sort of way. Finding delight in the ordinary and adventure in the strange, that’s a goal. Would a life coach approve? Well, yeah, probably. Existence is so weird. Wisdom is found in cliché, knowledge in the boringly ordinary, and understanding, well, I’m still working on that. So be it, though. Because it already is. That dude does not flip his wrists around when he runs. Like I do. But, you know, genetically, I’m like, half gay. I should be more neat and clean. And have a loofa. And now the shadows on the houses are crisp with the cooler, brighter daylight. Hands up, we’re approaching the turn. Whoop. Whoop, whoop, whoop.

Which Is Praying But Less Cheesy Because It's Funny and I Use the F-word

2008-05-14T03:48:00.000-07:00

05/14/2008 5:57 AM – 6:20 AM

Okay, God, well, let’s try this. Me. Talking to you. Forgive the non-cap’s of your pronouns; I’ve got a cigarette in one hand. And something in me hates earnestness, because I can see how it leads to believing in ridiculous things. I don’t want to see miracle cures in every slick shiny that comes along.

I was reading the Psalms this morning, deriding the constant sighting of enemies, because there are crazies, drunks and bullies in the world, but actual enemies of me seem to be in short supply. Thank you. But then I realized that I do have enemies. They spring from myself. I am afraid of things. I’m afraid of my fear. It’s just one tiny little fucking switch, the switch that says: “Death is to be feared/death is not to be feared.” And I have trouble getting it to sit back into the “not feared” position. We have to give up on the things that we can’t do. But what can’t I do? Maybe I can’t actually write. Maybe my stories will always come out weird and unpublishable. I’m okay with that at the moment, but in the harsh light of an Under the Sun day or the heavy darkness of unasleep night, will I be?

I like this song. “Under the Bridge” feels like a hymn actually. I never want to be afraid again. I want to look forward to death to see what Narnia looks like, but I want to love being here too. I had this series of thoughts yesterday. One of the kids at work was having some sort of problem with her boy and I, as is my tendency, had only a snarky little comment to make about “that’s why I don’t have one.” But then I had this progression of thoughts, because while, yes, that actually is part of it, the other part is that now that I’m of marrying age, I’m not looking for just some girlfriend (wait, was I ever?), I’m looking for a wife, and to find a wife means that I have committed myself to a “til death” thing because I actually take marriage seriously, but committing myself to a “til death” thing means that I accept the fact that I’m going to die and I am not yet ready to accept that. Now, really, this was originally just kind of flashy dark humor, but there is some truth in it. I know that I’m going to die and, right at this moment, I’m fine with that. Weird, I actually am. It’s not just me saying it to make me feel better. Anyway, that thought process wasn’t there before except as a joke, but, sometimes, it is now. Like, obviously. Somehow the Spike/Happiness Equation doesn’t seem to work without you. So, Oh God of the Psalms, be my shield. Surround me with your favor to protect me from my enemies, which most of the time, are me. Umm, Amen.

Which after Travails Arrives at 8

2008-05-13T05:45:00.000-07:00

05/13/2008 7:18 AM – 8:02 AM

I think it’s this that my objective in this whole thing is simply to learn to trust God and the universe he’s birthed us into. It is looking down through the layers of crazies, bums and bullies and seeing that the underlying nature of the whole is good. I’ve been struck over the past year or so by a number of references to the peace of the old. The fearlessness of the ones that make it that far. Which is not always the case, but so beautiful when it is.

I'm nervous about messing it up, about this being my only shot at it. If my hope were a lie, which most of the time I do not believe it is, I would still have the fact that it takes some of the pressure off this game of living. There is that. We are here to learn and delight. We learn to make things with blocks and play well with others and delight in these tasks. And as I must learn to trust God for the preservation of my soul, I must learn to trust his universe to follow his unseen orchestration. This is hard.

I am a skeptic by nature. But I am also a mystic. I am an idealist and a realist. The struggle rarely reaches the full-on pitch of battle but the tension remains. I’d like to think that this keeps me honest while retaining my sometimes naive optimism. But knowing that money does not buy happiness has left me at times with a shitty work ethic and a mountain of debt and knowing that good grades do not indicate any guarantee of understanding has left me with a long string of bad grades. Knowing the underlying emptiness of earnest pursuit has often left me with nothing but a self-satisfied sneer and a destitution of warmth. I know that the pursuit is the thing. But when honestly examined, what is worth pursuit? What when apprehended satisfies? Not my mother’s God – that guy is seriously bipolar. Not the Zen God – he’s cold and doesn’t dance. Not this little savings in the bank – it’ll be gone very quickly. Not the knowing of unknowing – it doesn’t really teach you anything. Not the prettiest girl – you can’t really talk to her. Not the girl that you can always talk to – she's usually taken and never seems to be able talk to her boyfriends. Not writing a novel – it’s not really good enough to be published. Not getting a really, really good performance review – a large part of that is being good to the boss. Not getting a really, really good grade – it’s stuff you knew before you took the class. Not getting away with something that you shouldn’t have – it severs social connections you'll probably wish you'd kept. Not finding the most honest perspective – it’s not really anymore helpful than the rest. Not knowing thyself – thyself will cease to be relevant. Vanity of vanities, all is vanity. One generation goes, another generation comes and the universe offers no comment. Where is the spark? Where is the beauty? Where is that one true thing? If only one could only know with certainty what actions store up treasures in heaven and could peek in at the account statement from time to time.

But with all this horseshit lying around, there has to be a pony in here somewhere. My hope and my pride. My white plume. And then you see, I am content for this round and I’ve won more rounds of late than I’ve lost. And having done so, we can sigh, nod and say, “fuck it, Dude. Let’s go bowling.” Which, really, is the answer to everything. Yes. The Dude wins. My condolences, Mr. Lebowski, the Dude wins. Let your garments always be white, let your hair lack no oil and mark it 8, Dude. By all means, mark it 8.

Mostly About "Lost"

2008-05-09T04:09:00.000-07:00

05/09/2008 6:33 AM – 7:01 AM

The sky is light, unclouded save for a few tufts that add dimension to the picture. I feel good. I was obsessed with Lost all night. I fell asleep thinking about it. I woke up thinking about it. This makes me unaccountably happy. Why should this show be the one which lights me up?

Happy people have packed schedules. They fill their time with activities which fully (or nearly fully) engage them. Their off-work time is filled with work. This astounds me. But then I can see that I actually rarely vegged out unless it was both an opportunity to escape and a way of raising my finger to authority. When there is no authority telling me that I must not watch TV, I rarely watch TV. Except for Lost. And a handful of other "myth" shows that aren’t currently on (X-Files, Twin Peaks, Northern Exposure, etc). Odd thing about video games, I realized that they aren’t passive leisure pursuits. They actually do engage you in flow. The only thing is, when I finish playing, I don’t feel as if I’ve accomplished anything. Well, if I play them alone. Well, the majority of the time that I play them alone. Every once in a great while, playing video games alone is exactly what I wanted.

That dude that just rode by on his bike was leaning back against the sissy bar. Can you do that? What else is it that I can do to fill my time with meaning? How do you really live in living? I know that I should sleep more. Be asleep by 9 so I can wake up by 5. But I get distracted. And Lost is on till 11 now. Stupid competition. But I like CSI and Supernatural and the NBC comedies too. Not to the extent that I like Lost, but there you are. How is it that Lost ceases to be apathetic entertainment for me? 4 years of dedicated watching play into it, no doubt. Is it the whole “existence is a mystery” aspect? Just the damn good mystery aspect? The socializing “water-cooler/fan-blog” aspect? Maybe it’s as simple as being a few years dedicated to a well done thing. Ha. Like being married. Maybe that’s what marriage is about – the strange intrigue of being dedicated to a good thing for a long time. But it’s full time, not just one hour a week. But it’s got boobs. But it gets stupidly cranky. But it hugs. But it makes you do chores that don’t really need doing. But it smiles with its eyes. But it talks to you when talking doesn’t do any good. But it talks to you. Existence is weird.

On Moving and Feeling, Mostly

2008-05-07T03:59:00.000-07:00

05/07/2008 6:02 AM – 6:26 AM

Awake and old as I am, I’m young and will remain so. Happy people fill their time. They have packed schedules. I bought new shoes from Bean’s yesterday. They should arrive next week. I bought Mom a Mother’s Day gift from Amazon. It should also arrive next week. Poop.

I didn’t lift yesterday, but I did call Phil and drop off the rent checks for June and July. He said he’ll probably start showing the place in mid-June, so I want to have as much crap as I can moved out by then. I’m not connecting to my writing lately. Probably because I’m not really writing. And also the numbness in my emotions since the panic attacks, it doesn’t feel as if I’m for real connecting to anything. Though the numbness is growing less. Little by little, less. I’m forced to consider what actually works to make me happy. That’s what the whole obsession with happiness is about. I used to have my dreams of the future, but the future is now. I used to have God to rely on, now I feel far apart from him. I don’t want to be. I want that assurance that everything will be alright. That there is a plan in all of this. That I’ll end up doing what I was meant to do. That I’ll be happy and joyous and exuberant. I don’t feel in love that much lately. Odd how fast that goes away.

Before the panic attacks, the idea of going to Ithaca would have been thrilling – a new place! In the country! New stuff to see and do! In the country! Now, I’m wondering how long it will take me to find a job and how much of the money that I’ve saved will be spent in moving and setting up again. I’ll miss my job. I’ll miss my bosses. I’ll miss the building. I’ll miss the walk to work. I’ll be the new kid again instead of the old hand. I’ve gotten used to this life in Buffalo, as much as I don’t like living in a dirty little city, chock full of bums and thieves and bullies. It feels as if I’ve fallen in love with the ugly mean girl because she’s the only one that would sleep with me. Heehee… This coffee is weak. I’ll mix it stronger tonight. What was it that I used to love about moving? I was anxious to get out and prove that They were wrong about everything, that I was going to be a writer, if only I had a chance. I’ve had the chance and now I wonder if I picked the wrong thing. I am self-motivating now, I guess, but how do I motivate myself to write when I don’t really feel like I was destined for this, that “destined” is a crap word anyway? But it’s not enough for me to just read and watch TV and get drunk anymore. I have to think of myself as something. I have to make something noteworthy of whatever it is that I am. And bragging rights is a part of it, but there is that need to know in myself that I can do it, that I can be interesting. Goddamn it, there are still emu farms to found! Heehee… It’s the excitement that I miss, the sense that “if I can only do this, then this will happen and then this will happen and then I will be happy,” but I know that happy is found where you are, crafted from the sludge of normalcy. Oddly, I feel kinda happy right now.

With a Cocktail Recipe and Too Many Swears

2008-05-04T04:37:00.000-07:00

05/04/2008 6:50 AM – 7:12 AM

Okay. This. This would still feel dumb. Back. Back where you’re from. Get up then and write. Do I want to? No. Fuck this. I want to be doing something. Possibly the prom queen. Not that I had a prom. Grr. Arg. This is just what it is. It’s been cloudy the last two days. And I’ve liked it. I mentally narrated my actions in a noir voice-over. Boo-yah, motherfucker.

Up at five-thirty and read a book about happiness. Drank good coffee with lots of cream and lots of sugar. Loaded a bunch of old songs onto the lap-top and I’m listening to them now. Some are born happy. Some achieve happiness. Some have happiness thrust upon them. Now what the thing is is life and life more abundantly. They never got what that meant – the Fundies and the Vegans. A life of censorship is no life at all. A life of discretion after burning your fingers attempting to figure it out for yourself – that’ll do, piggy, that’ll do. Happiness sometimes drafts in the wings of anger, sometimes on the tips of a lecherous smile. We don’t get that it’s hard to fit happiness into the box of virtue or that a life devoid of virtue is seldom happy. That fucking middle way all over again. But that middle varies from person to person. Blow.

You wake up. You wake up and seize what there is of the day. A Sour-Mash Lemonade: 1 part bourbon, 3 parts water, lemonade mix to taste. Shake till mix is dissolved. Add ice – 1 large cube per 4 oz of liquid. Shake till ice is mostly melted. Serve in Old Fashion glass. Drink and enjoy. Repeat as necessary. Watching a Pixar movie will add to the experience. Long run today. 2.33 miles. When will I take it? Soon. I run tomorrow night as well, better to let the body heal by running this morning. Wake up. Wake up, oh soul of mine. Open your eyes to the PI walking the rainy streets, the surfer the sunny beaches. The Dude abiding over, in, through all and all. We are the matter of stars, looking back at our parents to let them know that they exist. You exist. To be here. To be the biggest sap they know – this is exuberance. We run the road up. We run it back again. Small creature, where is your God now? Where he always has been. Inherent in the proposition. I am 4. I am 12. I am 18. I am 24. I am 32. I am 64. I am. I was. I will yet be. The day is just begun. So fuck it, we’re bowling. All their life in this world and all their adventures in Narnia had only been the cover and the title page: now at last they were beginning Chapter One of the Great Story which no one on earth has read: which goes on forever: in which every chapter is better than the one before.

On Darwin's Beard

2008-04-26T05:15:00.000-07:00

04/26/2008 7:17 AM – 7:47 AM

And perhaps it was that Lucifer was the one who created hell as the only possible place that someone as vile as he thought himself to be could be allowed to exist. We do love our drama, us lower creatures. God is good and we feel that we must punish ourselves for not being up to the magnificence of his love. We’re weirdoes. Beloved weirdoes, but weirdoes nonetheless.

What I want of my faith is something a little less stupid and bullying. But I still want faith. Faith is one of those things that, statistically, is held by more happy people than not. It isn’t bliss that we should follow, perhaps, but happiness. Simple, ordinary, obvious ol’ happiness (which isn’t really all that simple, ordinary or obvious). And what is faith? I think it’s an action that’s end is belief. If knowledge is justified true belief (recognizing the Gettier Problem, but having no good solution to it as yet except to say, “well, yeah, it’d be really weird if that happened, definitely”), faith is acting (which I think includes thinking) as if a necessary belief is both true and justified.

Of course, with any discussion of faith, one runs into the asshole problem on the one hand and the flake problem on the other. Good faith, happiness faith sits somewhere between, I think. In science, it goes: observe, wonder, hypothesize, formalize the favored hypothesis, test, observe results, adapt theory accordingly, re-test, observe, adapt, re-test, observe, adapt – when you get to a point where you’re just removing and then replacing commas, you say, “Okay kids, check this out.” Then the rest of the kids try it themselves. Then they say, “Cool!” or “yes, but…” or “Dude, you totally missed…” Well, if scientists were not afflicted with the same types of assholes and flakes that afflict religion that’s how it would go. But how does one test faith? You can’t really. You can get as far as the formalization stage. Very bad things can happen there, though. Or maybe I’m wrong. But I don’t discount science for its assholes and flakes. Religion has its Darwin’s too (who included in his treatise on evolution a section devoted to all the problems that he’d found with his theory). God bless Charles Darwin who was as non-asshole and non-flake as his defenders and detractors are not. When I get to heaven, I will look him up and say, “thank you, sir. Damn fine job of not being an asshole or a flake. Very useful theory. Damn fine beard you’ve got there too, but do you ever find that you've been walking around for three hours with a big clump of mayonnaise sticking in it?”

On the Beat of the Thing

2008-04-25T05:02:00.000-07:00

04/25/2008 7:19 AM – 7:42 AM

And in the end, panic attacks don’t really matter. They’re the sprained ankle of the mind. It stings and you’ve got to be a little careful on it for a few days, but the little tweaks and freezes stop after a few days and you’re back to the level you were at before. My current theory is that changing around my room triggered it, and I’ve got a few more changes of room before I’m done, so meh. Be better, oh brain.

It is better to be happy, even at the price of seeming rather silly. It is good to feel pretty. Let the world know me as happy and let this very self that is alone in his room know me as happy. I’m alive on this beautiful day and I hope for the salvation of all after death. That’ll do as a picture. That’ll do. Don’t fall in love with married women, but do fall in love as much as you can, with the same person, if possible. Don’t worry about tomorrow. Don’t ruminate over the past. Unless it's the cool parts. This very moment is where we are and God is to be found here. Sometimes you’ve got to look a little. Be grateful for the past, remembering what is good. Look forward to the future, considering the silly fun yet to be had.

Dance, I think. Do the moderate pleasure of working towards a goal most of the day, but sprinkle little instances of useless momentary pleasure throughout. Does it add up to anything? Sure. Or rather, sure! Put down your philosophy books and pick up your comic books, preferably the funny ones. Go running. Save a little money. Spend a little money frivolously. Use drugs, but recognize that the pleasant effects are one of those little things that should be experienced in moderation. Hell is sometimes other people, but then so is heaven. Writing a public blog that is ostensibly about giving advice to yourself is really a rather narcissistic endeavor. That being said, there is nothing wrong with a little narcissism, but one should recognize that it is one of those pleasant little things that should be engaged in moderation. Learn things from flowers. Recognize that you’re going to die, but only to the extent that it makes not being dead more fun that it was. Lots of gods have died; the wonderful thing about Jesus is he rose again. For me. Rise again, oh Lover of my soul. Rise again and set my feet to dancing to silly 90’s pop music where the words don’t matter. Just the beat of the thing.

For He Abides Indeed

2008-04-24T06:12:00.000-07:00

04/24/2008 7:57 AM – 8:54 AM

Okay. Here I am. Up. The thing I suppose that I should mention right off the bat is that I had a panic attack last night, and that's what this post is about. It was a small one and this time it was not hell that was it’s fixation but the absolute nothingness of an atheistic death.

The thing is, it’s not the panic attack that’s bothering me this morning, it’s that the two hours I spent calming myself down and, actually, well, “worshipping” is the word that comes to mind most readily, but that’s not quite right, anyway the two hours I spent doing whatever it was that I did made me have to sleep in and now I’ve missed my running schedule. On the second day of it. Well crap. But it’ll be fine. And it’ll be fine. And, behold, all things will be fine. I want to remember the steps or parts that I used to fight the panic attack so here goes: first I fought it with simple aversion meditation, that is, not thinking of white elephants. This was mildly effective. Rather mild, but still, it helped get on to the next stage, which was a weak “it’ll be fine; it’s just a panic attack.” Then I got out of bed and knew that I wasn’t just going to fall back asleep, I had to fight back, so I pulled out that old rusty gun “I rebuke you in the name of Jesus.” This was actually quite effective. It focused my emotion on anger to the exclusion of fear.

But I knew that this was not the end of the thing. Anger sinks back too easily into other negative emotions, namely fear, plus, even as I was saying it, I knew that part of me didn’t accept this. I had to fight both the fear and doubt. I used that scene from “Joe vs. the Volcano” where Joe wakes up to a moon that takes up like an eighth of the sky and says, “Oh God, whose name I do not know, thank you for my life.” I started to realize then that what I was using to fight the fear was a metaphor that we use to describe something that we don’t really know the name of. For me, this something is Christ or Christ is this something. I can’t prove it, and sometime it’s not literal, just metaphorical, but it’s there. It’s always there. This brought me to the next part which was the phrase, “Christ is risen.” And I knew what I meant by it. I meant, “Hell and death have been destroyed” or “judgment and punishment have been done away with.” There is nothing more to fear. There is nothing more to fear. The fact of evil has been done away with, we just have these flashes of the hollow place in our souls where evil used to reside and we have not yet allowed to heal over.

I realized that even an atheist has this sense of things. When an atheist says, “there is no God.” He is saying, “There is no more judgment.” There are other parts of atheism that I disagree with (namely that there is no eternal hope in it – psssht – with all the possible things to hope for, why hope that death leads to nothing?), but when the part of atheism that is there says, “there is no more judgment,” I agree. Christ has paid the debt. Evil is no more. Christ is risen. And then I realized another phrase that stated that thing that I was saying, “the Dude abides.” Christ is risen – the Dude abides. That which is merely silly and fun becomes that which is eternal and sublime. What better metaphor for what I mean by God’s redemption of mankind?

But there was more. It was a very busy two hours. Following my favorite metaphysical theorist, George MacDonald, I knew that my hope was that all would be redeemed even to the evilest of evil men, the vilest of demons and that betrayer of us all, Lucifer himself. I had, at this point a sort of metaphysical epiphany, which is that if Christ Risen, the Dude Abiding, redeems all things, than even my panic attacks were redeemed. The panic attack has, already in the distant realms, been turned to path of the redeemed. At the very heart of its being this panic attack was a fumbling attempt of my mind to comfort me. What felt like a vivisection of my soul was an attempt at a caress. So I thanked it. I called it a motherfucking cocksucker, but I thanked it. It’s like the Eucharist in a way, it’s still tasteless cracker and cheap wine down there in the belly, but the eternal fact of it is, I have just ingested the body and blood of my Christ, risen for me. And that doesn’t make sense to me, except in the way that it makes perfect sense. I am my Beloved’s and He is mine. And that doesn’t make sense to me, except in the way that it makes perfect sense.

I’m already running behind, so I think that’s the end of the story for now. I went back and forth between all these things and there were a few more things that I left out, and when I got back in bed, I had a minor slippage back into panic, but I thanked it for it’s attempt, told it to go fuck itself until it learned better manners in the sack and thanked God for the Resurrection of his only begotten Son and told the cosmos and all they that dwell therein – the Dude Abides. So. The Dude Abides. Go now and abide ye also. You’ve nothing to fear. The Love of God is inescapable. Even to cocksucking panic attacks. I'll go running tomorrow. Someday, I'll kiss the girl.

On 31-32, Gratefully

2008-04-09T04:33:00.000-07:00

04/09/2008 6:26 AM – 7:01 AM

And so it is my birthday: happy birthday! To me! 2 to the 5^th power! For some reason, a discussion of birthdays came up yesterday at the store (I did not mention that mine was today) and Nora (my store boss) said that she didn’t really celebrate them anymore, which I was more than half-inclined to agree with but then Sarah the Volunteer laughed and said, “Oh no! At my age, I’m grateful for every year more I get!” She’s 82.

I like Sarah’s response more. The cynic in me is satisfied by the fact that such a response is so thoroughly humble as well as being so happy. And so at 32, I am grateful for my 31^st year. I just did my taxes and it was the most money I’ve ever made in one year. I’m grateful that I finally learned how to work. I’m grateful that I have bosses that encourage me in working. I’m grateful for the cool and funny kids I work with. I’m grateful for those few really wonderful patrons that make being nice feel really good. I’m grateful that I learned the happiness and suckiness of running and that I’ve started it up again even earlier this year.

I’m grateful that I survived my panic attacks and did, in fact, learn from them. A lot actually. I’m grateful that the new novel is going well. I’m grateful that the student loan people finally caught up with me and it didn’t suck nearly as much as I thought it would. I’m grateful for my family, far away though it is. I’m grateful for my friends, scattering further though they might be. I’m grateful for email and blogs. I’m grateful for Wikipedia and Google. I’m grateful for bourbon and hoppy beer and pot. I’m grateful for fat, sugar and salt. I’m grateful for boobs. I’m grateful for unexpected and unrestrainable laughter. I’m grateful for learning humility once again in how little we can know and how wonderful it is to love, even if it doesn’t come right back. Perhaps that was what Koheleth was talking about when he talked about casting your bread upon the waters. I’m grateful for the dark days that make the bright ones euphoric. I’m grateful for empirical studies of happiness even if I don’t know how useful they’ll turn out to be. I’m grateful for those few scattered writers who can write and make the world into a funny serious wonderful mysterious hard meaningful loving place to live. I’m grateful for God, even if he won’t show up in my room and tell me that everything is going to turn out really, really well. I’m grateful that I learned what it means to hope for something that you can’t quite convince yourself is true. I’m grateful that I’m still alive and happy at this little moment. I’m grateful for the blue sky and the yawning morning. I’m grateful for my cup of coffee and my pouch of tobacco (even if the smoking of said tobacco makes me cough up really disgusting things – I really must quit soon). I’m 32 and I’m grateful for that. A whole ‘nother year to wonder and act and see and hope and love. Yeah - faith, hope and love – these are what I am most grateful for this year, I think. Well, those and boobs of course.

Daniel and the Blade of Grass

2008-03-19T07:53:00.000-07:00

Inevitably, Daniel Call found the single blade of grass that had haunted him since he was six years old. It was in the backyard of an old farmhouse that sat abandoned on the edge of a spreading suburb awaiting its demolition.

Daniel was fleeing the man whose wife he had just been caught sleeping with and was clothed only in a bathrobe and, fortunately, a pair of running shoes. As he vaulted the fence his trailing left foot caught on a protruding post and his forward momentum propelled him face-first towards the ground.

Spreading his hands in front of himself to cushion his impact, his fingers wound through the long grass and when he had pulled himself to his feet, three blades remained. He knew then that one of these was the one for which he had been searching since the day that Suzie Carmichael had told him as they were sitting beneath the Johnson's maple tree that she believed in faeries.

The first blade of grass told him, "cast her aside." The second said, "fight for her," and the third merely whispered, "my but it is a glorious day." Looking up, Daniel saw the sun and the blue and the white and the green that mingled and branched. Dropping the other two blades of grass to the ground, he put the third blade of grass in his mouth, chewed it and swallowed.

In point of fact, it was the second blade of grass that was his own, the one that had told him to fight, but it was too late, one can only eat one talking blade of grass in a life and Daniel had made his choice. He cannot really be faulted for his wrong choice because he was forced to make it literally on the run as the cuckolded husband had rounded the fence and was closing in again.

In the end, that it was not his blade of grass did not really matter. Though the fit was awkward at first, eventually Daniel changed to fill it and though the girl was lost, she had a twin sister in Minneapolis that though she was not quite as pretty and disagreed with him about the nature of the faerie economy, aged better and believed in the divine optimism.

In a February Way

2008-02-18T08:26:00.000-08:00

Can it be done then? Can you still imagine a better when the sky is gray and the soul feels a hollow, when nature and being conspire together to a stillness than is not replete with life but echoes of the inevitable silence? But there then. In asking the question, the something in the soul that is not gone, not given up remembers this same sky in a different time and a different place and the lingering bouquet of a memory of being that was seeing in the life progression a hope that is in itself an evidence of better.

Where is my Hobbit pony, my wardrobe door, my mutant power? It cannot be that they resolve into a stuff reserved for children. “When I became a man, I put away childish things”? So scornful of delight, we near declare it part of the teeming crowd of principalities and powers and rules of the darkness. And, oh, my archaic sensibility, seeing in vanish’d styles of prose the fix’d path to peace. Spring up, oh well, within my soul, spring up and bring not proof but hope never abating. Even the February light is conceived betwixt sunlight and water, which makes the plants of summer ripen and bloom. There is yet mystery. There are still places on the map that read not, “unknown,” but, in full honesty, “here there be monsters.”

And we strain to believe that like the trees, the dead are not dead but merely asleep. The cracked visage of the sky, entangled with barren limbs holds promise of adventure and delight. The gentler aspect of the soul sets the body to walking in the woods, quiet of all but the wind and the trunks that creak in its passing, and therein finds its own story embedded in the frozen ears of lichen. You listen as Bottom the weaver with your eyes to the dream unfolding in wakefulness mistaken for slumber. And love, even love, is then possible to the ass-headed man. That it is gone with the waking dew does not vanish its being in your memory. And memory slides into the moment and the moment fills with breath, and the bones, even those hollow bones, begin to move. Even from fear we rest, awoken. And this thinking, thinking, thinking flesh must move, move, move to find itself gentle for sleep to rise from sleep and feel the round fullness of life indwelling in life.

In Which Wind Stands in for Wind

2008-01-30T04:28:00.000-08:00

01/30/2008 6:33 AM – 7:02 AM

The wind is passing through with gusto. Where must it needs go at such pace? Thick diction without cause. The house sways in its progress and shakes in its regress attempting to find its place of precarious balance, putting off collapse until it is inevitable. Many years from now, I would hope.

The cold flows round my room marking a circuit traced by cigarette smoke. It always does when the wind rises up from the south and flings its way across the city to the north. It is strange to imagine that the south brings the chill, but standing up, above the city, one watches it whirl and knows that it comes no more from the south than it does the dirt beneath. Too much Shakespeare, too much. Without being Shakespeare as small consolation to the readers. But the mystery of unknowing the bottomless is too tempting to forego. Pining for nothing and that should not be. One should always pine for something. It connects you to the work and lets the cold file by without remark save muttering, “it’s cold,” and wrapping the blanket tighter round. A man that doesn’t seek adventure is just a corpse that seeks its hole. Pine for something.

The thing is what it is, not symbol of another. The wind is the wind. The cold is the cold. The waning dark, the waxing light, just dark and light. Ahh, too much thought spent on mysteries of mysteries, not enough on base nature, which while subject to moths and rust and thieves, is there. You cannot know it, but neither can you poke your finger through it like so many tattered aphorisms. Perhaps that is the start of Wisdom, when you seek to turn your back on it, citing that “it prophets me nothing.” But then, what makes gold gold, if not the abstracting eyesight of Wisdom? But then, rebutting, gold is just gold. It’s the ridiculous valuing of scarcity that prizes gold above a cabin stocked with food and wood and books. Sour grapes, old man, sour grapes. The Boy from Denmark’s tragedy was not one of indecision, nor thinking too much, but thinking over well. So. Does one emulate the Prince or the Counselor of Aphorisms? Both die, you see, and Ophelia, poor Ophelia, loved them both. She dies too. Only Horatio and that fool with a sword that commanded men to death for an egg-shell survive. The straight-man or the asshole? Neither. The play’s not over yet. We still have several acts in which to whoosh about the stage, signifying nothing but ourselves as wind. “More life,” says Harold Bloom, “more life into a time without boundaries.”

Jack the Bastard, a Short Heterodoxy

2008-01-19T06:35:00.000-08:00

After Jesus the Christ, Jack the Bastard was God’s favorite son. This, you can no doubt imagine, caused the angels a great deal of consternation, because everything that God had promised and lauded through the life, death and resurrection of Jesus was mocked and flouted by the immortal life of Jack.

“When the universe goes, so goes Jack,” said God, “the Deeper Magic will not be broken.” “But, “said the angels, “in the meantime he’s fucking everything up for the Little Lowers.” “The Little Lowers,” said God, “could stand some good fucking up. My only begotten son paid everyone’s fare. They’re all on the train whether they will it or no. My misbegotten son shouldn’t needs be shamed for picking their pockets while they ride.” Jesus, for his part, was mum on the issue. Eternity was large and the inheritance of the good son. The prodigal could spend his portion as he wished.

The debate raged on in the antechamber of eternity as they all sat waiting dressed in their finest for the trumpet to blow and the train to approach and the bride to arrive. God would often turn to his oldest and dearest friend for support. “Lou,” he’d say, “have you considered my bastard, Jack?” “You know,” said Lou, “it’s confusing when you call him that. It makes you appear the irrepressible philanderer instead of the prudish old hermit that you are.” “Yes,” said God with a distracted smile, “he rather does cast me in a whole new light.” Lou would sigh then. “You always do seem to miss the point,” he’d say. The other angels were always rather offended by God’s doting on Lou. It was as if he’d never been the horrible asshole that he had been. Jesus, always the mediator, would take them aside and remind them in his firm and quiet way, “all is forgiven; all is forgiven; all is forgiven.” They were quite chastened by this, because if Jesus could forgive Lou, anybody could. Jack, however, they felt free to argue about. He had no place in this cosmic scheme of freedom and redemption. He required neither permission nor forgiveness, and the exact nature of his will God refused to divulge. “It’s because even he doesn’t know,” Lou would say. This would set the angels all atwitter, but God would just laugh and clap Lou on the back. “Ha! You ol’ son of bitch,” God would say, “you ol’ son of a bitch!” “Which casts certain suspect assertions onto you,” Lou would retort. And this would just make God laugh harder.

It was a long time that they waited in the antechamber, and sometimes they would wander over to the gate to have a smoke and peek up over the top to watch the reception in the courtyard. Everyone found it unsettling except for God, Jesus and HG. They being the only ones that had any experience at three-in-one. It was especially unsettling if, as they turned to toss their butts into the street, they happened to see themselves approaching on the train. “Don’t worry about it,” said God, “you’ll get the hang of it at the wedding.” Though no one doubted him, they all agreed that it was pretty fucked up.

There was a rumor that circulated among the guests that since Jack and HG had never been seen to appear in the same place at the same time, they were actually the same person, like Clark Kent and Superman. No one really believed it, reasoning that coincidence was the better explanation, but it was something to talk about that passed the time. When asked about it, HG said, “All of eternity is but one day. We in the morning mourn for the night before that never was. In the afternoon, we will wait through the dry heat for the bride to arrive. In the evening, we celebrate the wedding, forgetting the night that will never come.” Everyone had a good laugh at that, and even somber old HG had to admit that it was a pronouncement that better suited the conditions of the cramped train than the airy antechamber. When he was asked, Jack the Bastard just laughed, but then Jack was always laughing anyway. It was why, after Jesus, God loved him best.

Which Is a Bad Poem Entitled: “For the Seduction of the Forgetting Girl on Earth-619”

2008-01-14T19:36:00.000-08:00

It's been so long since I've tried to write a poem, that I was like, what the hell... why not? And now I dump it off on you:

“For the Seduction of the Forgetting Girl on Earth-619”

Come to me my lovely freak of angles, bones and sighs.

My unplanned room awaits your sounding breaths.

This here. This there. Tantamount to compromise.

Like hell I’d have any of that.

Come only as you are stripped free of politics.

We here truck only with the Lord sans choir.

When you enter, leave sound judgment at the door. Wear green.

I’ll tell thin lies to compliment.

Come down the street through rough whetted snow.

Follow the course of the 20 bus, outbound.

We are not prisoners here. It’s just that the letters still hold.

Evidently, I’m self-seduced.

Come take me up, away the night to the damn forgetting place.

The word that sits above the brow is thick with intransigence.

Arrive, dear spider on rooftop winds. Knit a Mobius of palm lines.

I swear to let your mutant power consume me in the morning.

On A Sunday

2008-01-06T07:02:00.000-08:00

01/06/2008 9:24 AM – 9:53 AM

And here then, we are where we set out to be. Odd. I didn’t think that this is where I intended. But here I am and I was moving with intent. The gray skies and leafless trees remind me of Addison which becomes more symbol and clump in the gut than actual place. I have no doubt that if I were flying over it in a helicopter at the height of summer the place would look made in dreams or Photoshop.

Perhaps now I can write for its own sake, but, no, there is too much laziness in me for that. I can write to note that I was here at this place at this time, to prove that I was indeed alive and not a phantom conjured by my mind to give my life a sense of continuity. And so, dear Spike, on this date, at this time, you were indeed alive in Buffalo, NY under gray but not particularly morose skies. You woke up and read in your couch for an hour, considered going to church but didn’t, sat in your chair at your desk, decided that opera best suited your mood and then typed, distracted occasionally by the neon colors that the runners wore.

You thought a bit about death, but it didn’t really bother you, nor surprisingly, did it particularly weary you. It sat in your mind like a smooth pebble on a beach, one amongst many. Your thoughts are mostly of what you will do in the spring, when the lease is up and its time to move. There is a chance you’ll actually have enough saved up to go somewhere else. Mum’s vote is to move out of the city but stay in the area at your job. She has a point. Ben’s vote I’m not quite sure on, but he thinks you should at least hike the FLT. You probably should. But for how long, I’m not sure. And where, oh Spike, do you think you should go? Well, dear Spike, I’m sure I don’t know. I have had enough of city life to inform me for a long while yet, but country jobs are few and far between. It is a question with a slight tension but no real worry as yet. Perhaps there is enough tension for you to actually save money, but not enough to get worried and spend money on beautifully transient and unhealthy thing so as to forget that you’re worried. That would be nice. Somehow, one must find that place between fear and laziness where satisfaction resides. To be Falstaff but with whit to change course if the course needs changing. My. That was a pretty girl that ran by. I must get one of them someday. That then will be a thing to reside within for a summer or two. On with it then, thou dirty old man, there are books to be writ and houses to build and hours and hours of fine idleness to be thoroughly savored and forgot.

Of a Picture from the Pennsylvania Woods

2007-12-09T05:58:00.000-08:00

12/09/2007 8:24 AM – 8:56 AM

It is a picture, really, just a moment, a scene. Many of my stories start with one, but this one has been lingering in my mind for years and I haven’t written of it before. Perhaps because I never wished it to be fiction. It came to me somewhere south of Williamsville but north of Harrisburg. I can’t really narrow it down more than that. I was walking on one of the side-roads that I favored during that little adventure. It was little traveled but paved.

The trees grew close enough to the road that their branches mingled overhead at times. The day was sunny though, and cool. It was the morning, not yet eleven. Scattered along the side of the road were boulders that occasionally I would sit upon and rest. It was soon after I had gotten up from one of these and had started walking again that the picture came to me. It did not come to me fully formed or in a flash, but pieced itself together as my feet found their way across the cinders and rocks that made up the margins of the road. I have no doubt that it was born of weariness and little money, but such unflattering origins do not declare the picture void.

There in a car that is like a jeep but not a jeep, perhaps a little Rav or a Sidekick, rides a young man of about twenty-five (older than I was at the time but not by too many years). The top of the jeep that is not a jeep is down. The young man is worn but clean. His clothing is newly bought and washed: jeans, white-tee-shirt, new sneakers (Chucks, I think). Behind him, lying across the back seats, is a small duffle bag packed with new clothes, for the most part, variations on what he’s already wearing. Beside him is a drink of some sort, non-alcoholic but fizzy. As he reaches over to pick up the drink, he absently pats a briefcase that sits on the passenger’s seat. It is a metal briefcase, the kind with long curved grooves across its sides. Inside the briefcase is sixty-thousand dollars. We can’t see it as the briefcase is closed, but we know it’s there: thirty-thousand dollars packed neatly into one side, thirty-thousand dollars packed neatly into the other. How he got the money has always been a mystery to me. I think that it was obtained legally and it is without a doubt, his. But I do not know how he got it. I know that he had a little more, but he’s spent it on clothes, the jeep that is not a jeep, and clearing himself of his debts. He picks up the drink, unscrews the top, drinks, screws the top back down, puts it back in the cup-holder and pats the briefcase again. Up ahead, on the side of the road, he sees a dirty and forlorn little creature, scuffing his feet through the cinders and rocks that make up the margins of the road. I turn and move further off the side of the road. He nods to me as he passes. I nod in return. He drives on and I know exactly where he’s going. Wherever whim takes him, without a backward glance.

Of Chairs and Turkeys

2007-12-07T06:12:00.000-08:00

12/07/2007 6:52 AM – 8:54 AM

In banishing Joe for arriving at Calvinistic Determinism, he was banishing conclusions based on independent thought and study. I do not agree with determinism, at least not without extensive modification, but in banishing independent thought and study, he was banishing me. I say this not for malice, the past being irrevocable, but merely for the context of the metaphor.

The metaphor was this: a chair balanced on three, then two, then one leg on the edge of the stage. Balanced being an inaccurate word because it was held to keep from falling. The sitting on the chair was to represent an act of faith. I don’t remember if the metaphor was to run toward the sensible or the irrational, but I suspect, based my knowledge of the speaker, that it was toward the sensible. On this point I diverge, faith being a leap, not of the irrational but the arational, not the stupid but the blind.

The metaphor of the chair surfaces again from time to time, generally in a context quite different from its original presentation. I, writing this, sit in a chair. This chair has held me many times before. I would predict that it will hold me many times again. If I am wrong, I will most probably suffer a few bruises and scrapes, but the metaphor remains intact. I could, if I wished to adhere to a stance of strict skepticism, forego the use of chairs all together. We find in these mundane trivialities the refutation of strict skepticism. But I have before seated myself in chairs that broke beneath me. And this has to do not strictly with the fatness of my ass (though that, no doubt, played a large part). We are left with these fragments which we attempt (without due rigor) to assemble into a whole: 1) chairs break, 2) chairs 99.99% of the time do not break. Here we introduce a second metaphor, provided not by Joe but by Nassim, the metaphor of the Thanksgiving turkey.

Since the turkey has been alive, it has been tended to and coddled by a farmer. Its dwelling, food, warmth and socialization have all been provided to it by the farmer. Perhaps there is within the turkey some instinctual distrust of man, but this grows less and less with each passing day as all of his needs are met by the farmer. As the turkey approaches his second Thanksgiving, he grows more confident and secure in his position of love and trust in the farmer. Seeing a wild turkey skulking furtively by the farm, cold and hungry one rainy November night, perhaps our turkey feels sorry for him and wishes that he might welcome his brother into the fold, but the gates are barred and he has no opposable thumbs with which to lift the latch, and so he returns to his contented scratching and pecking. When the farmer arrives to carry the turkey away, he may at first be discomforted by the upset to his routine but he has no reason to suspect any ill from the hands of the farmer and, with his head on the tree stump and the axe in the farmer’s hand, he still trusts that the outcome will fall to his favor. All things considered, it was a good life for a turkey. He lived contentedly, died at peace and tasted very good, stuffed with spiced bread-crumbs and served with mashed potatoes and gravy.

Both the turkey and the sitter-upon-chairs share what Kierkegaard would loath to hear called the irrational. And so I do not. I call it the arational, which spellcheck informs me, is not a word. But while the turkey may be forgiven his foolishness, seeing as we do his very small brain and limited experience, the sitter-upon-chairs does not escape our withering glare unscathed. He has knowledge of the fallibility of chairs, and yet for reasons of comfort and convenience, he continues to sit upon them unthinkingly, save for a few scarce moments when he notes that his ass is particularly fat and the chair particularly frail. But in both cases, there is an arational will to believe. There is simply not enough information to arrive at a conclusion about the nature of the farmer or the chair. The necessary subtext of all conclusions is a leap of blind faith. So. Jesus loves me, this I know, for my Mommy tells me so. Little ones like me belong, I am weak and he is strong. “Every day, I wake up and step on a land-mine,” says Ray Bradbury. As do I. And isn’t it a lovely day for a frightful boom?

Say Kid, You Wanna Buy a Monkey?

2007-12-03T04:42:00.000-08:00

No, but seriously – who wants to proofread a novel? (the inflection of that last sentence is identical to the one where you say, “who wants chocolate chip COOKIES?”) A novel which is mine. It’s not a new one. It’s the old one. The one that I’ve been saying was crap. It wasn’t crap. Just parts. Those parts have been cut. So now it’s much shorter on crap and just plain shorter in general. So you can read it in, like, two days. If you do want to proofread it, email me at (start magi-text) spikedotdunnatgmaildotcom (end magi-text now). Jonnie, who has been kind enough to read the damn thing about a billion times and done a smashing job of it, has discovered that hidden deep within the recesses of MS WORD is an option called “Comment.” It’s under “Insert.” This allows the reader to point out my obvious flaws and mock me for it without actually changing the text, thus forcing me to confront my demons myself. My therapist assures me that this is the proper thing to do. She does however, also force me to wear women’s shoes and recite the pledge of allegiance at the start of every session, so I do wonder about her efficacy at times. Also, if possible, I’m trying to figure out a “blurb” of about 200 words as they say in the “biz.” If anyone can figure out one for this thing, he or she will get a cookie (subject to taxation in the state of New York, offer void to anyone that does not live in my immediate vicinity and cannot supply the cookie themselves – I’m not supporting any damn, dirty hippies).

PS – does anyone know any literary agents? Anyone? Anyone? Bueller? Bueller? …damn, dirty hippies…

On Watching the Grandmasters Play

2007-11-28T03:52:00.000-08:00

11/28/2007 6:10 AM – 6:33AM

And there with nothing pressing, nothing new figured out, just working towards a goal, you wake up in the morning and do the things you’ve got to do. You don’t have to live in fairy-land, though there are some that make it. You don’t have to just let the world float by, thought there are some that can. You do what you can to make your corner of the world a better place to be.

And even if you don’t believe that you can make the world a better place by overt means, though there are some that do, you continue in action, forsaking the smallness of ones ability and the smallness of those that love you. It is a small world, after all. The boats bottom out from time to time and they close down the ride to make them float higher in the water. And if it doesn’t make sense, if it doesn’t cohere, we recognize in watching the grandmasters play that it’s possible to say that either there is no plan or the players are much, much smarter than we are. There is a choice in seeing the universe and that is the odd thing, that is the uncomfortable thing, that is the innate strangeness of being.

It’s much easier, much more palatable to find a prophet to tell you what to believe, even if they say they’ve peeked behind the curtain and lived to report that there is nothing there. Perhaps they have, but their revelation of nothingness holds little import for those that are not them. We still stand outside on rainy days, wondering what’s playing at the matinée. A cartoon, a serial, a newsreel, the previews, the feature. One leaves the darkened theatre and the eyes adjust to the color of the sky and the perception changes rendering the data acquired unreadable. One can never step into the same river twice. Of course, argued Nietzsche, there is a limited amount of matter and energy and so, given enough time, not only is it possible, it’s required that the water you walked through yesterday will one day be the water you walked though again. Nietzsche was crazy though and though his wobbly mind by virtue of its wobble could pierce though any number of curtains of bullshit, it was unable to detect the bullshit that it itself had produced. There are not an infinite number of monkeys on an infinite number of typewriters with infinite time. There’s just us with one typewriter, a certain number of heartbeats and a vague attempt to better our corner of the world as only we believe it should be.

Meanwhile...

2007-11-28T03:50:00.001-08:00

Which Is Trying to Understand a Feeling of Wellbeing

2007-11-06T18:13:00.000-08:00

11/06/2007 8:40 PM – 9:07 PM

For some reason which I am trying to understand, I feel very good at the moment. Quite honestly, I haven’t felt this good since last November, before the first panic attack. I would like to know why I feel so good. I would like to try to duplicate it again. Whenever possible. It’s kind’a like being stoned, but the weed sits where it is, unsmoked.

Perhaps it is the effects of the warmth of the room, but I don’t think that’s quite it. I can’t imagine that it’s the beer that I’ve been nursing for the last hour, but perhaps that’s part. The day itself was fairly uneventful. I did go out to vote for the first time in something like eight years but that was mostly just amusingly awkward. It’s very possible that I voted for someone that I didn’t intend to. I felt kinda like one of those old people in Florida that one hears about. There was no work today, county offices being closed so people could vote, but I didn’t work Sunday and I didn’t feel this good. But I might be implying that I feel up and jazzy, I don’t. If it’s jazz, it’s smooth and warm and quiet. It is a Spikey kind of very good: calm, relaxed, not worried, not compelled.

The absence of roommates, perhaps, but then Sunday was also devoid of roommates. Maybe it’s the work I did around the house, but that was very little. I did the dishes over the course of five hours, took out the trash. I read superhero comic books and took a nap. I ran in the morning. I didn’t write, which is somewhat out of character for a good feeling day. I listened to the newest SModcast, the last two disks of Me Talk Pretty Someday, the first two of Blink, but I’ve listened to Blink before. There is a feeling though, of potential, perhaps. I don’t feel old and death is distant and there seems a possibility of love in it. There is that feeling that things will work out. Strange that I hated that feeling so much when it got me in so much trouble, and then found it the biggest void when it left. Where is that line? But it is a passive question, untroubled by implications. Today is today. Perhaps I can’t manufacture a feeling of wellbeing, of being safe and loved and good, but it’s nice to know that I can still have it at times. Perhaps that knowledge will override the worry when it grows too big. But it is enough to have it now. It is enough to know that it came again today.

Meanwhile...

2007-10-30T04:45:00.001-07:00

On Vivid Memories of Morning

2007-10-28T04:54:00.000-07:00

10/28/2007 7:24 AM - 7:49 AM

There is something in the morning, a smoothness in the passing of time, that isn’t found at other parts of the day. It is one thing to waste the daylight, another thing entirely to waste it as it first appears. I find it odd that now I, who was for years a dedicated insomniac, find the morning hours my own. It isn’t unusual, I suppose.

I remember that as a child of four or five, I was usually the first to awake. In my mind, I awoke hours before the rest of the house and waited impatiently for someone else to rise so that I wouldn’t be alone anymore. Reasoning the memories, I conclude that it probably wasn’t more than a half hour, forty-five minutes at the most. The memories that we create when we’re that young are tricked by the fact that, since we had so few, the ones we did have are more vivid than the ones we make now.

I'm guessing that it’s because, when comparing the density of those memories so bright and clear, so packed with information, with the standard of memories more recently made, the mind estimates time and concludes that it must have taken longer because so much data is contained within those tiny moments. It’s like having two digital videos, and without being able to actually watch them, trying to compare them based only on their file sizes. We conclude that since they are both about the same size, they both must run for about the same amount of time. Opening them, we discover that one is merely standard while the other is hi-def. The standard runs the standard amount of time while the hi-def runs much shorter but oh so much more vivid and clear. The memories of childhood seem so much more important that the ones from three weeks ago, but the data they contain is not much more significant for decision making. Just so much more alive and real. And there. I have written the sun up. You’re very welcome. There are clouds along the edges but the sky overhead is clear. This is good. It is a Sunday after all. God can peak down and see us and maybe grant us moments of being as vivid and clear as our memories of mornings long ago when someone awoke and seeing us, proved that we were real.

Meanwhile...

2007-10-27T11:11:00.000-07:00

On the Great Gray Funk

2007-10-16T06:51:00.000-07:00

10/16/2007 7:39 AM – 9:26 AM (this started out as an instant but did not finish as such)

There’s this thing I was reading. My latest research project is on the “survivor type.” Which was the title of a pretty good Stephen King story. Not one of his best but, like most King stories, memorable. But his type of survivor differs from the one I’ve been reading about. I’m looking at the more normal survivor, not the one inclined to do a lot of coke and eat his feet.

But that’s still stewing and I don’t really have thoughts that cohere at the moment. One thing that’s come out of the reading though is a theory that, in order to feel as if we exist, we need observe being observed on occasion. Somehow, we require seeing someone seeing us in order to confirm our existence. Which is silly. It’s much more reasonable to see and know ourselves and work from there. Like Descartes. But he blew it logically once he got to verification of the world apart from the mind. But, if you start from thought and work your way out, you’re going to run into problems anyway. ‘Course if you start with the out and work your way in, you’ll run into verification problems as well.

But enough of the holistic rational approach, it’s riddled with verification problems. The particular empirical approach however, while unsatisfactorily devoid of cohesion or theories, works. The tendency of the human creature is to require an observation of being observed in order to confirm its existence. Silly, as I said. The reason this was mentioned in a book on survivors was that the author was discussing the motivation of people that got lost or stranded somewhere alone and survived the ordeal. One thing that kept popping up in his research was this drive to be looked at by someone else. And it’s odd, that. Something as practical as surviving being driven by something as abstract as having your existence observed.

When I was younger, I loved cloudy days best (which is a good survival tendency for someone growing up in Western New York). That’s shifted in the past few years, but I still love a good bit of clouds on occasion. When I was younger and my whole life revolved around church and God (mostly in that order), I felt a certain relief in cloudy days. Despite the fact that my church’s theology was slightly more sophisticated than placing God up and the Devil down, that feeling of God as looking down from the sky persisted. On cloudy days, therefore, the feeling that I was momentarily free from his gaze obtained. It was the feeling, not the thought. I still believed that God was watching, but the feeling that I needed to be a good boy (which, as an aside, is a compulsion that most survivor types don’t feel) loosened. On cloudy days I felt as if I were allowed to be more myself than the thing that my church wanted me to be because of the silly feeling that the clouds obscured God’s view of me. I would wander on cloudy days, down the railroad tracks, up the hills, across the fields, through the woods, along the stream, carrying my BB gun or jack-knife, feeling slightly dangerous, slightly more alive than on days of blue skies. But now I am older and the feeling that I am going to die someday has arrived to fortify the knowledge of the fact.

There is an atmospheric condition in lake-effect areas known as the “Great Gray Funk.” Basically, the lake that, during the summer, tends to keep the sky more clear than would be expected in non-lake-effect areas, during the winter tends to do the exact opposite. From late fall to late spring, the land leeward the lake is usually cast in a swaddling of thick gray clouds. The temperatures are milder than that of the surrounding unaffected areas, but the clouds pile on top of clouds. My younger self would love it. My present self is content to survive it.

When the insistence on God is briefly removed, there is a sigh of relief. When the absence endures, one starts to hear the echo that indicates a deeper hollow. There never was a God like the one they told me about while I was growing up. I still believe that there is a God, but his substance is more subtle and mysterious than I was taught. In this life, he does not always punish the wicked nor reward the righteous. The blessed are blessed not with good fortune but the ability to enjoy whatever fortune they endure.

Yesterday, the clouds came in for the first time this year. There had been clouds previously, but the clouds of the Great Gray Funk are a type of their own. There is a thick, soggy chill to them that we do not see in the summer. Today, the clouds have thinned and there is a rosy rippling to their skin. “But I’ll be coming soon,” says the Great Gray Funk, bringing with him that feeling of a further separation.

We require, at times, seeing someone seeing us in order to confirm our existence. If You cannot bless us with your gaze, bless us at least with the ability to enjoy enduring in its absence.

On Contradiction. Again. But with Einstein Quotes

2007-10-11T05:20:00.000-07:00

10/11/2007 7:43 AM – 8:10 AM

I’ve been thinking about that Einstein quote, “I want to know God’s thoughts, the rest are mere details.” I’ve always liked it, but the idea it seems to convey has been bothering me of late. Then I went to see if Einstein had actually said it (he did. I think) and I found another quote by him: “God does not care about our mathematical difficulties. He integrates empirically.”

The first seems to advocate a sort of rationalism and the second, well, empiricism. A contradiction in either primary or near primary principals, it would seem. But then I’m trying to recognize the necessity of the occasional contradiction. It’s slightly bothersome. It would be much more helpful if our thoughts about reality melded seamlessly with reality itself. Does nature abhor or admit contradiction? But perhaps both quotes taken together do not constitute a contradiction at all.

“God is in the details,” maybe, but that seems more of a gloss than an answer. Unless one is advocating a sort of neo-pantheism. Like a Gaia hypothesis. Which I still find rather laughable. But considering that I believe that a carpenter who gave up carpentry to be a wandering preacher about two-thousand years ago was actually God who died and then came back to life, somehow forgiving everyone every asshole thing that they’d done in the process, I really shouldn’t be the sort of person to point out the ridiculousness of a given belief system. Or I should be. The thoughts of God are details, the rest is conjecture. But what fine conjecture. We piece together a thousand disparate strings and weave a comic-book tapestry. Then someone points out that this string can’t hold any weight and so we replace it. Or we don’t and die nobly following our lemming system over the cliff. Without our conjecture, we have only a pile of strings, but weaving them together we counterfeit reality. One wishes that one could merely insist and leave it at that without a troubling of conscience. I’m going to go read a Donald Duck comic and pretend that I live in the woods with a hot chick.

On the Bodily Functions Politic

2007-10-08T08:10:00.000-07:00

10/08/2007 8:34 AM – 8:54 AM

What then are the rights of the governors? The same as that of the governed, but the office has no rights at all. And maybe you can skip this one, because it’s just politics which is a tiresome sport, fit only for the lazy or belligerent. Life, liberty, and property – the original self-evident rights. The last struck from the list because of the controversial definition of “property” – i.e. does that include another man?

Disagreeing with “self-evident” by reason of an attempt at logical voracity, we still must regard them as necessary, though not, perhaps sufficient. Thou shalt not deprive another of life, save to prevent the taking of life. Thou shalt not deprive another of liberty by enslavement nor imprisonment save to prevent enslavery or imprisonment or the taking of life. Thou shalt not, by force nor fraud, take the property of another, save to reimburse the taking of property by force or fraud. Nor shall you by false witness, in act of omission or commission, allow these rights to be infringed.

It is not self-evident because it is not evident to all. It is not God-given because it is not given to all. It is merely the necessary starting point for a working society. What holiday is it? I don’t even know. Something granted to us by a government that takes itself very seriously because its governed takes it very seriously. Pssht. Politics: the messy bowel movements of human interaction. The duty of a contentious citizen is to work subtly to undermine it the power of its government. The power of a True Believer is to have no conscience. Do your best to fly under the radar of the government and its True Believers. Do your best to pursue life, liberty and property with unpatriotic aforethought. Serve God, love me, and oh, the happier we will be.

On the Law of Unintended Consequences

2007-10-06T07:46:00.000-07:00

10/06/2007 10:04 AM - 10:44 AM

The Law of Unintended Consequences states that every action taken is the cause of unforeseen effects, which is tautology but possibly informative through our tendency towards reiterative learning.

The status of Unintended Consequences is ambivalent. It may be that the effects are positive, as in the case of Adam Smith’s “Invisible Hand” wherein actions undertaken for the profit of the individual have a beneficial effect on the group as a whole. It may be detrimental, as in the famous case of the butterfly that, alighting from a flower in Japan, caused a hurricane over Texas. Or it may be indeterminate, as in the case of Pandora’s Box, the last escapee of which is reported to be Hope.

The problem with assigning a status to the Law of Unintended Consequences is really the problem of assigning a status to Stories in general. We call it a Tragedy because we stopped the story where the noble hero died as a result of his fatal flaw. We call it a comedy because we stopped the story when the common protagonist got the girl. If we had declined to accept the arbitrary end point and let the film keep playing, the tone of the tale would change as well. The death of the hero brought about sweeping reform and the group benefited by the effect. The marriage of the protagonist was a lousy one and the kids that issued forth were evil little shits. But these too are arbitrary endings. The sweeping reforms had the unforeseen effect of fomenting a revolution that sat a Hitler on the throne. The evil little shits grew up and grew kind and made movies that brought about sweeping reforms. The rule of the Hitler brought about the journal of an Anne Frank that brought about the perspective of a fifth-grader three thousand miles and seventy years away that brought about a book that brought about a paradigm that brought about a business that brought about a school that brought about a painting that brought about a theology that brought about a reform that brought about a drink that brought about a flower that brought about a butterfly that brought about a rainstorm that brought about a situation with a common protagonist and a girl that brought about a couple of evil shits that brought about a movie that brought about a reform that brought about a revolution that bought about a Hitler that brought about a comic book that brought about a laugh. On and on, ad infinitum, ad nauseam. Ad hoc, of course, merely pointing out how little we can claim to know, and waiting to see what the effect of that will be. Funny, in some weird way, would be my guess.

Which Is a List of Everything Cool to Do That I Could Think of in Twenty Minutes

2007-09-30T04:54:00.000-07:00

09/30/2007 7:19 AM – 7:42 AM

I did everything, he said when he came to die. Alright then, what is everything? A list, I say, I list! To buy rural land with my own money, build a house on it with my own hands, and make and tend a garden large enough to feed 'til the next harvest.

Further, to write, publish and be paid for many novels. To thru-hike the Appalachian, Continental Divide, Pacific Crest, North Country and all the various cool smaller Long trails. To live for a year in Ireland, a small town on the Mediterranean coast, Alaska, a desert and a tropical isle. To find, meet, seduce and marry a woman that’s worth the trouble and will remain so for as long as we both shall live. And to be worth the trouble myself. To read too many comic books and write at least one long one. To read all the Great Books and many, many Damn Fine ones.

And finally, to have and raise children who are driven to enjoy life and are able to do it fairly effortlessly. To be wise. To be cool. To laugh a great deal. To get and keep a body and mind that are able to undertake any adventures that may present themselves. To spend the majority of my life without a boss. To believe in, love and enjoy God while I’m alive but not so much so that I neglect all the wonders of this life. To not worry except to the extent that it is useful. To be able to build a fire with only the stuff I can find around me. To be able to build a bow and arrows from scratch and then take down a deer with it. And then eat the deer. To be able to play the old, good blues on some instrument and sing along with it. To have a workshop and be able to make cool stuff in it. To keep making lists of things to do and then do them until death sneaks up behind me, whacks me on the head and drags me off to heaven, laughing. Me laughing, though death can laugh too, if he wishes.

On the Problem of Planning in the Playground of Probability

2007-09-28T04:39:00.000-07:00

09/28/2007 7:06 AM – 7:28 AM

Up then and dreaming of possible worlds, gear lists and quiet land. The rain and clouds befitting a pseudonym. Coming up from the bottom to sit at the top, feeling the breeze essay across the surface, eyes closed.

There’s words in it and thick calluses for walking long ways. The abstract concrete can get a hold, geeking out is enjoyment for a geek. Lists then, and many of them. But there are others in the woods and where one is and how to get there and what will we do when we get to the thing. Where do the ideas find their form? and How do you get there from here. The words on the edges falling off into that which lies below the horizon. Neither here nor there. It’s only words and they aren’t here for this. This is warm-up.

What is perceived is what is, but the frequency with which that which was not previously perceived intrudes upon the system makes prediction difficult. There is a need to act, but to act is to discard data. But this is always so. One looks at the system and assesses its probable outcome. One must, because one must act. But probable outcomes are notoriously unreliable. The meteorite and the pot of gold both obtain, if only rarely, but those rare events often have massive effects that skew the system to chaos before settling into a new predictability. But one must act. Chance favors the prepared mind. A flexible rigid system accommodating chance while following a reasonable course of action. How hard can that be? Pssht. Stupid, stupid reality.

Which Ends In a Sort of Idealistic Subjectivism

2007-09-27T05:53:00.000-07:00

09/27/2007 8:15 AM – 8:45 AM

There’s still 10,000 things ahead, that’s the thing to get. At every point, there’s still stuff to do. It’s still 1981, somewhere, and there’s still things that have to be tried. It’s not much of a thing, maybe, but it’s something. And it counts if it works.

What does it consist of? I suppose the physical necessity is money, but the primary is desire. There are still interesting things, and even on those mornings when your mind is slow and dull, that bug in your guts is still there, even if it twists only slowly. Bullocks and bedposts, get up then and do something. If you swallow the fly, swallow the spider. You’ll have a story in the thing and like the man said, you either need to write something worth reading or do something worth writing about.

In the meantime, you do whatever it is with plans for something else. Being here is being in your daydreams. Here is here. There is that problem of imbued verses inherent and I don’t know the resolution for that. I’m just here doing the thing that I’m doing. Arrgh. And the dullness of the whole is bothersome. No flickers. Wake up and wheel around awhile. There. You wake up and wheel around awhile. The clouds of leaves on the horizon sneak over months into the sky until they’ve found their footing in the unpredictable coloring. When the winter comes, their base material seems intransient and falls more vividly that that which they had aspired to attain, leaving behind the fractal skeletons to hold their place while they rest in preparation for their next assault on the clouds. Given time, and effort, all aspirations attain. The trick to being felled is to be so ensconced in pursuing desire that you do not notice and mistake the axe for the gentle breezes of an autumnal blanket pulled slowly over tired feet. And perhaps it will be. Percipi est esse. Willing it, it obtains, Berkelian, where it matters.

On, Oh, Let's Say, Epistemology. Again.

2007-09-25T04:15:00.000-07:00

09/25/2007 6:45 AM – 7:07 AM

Why start today? I don’t really know. But then, we have concluded by verification of repeatable experiments, that I don’t really know anything. Except of course, those odd little things that I do. What do we know? But not a list exactly, more an attempt to classify. Then we venture into the tricky territory of claiming a place on the spectrum.

Because we do know some things and to claim otherwise merely to fulfill an abstract notion of aesthetic rightness is rather dishonest to reality. I suppose that we could start with a list, but I don’t really feel like it. Odd, isn’t it – that this little bit of notes indicates to my mind a progression. There are many things that the Zen masters were right about. But they were wrong about stuff too. Life isn’t about fleeing the tigers unless one has managed to become a being pathologically fixated on death. Screw that shit. Somewhere between the naiveté of the palace life and the moronic aestheticism of the forest is honesty that can be put to use.

It’s true that we don’t know a lot, but neither do we know nothing. For now, one can leave it at that and my cozy little hermit’s cell is warmed by desires. There is another thing that the Zenites overdid. The rebuttal is simply bad poetry because it is overly used, not because it is untrue. Desire, says the old man sharp in wit and vigor, desire, desire, desire. We stay alive to grasp something. We love living for the moments when we do. If the ends are far, far away, you must fall in love with the means, and most good ends are far, far away. What do you want then, O Spike, of Dread and Delight? Well, for one thing, to move the fuck out of Dread. This place sucks and most of the chicks are fatties. But apart from that, I want what I’ve always wanted. To have a nice solid home that I can abandon and return to at whim. Me, mine, my, no one taking, no one giving. To be given something, no matter how small is to put your balls a little more between someone’s teeth. Unless you’re an asshole, then it’s fine. Nothing to latch onto, see? But I rarely enjoy being an asshole. Except for those times that I do. But the bell rang and what I meant to say was, “write, run and save money,” these fine little commandment issue forth from reality, which does not give a shit how you feel about the weather.

To Be Both Happy and Honest

2007-04-28T15:10:00.000-07:00

How can one be both happy and honest with one’s self? These are the four possible natures of God: 1)God saves no one, all are damned, 2)God saves some, 3)there is no God, 4)God saves all. These are the four possible outcomes of death: 1)one is damned to eternal torment, 2)one is purged, 3)one ceases to be 4)one is saved to eternal joy. How then can one be both happy and honest when we have no way of verifying either the nature of God or the eventual destination of our souls?

Oh God, save me. Save me and save my father. Save Hitler and the Jews. Save Jimmy Swaggart and the Dali Lama. Save the Buddha and the Christ. Save us all. Save us everyone. Save us and show yourself good and mighty. If we can forgive, can’t you? Who knows what is good for man in life, all the days of his vain life which he passes like a shadow? Who knows if the spirit of the sons of men goes upward and the spirit of the animal goes down to the ground? Do not be overly righteous, nor be overly wise: why should you destroy yourself? Do not be overly wicked, nor be foolish: why should you die before your time? Walk in the ways of your heart and in the sight of your eyes; but know that for all these God will bring you into judgment. Therefore remove sorrow from your heart, and put away evil from your flesh. Let us hear the conclusion of the whole matter: fear God and keep His commandments, for this is man’s all. God will bring every work into judgment, including every secret thing, whether good or evil. So I commend enjoyment, because a man has nothing better under the sun than to eat, drink, and be merry; for this will remain with him in his labor all the days of his life which God gives him under the sun.

How then shall we live? How can we be both happy and honest? As we do. As we always have. As we will until we die and finally know. Whenever you can, believe God to be good and mighty and your soul to be destined for heaven. Obey God’s three commandments: love God, love your neighbor, love yourself. Forgive and expect to be forgiven. Love. Work. Those two above all – love and work. Work was not the curse for our disobedience, seeing our innate nakedness as shameful was. Work is how we find our way to the garden we can no longer see with our eyes or touch with our hands. And love, love is still the atomic principle, the thing at the heart of it all. Love and work. Yes. Love and work.

Towards Complexity

2007-04-16T17:40:00.000-07:00

04/16/2007 8:24 PM – 8:36 PM

To do is to be. To be is to do. Do be do be do. Who knew? And there we are. Doesn’t matter, necessarily what the what is, only that it’s yours. It’s the do. The do gives you the why.

One acts in spite of uncertainty. It never gets to the end of the thing. You forget yourself and the self grows into something of greater complexity, like a better beer, fit to be savored. You blink. Happiness. Flow. Act and forget. Rules and goals. Complexity and ability. To do is to be. To be is to do. Fuck it, Dude, let’s go bowling. To bowl is to forget the self. To forget the self is to be illuminated by the 10,000 things.

The mind spirals down to its own frightened demise when left to its own devices. It’s only by constant vigilance that liberty is retained. To be happy is to be and to hope. We are and we act and we hope. This is what we do. That cheap sentiments keep us afloat does not negate the fact that we are, in fact, afloat. Existence exists. Existence is good. The proof is in the choice. The choice is in the being. The being is in the doing. We are what we came in with, but, acting, we leave better than we entered. You take it in your teeth. You take it in your teeth and laugh the fear to hell. God comes down riding raindrops and sunbeams.

In Praise of the Boring

2007-04-02T06:09:00.000-07:00

04/02/2007 8:41 AM – 9:03 AM

And if you don’t have something to look forward to, you might as well throw yourself under that train and finish the joke and find out if God is as cruel as the Evangelicals tell us he is. Other than that, optimism is the best option. Even simple optimism has its selling points.

The reason being that, in optimism, even this is just a part of the whole, which is good. So this is good. Make it so. Even the odd shakings grow to a distant memory, even if they occurred less than a day ago. Ahh, fuck it, Dude. Let’s go bowling. And so, remember, you’ve got to be doing something that adds up to something or you won’t see the point to your existence, imaginary or otherwise. And the They that say it’s a crutch haven’t noticed the crutch in their own eye. It’s all a crutch. It’s just being and being needs all the crutches it can get. It doesn’t need any at all, I’m saying. So you tell yourself a story and you write it down. You read a story and you change it to suit your whimsy. The Whimsy is the thing. It’s not the only thing. To say that delight is the only thing is as eyeblocked as to say that the only hole that needs filling is the God-shaped one. There’s also cooches. Nooch.

To be a part of the pageant, that is a good thing. It’s been going on for two-thousand years and it changes, but the Essence never does. Like the self, that there is no stable core does not negate the fact that it is and will continue to be. We are ourselves. Lift up your heads, oh yea gates. Be lifted up, everlasting door. And the what? And the where? And the why? And all these things obtain in accepting that they are there and that we cannot shovel free the hole from the earth that creates it. Open up your eyes. And perhaps the thing that is there and shaking is the thought that the Pirate You that you were depending upon turned out to be fiction and it was the Accountant You that saved you. And it isn’t the Beautiful Mind that saves the world; it’s the IRS agent that threw Capone in jail. That thing that we call the sad, boring, little man is the one that grabs us by the collar when we walk toward the glass and yanks us back and tells us to grow up. And that is perhaps the great disappointment. Our parents became our parents and we become someone else’s parents. And though I, crazy uncle that I am, wish that existence was cooler. It’s the boring ones that save the world. God bless ‘em and may their existence never weigh too much. And may the Dude abide.

With a List

2007-03-28T17:01:00.000-07:00

03/28/2007 7:39 PM – 7:59 PM

What’s the edge then? The list (for easy reference): non-judging, patience, beginner’s mind, trust, non-striving, acceptance, letting go. There. And what do we do with it then? We exist as we are and forget what we can. Remember walking in the creek on days like this. The water is too cold. If mom knew, she’d say no. But there’s no need to tell mom. There’s this. This is words. There’s tomorrow. But it’ll be today by the time it gets here.

If you can, you forget yourself and remember only enjoyment. Being in enjoyment, with or without concept of self is the solid thing, the good thing, the one good thing. We stand up and sit down. We accept the fluctuating nature of being. We accept that enjoyment runs though fingers, tight clenched or wide open. Hold fast/let go. You sit up with a start, the sound of gunfire in the distance. And once you were brave and curious and now you see the withered hands and missing feet. But for the grace of God? What grace? He has no leg. Who sinned – this man or his parents? But that is neither fair nor clear. We do what we can and God remains just because his position of power is situated in eternity. Mea culpa, mea culpa.

We cannot know, oh Spike, the nature of the thing. God is just. God is good. God is right. God is always right. He must be or we cannot move. And so he is and so we move. You get up after the shaking has thrown you to the ground. Non-judging, it just is. Patience, this too shall pass. Beginner’s mind, it is interesting. Trust, all things work together for good. Non-striving, this is enough. Acceptance, this is. Letting go, okay. We are what we are and we dream of better things to be. The color of the thing. Orange. The taste of the thing. Orange. The name of the thing. Orange. We are and see that we cannot. We are and see that we can. The day is itself. The self is fluid. The fluid is divine will. Somewhere, my true love lies. My mansion awaits in the Kingdom of Heaven. Come, Lord Jesus. The weight of the just fucking making it is heavy and I am only myself. So you breathe and feel your belly push against your shirt. Open your hands and fall. Close your eyes and know. Whatever it takes, take it with water as cold as the creek in March.

Through the Shaking

2007-03-27T18:05:00.000-07:00

03/27/2007 8:39 PM – 9:03 PM

And there. Why? It was a good day. One worked. One did as one’s supposed to and yet there it is, sitting in one’s mind, shivering to break the house apart. So what does one do? One does what one does. Write it down. Write it away. Write it through.

We are not our thoughts. We are not our fears. We are not our bodies. What are we? One doesn’t know. One lives and, if one’s evidence is correct, one dies. There’s nothing you can do about it. You exist. And by faith, we say, “heaven.” By faith, we say, “not hell.” Then you open your hand and let it go again. I am not my thoughts. I am not my fears. Hello, my name is Spike D, and I am slightly daft. Hello, Spike. It’s been two months since my last panic attack. Twenty minutes since my last general anxiety episode. My name is Elmer P. Fudd, millionaire. I own a mansion and a yacht. All of this and you know that it goes away. All of this and you know that it will be gone in a little while. Who are you then? Anyone that isn’t afraid. No. Anyone that exists to eat the whole world in a single bite.

Happy thoughts: cross-country girls, comic books, magical realism, pictures that prove that bat-boy exists, falling asleep quickly, the ringing of the chime when the bread becomes flesh and the wine becomes blood, private detective stories, olive trees, secluded beaches that honest people can lie on, lips, maps of worlds that don’t exist, albums that you can listen to all the way through, forks, rain clouds rolling across the desert, cigarettes at two in the morning on summer nights when it’s too hot to move, cold beer, boobs, coffee, finding random golf balls, houses in the country, 8 ½, long johns, lithographs, winning, gummy erasers, cold water, comfortable couches, seeing movies at the theatre, a baby smiling, Stephen King, too many books to read, Aslan. And everything is fine, see. Everything will do. Cross-country girls are hot. Forgetting the former false state, one becomes at rest.

On Falling Asleep

2007-03-26T05:35:00.000-07:00

03/26/2007 8:10 AM – 8:31 AM

What then do you fear? Falling asleep. Odd for someone that’s spent most of his life fighting insomnia. So let yourself go and see what happens. It’s cheating, you see, because you already did and nothing really happened. You didn’t fall asleep exactly and you didn’t stay awake exactly. But perhaps it’s a metaphor, because you are afraid of the big falling asleep. Though, by faith, we apprehend the data of an eventual awakening.

And by McDonald’s faith (bigger than accepted), all awake, and, someday, we will be able to apprehend McDonald’s faith and claim it as our own in deed as well as hope. But hope will do for now and one is up and the light is out and one can feel the movement of one’s arms in one’s skin. It is enough to walk; the destination will arrive when we get there. Far enough. The smell of the incense, the inclination towards food, the beginning of the day. The fiction is real. The word is made flesh. The vampires are driven away, believing or not. The Divine is inherent, understood or not. It is enough to love a wife. It is enough to be one’s own. It is enough to be where one is the moment that one is.

What do you know? Nothing. What have you learned? Nothing. What will you know? Everything. And then? Everything will be there to be learned again. Further up and further in. The odd collected phrases come back and we open our hands and let them fall to the page. Hello, sunshine. I am my parent’s sunshine when I am less than ten, less than nine, less than eight. All moments coalesce into what it is that we are when we are ourselves alone or together. You apprehend by faith the knowledge of others and say, “this is my neighbor.” This is my neighbor. I am my own and I will learn to lend myself. One learns. These. These are just evidence of fingers hitting keys. These are just squiggles representing sounds, representing ideas, representing attempts at knowing. Perhaps we apprehend. Perhaps we don’t. We open up our hands and let go. We close our fingers and hold fast. Doesn’t matter. It’s the cost of being. It’s the long walk down the sunny road to Fillmore for a pack of cigarettes. We are what we were. We’re what we will be. The cross is the cross, history or not. Others exist even if they don’t. God is love. I know love. I know God. That will do. Jesus loves me. This I know. For the Bible tells me so. And the church. There’s more pairs of eyes to see than the two that I know intimately. We pick it up and set it down and pick it up again. There is therefore now, no condemnation, just being. Fall asleep if you need to.