August 2006 Archives

i have finished my replay of the second greatest video game of all time, planescape: torment, the game which asks, what can change the nature of a man?

Long ago I heard and heeded Ravel's Riddle and found an answer different from that of The Nameless One. Or rather, it was the same. I found what could change the nature of a man.

i take great pleasure in the acknowledgement and belief that a video game was pivotal in changing my life.

and if i've learned anything from ps:t, it's that belief can change the nature of a man, which won't spoil much for you, dear reader, since you, dear reader, are as unlikely to play ps:t as you are likely to have read the spoilers in wikipedia.

me, shortly before ps:t:

me, last week:

notice, in one of these photos i'm chubsky and forcing a smile. in the other i've drained a beer, i'm about to eat a cake, i'm sporting a magic beard, and i've got a happy fiancee holding my hand.

you do the math.

as i changed my sheets tonight i noticed something unusual. there were four pillows on my bed. i've always slept with three. why was there a fourth?

i didn't ponder long before i remembered that night so long ago when my humble bed first found itself home to an even number of pillows. that morning-night so dim from fatigue and so clear from excitement, when words led a houseguest to a much warmer bed, and a pillow kissed leather farewell to join us.

four pillows lonely stood witness near dawn
and heard words so secret that everyone knew
four pillows lonely helped birth a new home
built everlasting, on the risk, "i love you"

summer's coming to an end, and with it, evidently, is my espresso fast. i fired up silvia today for the first non-does-she-still-work? usage since may. in preparation for this i roasted some espresso beans last weekend and today i put them through the works.

i've not entirely lost my touch although i can use some practice. within about 5 shots i had it back down and could pull some decent shots. sadly, though, i'm not getting much chocolate flavor out of these beans. neither am i getting much pepper flavor. in fact, i don't really like any of the tastes i'm getting. so although i managed to pull some technically good shots, i guess i still need some work to get some tasty shots.

no worries, i've got until sunday to get it right, and i should have enough beans to experiment.

in the meantime, i'm under the effects of 5 half-shots of tom's finest. i was wise enough to not drink the entire cup each time.

it's nearly a week since my return from possibly the best weeklong vacation i've ever had, and not only do i have absolutely no urge to write about it, when i fought my lack of urge and attempted to write about it, it came out crappily.

i wonder...

this has happened before...

here.

can it be that camping with 203 inhibits my writing abilities?

mister spock had this parting gift for his romantic rival in that episode where he kills captain kirk:

After a time, you may find that having is not so pleasing a thing, after all, as wanting. It is not logical, but it is often true.

having wanted, having had, and finding myself again wanting, i can honestly disagree with mister spock.

the initial wanting was indeed a pleasing thing, but now, the constant wanting holds no candle to even the memories of past having.

my mind is a silly place, full of needless worries and long-ranging anticipation, logic traps and weird justifications. i thought this morning about the way i came to the decision to propose, and i had to smile at my own contortions of rationalization -- none of which i regret or suspect were in error. still, documenting them someday may be amusing.

but the point (well, a point, at least), dear reader, is that i am objectively and demonstrably better in her presence. not just the usual love stuff where i have a smile all the time and have someone to hold. no, i clear the table and am nice to my brother. that kind of stuff, and much, much more, all easily observable by those that know me.

and so again i find myself wanting, and it is not pleasing in any way, because, as my secret heart told her back when the wanting was somewhat pleasant (because it was a wanting of hope and not a wanting of loss), without her, i am diminished. the having will return, and then the wanting again. someday it will be over and i can step off the yoyo.

forgot my ring (on account of the lifting).

that's the second time ever. i almost turned back for it but i was already quite late for work.

i feel naked. no, not naked. naked is pleasant. this sucks.

following one of the best weeks in my life, i found myself alone again, and not merely separated from my love, but isolated old-school.

the week consisted mostly of poorly sleeping and being hot and despite this it was, as i said, one of the best weeks of my entire life. this bodes well for the rest of my life.

but it ended, and i lost my words. i haven't written in so long that my last entry scrolled off the main page. for three days i had no words. but now they're back. i'm back. the swing of things is dictated by my iron. no matter how much hiking and running i do after my "return" i haven't really returned until i've once again made gravity my enemy.

my summer lifting program is working. that's all there is to it. i cut out my beloved squats and deadlifts and because of this my running, hiking, and upper body have all gotten stronger. i was contrary and it worked. i wont make it last forever because i must squat, but i'm glad that i'm flexible enough to try new things and make them work.

this bodes well for the rest of my life.

i told you that you were "wrong in a different sort of way" and i was right!

the front page displays the previous week's blog postings and... the previous week had no blog postings.

right again, am i! foo!

doubleyou
tee
eff?

found while looking for something else: old post.

i was feeling confused and helpless at an early roadbump in my early relationship (the day before her birthday, no less). it doesn't get to the point until i start babbling about "i don't like to think i'm special."

i've gotten over that shit.

i'm special. i fuckin kick ass. big time. and i'm holding back, too. i could kick even more ass if i tried but i'm lazy and humble.

i looked in the mirror the other day and thought to myself, damn, i'm a good looking guy, to which i replied, and i'm gonna keep it that way, too, because my good looking woman deserves a good looking man.

the proof is in the pudding, as they say (or more precisely, as they ought not to say), and here's what the pudding tells me: ordinary people hang with ordinary people. want to be ordinary? that's cool. that's groovy. that's your thing. do it because you want to do it.

but i'm on the fast track to eternal bondage with an extraordinary woman and i got to this point by believing my own bullshit.

no, that's not right.

i got to this point by believing my positive bullshit, the bullshit that says i'm the bee's knees and not just "ordinary". because extra-ordinary people, once they start being honest with themselves, aren't interested in the ordinaries. they can try, but i'm convinced it won't work out in the end. granted, my sample size is small enough to be ridiculously unscientific -- it's like 3 or something -- but sheeeit, man! girl, you know it's true!

oh, but i'm once again being bombastic and silly.

you see, i still don't really believe all this horsecrap. i do believe in the extra-ordinariness of 203, and the notion that EOs don't really get on with Os, and if i believe those two things, logic demands that I believe myself to also be an EO.

but i also don't believe in what i'm implying by the Os and the EOs. i'm not "better" than anybody in the sense that i'm worth more to the world. in fact, in terms of contributing to the world, in the absence of any george-and-clarence dream-sequence revelations, as far as i can tell i'm near the bottom of the heap. okay, the middle of the heap. certainly not anywhere close to the top. i do contribute in important and subtle ways. those who know how i do it appreciate my efforts. or not, as their case may be.

but the point is this, and here's the point (ha! it's not the point, it's a false point, you've read my stuff before, you know i've never got a point!): i do some things that most people can't. lots of folks can say that. but i can say it for a combination of things that sets me apart quite nicely from the crowd (despite what i said here) and in that way i am EO. there really is nobody quite like me, and (ooh, here's the point! i think! (my fingers smell funny! you know why! depending on who "you" are!)) (shit, I forgot the point! i got distracted by my fingers :() the point is this: (thinking.....) I don't go around thinking i'm of more value than anybody, because i don't know how to measure the value of a person. but i do think i've been graced by fate with a good solid intelligence, will, and body, and have put them all to good and consistent use within the framework of my own special belief system. the fact that i have talents (via random luck) and have put them to some use (via will power and ambition) and have ended up in a good spot (via a combination of random luck and te application of my talents, will power, and ambition) is what makes me EO in the very real sense that most people cannot truthfully claim what i have just claimed.

there's nothing in the world to make a man feel more extraordinary than the love of an extraordinary woman. and that's not just me saying that, i know i've heard it somewhere, so it must be true.

so, to summarize or something: once i quit my melodramatic whining about what a burden it is to be fantastic and how i couldn't deal with balancing my humility and my fabulousness, i landed the second biggest fish in the pond. lesson: humility has its place, but party-people, please, so does honesty.

and honestly... i'm the bee's knees. to quote al gore: peace out, y'all.

i just saw a picture of a dude on a boat on a river drinking beer from a "beer bong". he had a better developed chest than i've got.

my only consolation is that i can probably hike farther than him. and run farther. and squat more. and i've got a better girlfriend than he's got. and i'm probably smarter than he is. i drive a better car than he's got. i can make beer and he likely can't. i can program in more languages than he can. i can read more natural languages than he can. i can laugh without a beer in my hand, and i can get laid without a beer in hers. i can converse intelligently or at least humorously on a wide range of subjects. my toes are more dextrous than his. i know how to build a shrine, an altar, and a makeshift shelter. i can pass traffic school with 100% on my final exam.

and i don't ever fucking drink bud lite. not even out of a beer bong.

okay, i guess i don't have just an "only consolation". i feel better now. <sucks in gut>

people tell me: "of course you like the desert, you grew up in it."

not so. first, i didn't grow up in the desert. i grew up in air-conditioned buildings. i never went into the desert, at least, not often. i was a boy scout for most of my childhood and still rarely went into the desert. when i did, i hated it. i hated being outside up until my senior year in college. i couldn't wait to leave the desert and go someplace where i didn't need A/C.

even when i visited, i stayed out of the desert. always in the A/C. car, house, grocery, mall. the desert never touched me.

but now when i go back i leave the A/C off. that's right, now that i have a fancy luxury car that can tell me it's 110F outside, i leave the fancy luxury A/C off and enjoy the heat. and every chance i get, i'll put on my hiking shoes, grab my water, and hit the sand. why? because now i love it. let me tell you a secret about the desert that explains why i love it: the desert will fucking kill you. the bay area won't fucking kill you. new jersey won't fucking kill you. hong kong won't fucking kill you.

but the desert will fucking kill you.

a hike in the desert is a spiritual journey wherein one can find one's limits and one's self. done right, the heat and the solitude will burn away all else. done right, a desert hike is a chance to thumb one's nose at death and for a while, be immortal. because although the desert will fucking kill you, you don't have to let it. successful defense against a hostile enemy is a good feeling.

that's right, the desert is hostile. and it's also welcoming. it's my worst enemy and my best friend. it's me. that's why we get along so well, i understand the desert and the desert understands me. it took me a while to arrive at this point.

the first time i did the desert death hike i learned two things: first, take water. now, take more water. keep going, take more. more than that. that's not enough, keep going. little more. okay, lots more. still not enough. all right, put it on your back and walk a little. not staggering? you're not carrying enough water. pile on some more.

the second thing i learned is this: i may be too easily frightened, but i'm not stupid. i panicked but i made it through because of my own desert-hiking-smarts. i left a marker to the exit and i found it. yes, i found it after i panicked. but i laid it there before i panicked and that's the point.

i mentioned solitude above. this time i won't be doing the DDH alone, i've found someone tough enough to make it with me, and likely tough enough to truthfully say at the finish: "that was it? i thought it was gonna be hard!" (i never said the beach walk would be hard, only rewarding. the DDH isn't "hard" either, but if the weather's right, it's harsh. the forecast says only about 105F. that's not bad at all. looks like it will only be "fun". i can live with that :)

there won't be total solitude because i won't be alone. it'll be better than solitude, because i will be able to share a place that is "mine" in a way that most places cannot be. windy hill is a nice place to hike but it's not "mine": tons of people go there all the time. but i can say with a high degree of confidence that we won't encounter more than 3 other people on our DDH, and i'd wager the number is much closer to 0 than 3. the place won't be "mine" this time, it'll be "ours". all ours. i know a couple of places like that, and it's nice to know of such places. especially places that posess so much natural beauty as the DDH. of course, beauty is in the eye of the beholder. we might be able to smell the salton sea. ick ;)

i wanted to see how my running shoes, for which i have a newfound love, could also serve as my hiking shoes. so i set out for an easy hike. the minimum distance for "a hike", i have decided, is seven miles, and since according to my memory, the windy hill loop is seven miles, i went to windy hill. turns out that my memory was wrong and the loop is actually 8 miles. whoops!

i went with minimal gear: tank top, 3li water, 2 clif bars, sunscreen, and forerunner gps. socks were my usual hiking/trail running socks.

i kept up a very good pace, around 3.4mph, on account of i felt airy and light, on account of i was exactly that. i'd lunched before getting to the trailhead. the runners are noticably lighter than my hikers, which themselves are quite light for what they are.

i felt as tho the runners didn't have good traction, and no doubt they did not, but i found that with a sure step i could mostly compensate. however, if my mind drifts too much i may not be able to maintain concentration-based-traction and could end up in the dirt.

speaking of dirt, the shoes' ventilation is very nice but it lets in lots of dirt and dust. not a big deal with the dust, but small rocks could get in, it seemed. neither set of shoes is waterproof so i didn't judge the runners harshly on that account, but i did have very little traction when crossing the abundant muck of windy hill's shady trails. the traction on my hikers isn't fantastic either but it's better than that.

at the end of the 8 miles i began to have foot-tendon problems which i used to get before i found my dunham hikers. the pain is related to poorly fitted shoes, i think. but in this case i suspect that it's got more to do with shoe looseness and the fact that i ran 10 miles yesterday. i was able to compensate by adjusting my gait and footfall. at the end of the hike my feet felt much better than they normally do in the dunhams, however, i haven't hiked so light (light, damnye!) in my dunhams in quite a long time so it could just have been the minimal load that kept the toesies happy.

i've decided to take them with me for the desert death hike since a bay area hike, no matter which one, is not a fair eval of desert hiking conditions. the fisrt time i did the desert death hike was in my dunham trail runners, which were a half-size too small and poorly built. but they got me through it so i know a pair of runners can survive the hike. as i drop in weight i'll need less cushioning on my feet, and my feet will thank me for allowing them to adjust to a single shoe for all my shin-pounding activities. that's the plan, anyhow. time will tell.

I'd like to extend a personal thank youse to You Know Who You Are for the fargen "you mean to rather than and, don't you?" rule which influences my behaviour to this day. it's mind control, i tell youse! One of these days i'm going to muster up some writing style and to see if i can once again write the way i want to.

d'oh! Someday, Gadget, I'll get you someday!

the good :
- the quick-release hose attachment that i devised last week for my sink came in mighty handy. originally intended for in-place refills of the 3li water filter that sits in my fridge, the hose also made itself useful for filling up sanitizing buckets, rinsing out bottling buckets, and ... uh, no, just those two things.
- bottling is, in my experience, a totally eristic experience, regardless of whether the brew is dedicated to that particular deity. today was no exception. my kitchen smells of beer because my bottling wand is unreliable and prone to spewing beer all over the place.
- i filled up a grolsch bottle and used the original cap. yay!
- i re-used an orval bottle. orval bottles are hecka-cool lookin.
- i thought up just-in-time an appropriate glyph for the bottlecaps to differentiate them from the previous four beers.
- i re-organized my beer closet. now i have an archival case, though it hasn't got any EPA in it yet. found some of batch #1 and put it in the fridge for guests (one guest in particular).
- the beer is chocolatey (how? shouldn't be), malty, candy-ish, and yummy.

the bad :
- those aren't the flavors i was going for. it tastes very much under-hopped and way too sweet. hopefully the beer will change in the bottle into something closer to my target. the silver lining to this cloud is that now i'm actually motivated to pursue this recipe more scientifically. i'd like to come out with what i intended (worked for the previous beer) and if, after it's aged a little, it's still way off i will tweak the recipe and methods to see if i can get closer to target. sadly, i may have to wait until winter to get the appropriate temps.
- one of the bottles broke while i was trying to pull it out of the dishwasher. that's what you get for bumping into an orval bottle, youse!

the ugly :
- i could not for the life of me cap my KWAK bottle, which is a shame, because the bottle fuckin says KWAK on it. how cool is that? also it's honkin-big, and has a really cool shape. likewise, i could not cap my lindeman's bottle, which has a similar shape but is smaller.
- one of my gulden draak bottles had mold in the bottom and had to be tossed. ack.
- i think i need a better way of sanitizing the bottles. the dishwasher is nice and easy but it always leaves condensation inside the bottles. it hasn't had a big impact on beer flavor or sanitation but it makes me nervous nonetheless.

i saw a guy with two earrings today, one spiraly one in each lobe.

i recalled The Rules from back in elementary school.

if you're pierced in your right ear, you're gay. nobody really knew what it meant to be gay, only that it had something to do with getting your ass kicked a lot.

if you're pierced in your left ear that's okay, you're not gay. you're still probably going to get picked on, at least if you're me. but i showed them!

and, of course, if you're pierced in both ears, you're a pirate, matey! yarrrr!!!

[16:09] victor: you sound kinda dorky when you say
[16:09] victor: stuff like
[16:09] me: NEWS FLASH
[16:09] victor: "fell in love with the road"
[16:09] me: <---- is a dork
[16:10] victor: and "my first love is the iron"
[16:10] victor: yeah well, you could down play it once in a while :)
[16:10] victor: i mean c'mon, i have to be in public with you sometimes

somewhere out there on the road today, an idea squeezed through the endorphin clouds and entered my mind. it stuck with me through my entire run and i'll share it with you here, in all its cheezy lameness:

limits are a failure of the imagination.

folks, i have some kinda imagination.

10.01 miles, 1 hour 36 minutes (9:36/mi). 10 miles, bitchez!

i've been running for nearly two years now, much to my surprise, i thought it was shorter than that.

early on i fell in love with the road even if i didn't make great strides quickly. but my mindset changed.

sort of. i flip flopped back and forth because my first love is still the iron.

but when i made progress, i made progress in quick spurts: time between first 4 miler and first 5 miler: 3 weeks.

but that was more than a year ago. i didn't make much progress on the running front until lately. what changed? i don't know. me. my life, my motivations, my goals and my training. not really, though. as always, i want to lift tons of weight, run far, and get laid all the time. pretty typical for a guy, really, which is what amuses me so greatly. i never expected to attain typicalness but whaddya know? with a lot of hard work, patience, and poorly fitting shoes, i managed.

sometime in the last 2 or 3 months i became one with my running shoes. and over the course of less than 4 weeks i not only solved my nipple problems, i also doubled my maximum run from five miles to ten miles.

this time i arrived home with an empty gatorade bottle.

so that's that. i got my shit together (the right shoes, magic underpants, a nipple-tastic shirt, magic sunglasses, a helpful hydration belt, and a new infected mushroom album), i rested properly (the deadlifts were hodling us back, einstein), i ate conservatively to cut down on the weight (not working so well but i've cranked up the discipline, though that will all be sabotaged by next week's trip (or will it?)), and, well, i dunno what else i did, besides not ever accept last week's mileage as a limit.

Another Friday night, another post-dojo trip to Chancellor's with Victor. At least, that was the plan. Fate had different plans for the two of us last night.

First, the Dodge broke down. And I mean broke down. The fucking rear axle fell right off as we pulled out of the dojo's parking lot. Have you ever had a rear-axle come unattached? Let me tell you, it's no fun. I can't remember if we first heard the awful noise or felt the horrible lurch as the back end of the Caravan hit the blacktop. The wheels, still attached to the liberated axle, continued to roll down the street and I had to send Victor running after them. He was able to prevent their escape, but the axle assembly was far too heavy for either of us to bring it back to the van. The van itself wasn't going anywhere, so the two pieces had to wait to be reunited until the towtruck arrived. Somehow, I'd managed to reach the ripe old age of 34 without ever having called a towtruck before. This was my first, and though I'm inexperienced in such matters, I have a sneaking suspicion that it normally doesn't go the way it went for me last night.

Right around the time my vehicle succumbed to spontaneous self-disassembly, there was a 12-car pileup on the 101. Every towtruck within 100 miles was dispatched to the scene, and the ones that weren't already at the crash-scene when I called for assistance were stuck in traffic either going there or leaving there. Victor and I were privileged to wait two and a half hours for assistance to arrive. It was my suspicion that the operators of the truck did not have much prior experience with separated rear axles. My suspicion was painfully confirmed when the towtruck operators attached their lifting straps to the front axle and attempted to pull the vehicle up onto the flatbed. After some sparks and lots of awful noises they decided it might be better to leave the front wheels on the ground while attaching the dragging equipment to the wheel-less rear of the vehicle. They managed to get the Caravan up on the bed, and rolled the rear axle up a ramp and tied it down.

And that, my friends, is the last we ever saw of Fran's old Caravan. But we didn't know that at the time.

It was too late to go to Chancellor's, and even were it not, we had no way to get there. The Dodge was being (ostensibly) towed off to a mechanic to have the axle re-attached, which couldn't commence until the next day, and probably could not be completed until the next week, so there was no point in driving with the towtruck. Everyone that either of us knew was asleep or in another state, so we had no alternative but to find a cab and have the driver take us to the nearest Jack in the Box, which is precisely what we did.

In the back of the cab, Victor and I conversed, as we tend to do, between bites of our greasewiches. I was impressed with both of us for being able to keep the sandwiches down after a heavy workout and a long wait.

"Did you know that a jellyfish has an incomplete digestive system?" asked Victor.

"No I did not," I said. "In fact, I so thoroughly did not know that a jellyfish has an incomplete digestive system, that, merely in preparation for not knowing that a jellyfish has an incomplete digestive system, I also, intentionally and painstakingly, failed to know what, precisely, an 'incomplete digestive system', in fact, is."

"Hilarious," said Victor. "It means that it shits out of the same orifice from which it eats."

"Ah. What a pleasant thing to bring up while eating fast food in the back of a cab at 1 in the morning."

"Hmph," said Victor, not pleased that I had rejected his topic of conversation.

We rode on in silence for a few more blocks before Victor gave it another go.

"I called Tiffany last night."

"You're joking, right?"

"No, no joke."

"Why on earth would you do that?"

"I wanted to see if she was doing alright."

"Dude," I said. "Cheeky Charlie? Hello? She's fucked up, you need to stay away."

"She put a hex on me," said Victor.

"What?"

"She put a hex on me."

"What the fuck's a 'hex'?"

"You know, a curse. The evil eye."

"Um..." I said, failing to come up with anything more intelligent than that. Victor was waiting for something more intelligent, however, and it became apparent that if I wanted the conversation to proceed I was going to have to do better than "Um". So I stretched my brain and arrived at "Uh" followed by "Er" and finished off with a nice, heartfelt, "Huh!".

"She said she was getting back together with Cheeky Charlie. Only she didn't call him that, she called him Edward. She said she wasn't sorry about what she and I did and that Edward wasn't going to find out about it."

"And that's when she put the hex on you, huh?"

"Yeah, right after that. She told me she'd put a hex on me and that I'd never find a happy love life."

"We'll get back to that in a minute," I said. "First, though, how do you know Edward and Charlie are the same people?"

"What do you mean 'how do I know?' I know. They're the same guy. 'Cheeky Charlie' was just our name for the guy. His real name's Edward."

"Did she tell you that?"

"Well... no."

"So even though we know she was sleeping with you while married to Cheeky Charlie, there's no way Tiffany could have been sleeping with a third guy named Edwin, huh?"

"Edward," said Victor.

"Edward," I said.

Victor went silent. Our burgers and fries were gone, and we'd reached an uncomfortable break in the conversation. It shouldn't have been uncomfortable: what difference did it make if Tiffany was cheating on her husband with multiple people? Who the hell knew if Cheeky Charlie even was her husband? In any case, Victor had broken up with Tiffany before finding out how much she was getting around, for entirely different reasons. But that was all easy enough for me to say (think, really), since it wasn't my life. Things aren't always so logical when you're looking out instead of in.

We let the silence ride a little, and stared out opposite windows. The cab driver was really taking his time. We weren't going much faster than 35, which, in a 35 zone is appropriate, I guess, though I wouldn't expect it of a cabbie. We were slowly approaching the Gamestop on Marina and 8th. The streetlamps were out and the corner was not well lit. A group of teenagers stood outside the shuttered and barred Gamestop, staring in through the glass between the cardboard cutouts.

Their shoulders hunched forward beneath their baggy hooded sweatshirts. They stood there unmoving, not even talking, until one of them seemed to sense my gaze. Our cab wasn't the first car to approach and pass this group of early-morning window-shopping fans, but it was the one that captured the attention of one of them. The youth turned to stare me right in the eye, through the dirty window of the cab. I could see his face beneath the hood, across the street, lit by dim moonlight. It was lifeless. The eyes were half shut, the mouth slightly agape, the tongue pressed up against the bottom row of teeth, buckling like a wave about to crash out over his lips. His cheeks were round and fleshy, his skin, pasty. The moonlight did not penetrate above his dark eyebrows; I saw no hair to speak of.

His features said nothing to me, but his eyes spoke, softly and with malice. They glowed an unhealthy yellow in the moonlight. He stared at me, though through the window and illuminated only by moonlight I could not have been easily visible. But he stared at me nonetheless, with eyes that expressed both emptiness and malevolence. Eyes that peered out from a soul that wanted nothing from life, and got exactly that. Eyes that spoke of endless boredom piled upon deep despair; an unwillingness to confront the creeping rot that brought him and his companions to this place and time. His eyes told me of an apathy even deeper than his despair; of a willingness to stand idle while that despair radiated outward throughout the city, throughout the entire world.

Our gazes were locked and I could not turn away. Our necks craned in opposite directions as we maintained our strange communion through the window of a passing cab. When finally he was beyond my sight, I felt somehow drained. Victor's story no longer interested me. My story no longer interested me. I wanted to go home and sleep for a long time. A very long time. Forever, ideally. I didn't want to be in the world anymore. Not one where the best idea a group of youths could come up with for entertainment at 2 in the AM was to stand outside of a video game store and stare joylessly, lifelessly at passing cabs. But the more I thought about it, the more I realized that the look I got was only the surface. That kid, whoever he was, wasn't going anywhere. Ever. I could see it in the hopelessness of his gaze. His location at 2AM on a Saturday morning indicated he didn't have the skills to make it, and the look in his eye indicated he didn't have the will.

What would become of him? Forgotten, swept aside into an irrelevant job and a life of painful ritual, if he's lucky. He could end up a lot worse. Fed into the meat grinder of never-ending war-mongering insanity. Dropped through the cracks of civilian life onto the cold, welcoming concrete of the street, swallowed up by apathy and mental illness. He looked to be halfway there already, and he couldn't have been more than 15.

"A fuckin hex, man," said Victor. "A fucking hex!"

"A fuckin hex, man," I said, still lost in my own discomfort, oblivious to Victor's plight.

"And she's never going to remove it. She said I deserved it, for dumping her when she'd been so good to me. I've never been cursed before, man," said Victor, growing more agitated as he listened to his own words. "How the fuck am I supposed to get rid of it? Can you even get rid of a hex? What if I can't?"

"What if you can't?" I said, in monotone.

"What if I can't! I'm fucking cursed!"

Motion above caught my wandering attention, and I looked. The moon stared into me, through my upturned eyes. Paler now than a moment ago, its yellowness had faded and been replaced by soothing blue. Her watery rays cooled my emotions and gently stilled the ripples on my soul.

"It will be all right," I said.

A: Three

this section of wait has gone stale. it needs to be over.

my hair looks like crap. it's long enough that it needs gel but 1) i can't take gel on a plane now thanks to the maroons in the DHS, and 2) i've gone the whole summer without gel and i likes it that way, dammit.

so today i'm wearing a hat, and perhaps tomorrow i'll get it cut. and not by the barber-lady i used last time because if she'd done a good job i wouldn't be getting it cut again 3 weeks later. or maybe i would. but i didn't like it much right outta the door, although that may have had more to do with the length than the cut. bah. this sorta hassle was supposed to go away when i shortened the hair. now i remember why i grew it out ;)

actually, there's no hassle if i just keep it mighty-short, however, the SO likes something to grab on to. aha! compromise! my silly beard is quite longish now, so she can grab onto that. there we go.

why is it that i happened to fall in love with an out-of-state girl at the worst time in the history of the world for flying?

banning bottled water on planes? jesus fucking christ.

"I heard some disturbing news," said Victor.

"Really?" I said. "Do tell."

"I heard a rumor that I was named after someone you know," said Victor.

"No," I said, "I'm afraid the truth is far less glamorous than that."

"That's not all," said Victor.

"There's more?"

"Uh huh. Not only was I named after another Victor, but it seems that I've inherited some of his personality as well."

"Now that may be true, but really, I'd have to say you inherit more from a different person altogether than this other Victor after whom you're supposedly named."

"Oh yeah?" asked Victor. "Anyone I know?"

"Certainly not," I said. "Would you like to know where your name actually came from?"

Victor nodded.

"Your name comes from 'Victory Malt', a specialty grain that went into my last batch of homebrew."

"Really," said Victor. "You're a homebrewer?"

"No, I said," I said.

Victor looked at me, puzzled. "What?" he said.

"What?"

"Nevermind. Forget it."

I'm a pretty simple-minded guy. I'm not all that complicated. I have things I want and I try to get them. I have things I don't want and I try to get rid of them. If there's more to life than that, I've never figured out what.

I spend a fair amount of time trying to figure out how to live. I'm about as self-aware as the next guy, I suppose, maybe even a little bit more. Sometimes that's an advantage and sometimes it isn't. And sometimes it's a big trap, when I think I know something about myself only to find out that what I think I know appears entirely different from the outside looking in. Since the outside is where most of the people are, it's actually rather important to get the view from outside once in a while.

I spent a lot of my life getting to the point where "I don't care what other people think of me" only to shortly thereafter arrive at the realization that more often than not, it's better to find what others think of me than to admire my own self-image. More wasted time. That's life, is it not?

Image, though, is not a continuous thing. People have lives stretching back for decades, but lives intersect at different points. Victor's known me most of my life and has a long perspective. Egan's known me only a year and has far less perspective. Thus Victor's mind-image of me is quite different than Egan's mind-image of me, in the same way that Victor, having watched Star Wars Episode III from the beginning through to the execrable conclusion has quite a different view of the film than Egan, who suffered through only the final 10 minutes.

Which is to say, Victor knows about The Stretch and Egan does not. Margie has heard of it but she didn't experience it, and she's not quite sure what to make of it. Which, again, is to say that Egan (and Margie, though I've told her otherwise) may have the idea that I've always been this way. I have not.

I live in the past, sometimes. I obsess about The Stretch. It's hard not to -- it was a defining period of my life. That's another thing I do: think of my life in very dramatic terms. It's not as if I'm Hamlet or Indiana Jones. No, I'm just a regular, boring average guy, but I still think of my life as if it were Shakespeare. If I didn't think of me in these terms, I'm afraid I'd simply go a little bit nuts with boredom. Who's to say I haven't already? I thought up a story during The Stretch but I never got around to writing it. I thought about a lot of stories, and I did get around to writing a couple of them, but they didn't come out on paper the way I saw them in my mind. They were a little disappointing, and, well, that's a disappointment. So I hesitate now when I go to write because there's no way to be disappointed in the written word that never makes it to paper.

The story was about a guy who decides to deliberately split his personality. In the story, the guy's living a life that's boring him to tears, and he's got self-esteem problems (that is, he doesn't like himself much and doesn't know how to change himself) and instead of addressing the problem like everyone else does, this guy designs a new personality for himself. He writes about the new personality, as an author might. The new personality is, of course, as written, outgoing, attractive, confident, and a total hit with the ladies. Soon enough, the writer assumes the characteristics of his character and begins to become more confident, attractive, desirable, and so forth. Unfortunately, the character has a bit of a nasty side and begins to commit all sorts of crimes which land, or at least nearly land, the guy in trouble. The guy decides to end the experiment and stop acting out his character's life. The character gets wind of this and kills the guy to preserve himself.

Only after I'd emerged from The Stretch did I discover that someone had gone and made a Brad Pitt movie along similar lines. So much for that.

I mentioned this story to Victor the other day. As usual, he had comments.

"So that's what you did, huh?" said Victor.

"What?" I asked.

"That's what you did after The Stretch. You spun yourself off into a new character."

"No, Victor, what I just told you is fiction."

"It doesn't sound like it. It sounds almost exactly like how you re-invented yourself after The Stretch. Even down to your little 'twist ending' -- you killed off your old personality just like the guy in your supposed fictional story."

I had to think about that one, a little. Writing, sometimes, is a trap. I write with a voice of authority, revealing from on high my mighty opinions and theories, and it sounds to the unwary reader as if I believe these things. It sounds like I mean them with the full force of my intellect, however unforceful that may be. Well, I suppose I do mean what I say but I reserve the right to change my mind. The only problem is that when writing, I -- and writers in general, I'd say -- tend to re-inforce what I've said and dig myself into a rut. I start believing in the authority in what is essentially tone -- part of my style. Writing is a fantastic means to find out how I currently feel about something, but nothing beats good old Socratic conversation for finding out what I really ought to feel about something.

Victor may have had a point. Did I invent a story about a guy who creates a "better" version of himself and then becomes that "better" version in order that I could inhabit my character in exactly the same way that my character inhabited his character? Was the story really a meta-story about me creating the story itself, and then living it? How deliciously recursive that notion was! I decided to concede the point simply because it was such a brain twister.

"You could be right," I said. "I'd never really thought of it that way before."

"Damn right," said Victor.

"But you really think that I've killed off, well, for lack of a better term, the 'old me'?" I said.

"You've said it yourself," said Victor. "You say that you're 'never going back to the way you were during The Stretch.' You've even said that the person you were during The Stretch is 'dead'. If that's true, who killed him?"

After The Stretch, when I climbed out of that tank, I was a changed man, as much as that's possible. It wasn't the tank that changed me, it was The Stretch itself. In that interminable lifetime I lived out the stagnant portion of my life. All at once. I got it out of the way and vowed never to go back. But I never killed the guy I was in The Stretch. On the contrary, were he dead and buried I might be tempted to go in search of him again. He's very much alive and he's enjoying the character he created for us while we languished in the tank. He's handed over the reigns to me. He has no reason to fear me.

Margie was there in the tank with me. I could feel her: shaping me, guiding me, laying out my path. She didn't know it, of course: she was on her own path at the time. But she was with me nonetheless, the idea of her. The Stretch was my tunnel and she was the light at the end of it. I didn't know it at the time, and when I got out, I didn't recognize her when I met her. We had to be introduced. It wasn't until much later that I remembered her.

"Did he protest?" asked Victor, bringing me out of my contemplation.

"I think I have to retract my earlier comment," I said. "I never killed him. That's the difference between fiction and reality, Victor old pal. In my story, the character kills the writer. But in real life, in this strange life we're living here, the writer creates the character and the character dies with the writer. At least, he does if he hasn't been written down. I was created when I emerged from The Stretch but the creator never died, or I'd also cease to be."

"Uh huh," said Victor.

While I was in the tank, Victor went about his life as usual. He visited me, occasionally, and occasionally I visited him. One night, I came to him in a dream, and he had questions for me. He asked them in a rapid-fire stream, without pausing for me to answer.

"Can a word be a sword and a song? Can a tree be in an apple? Can there be two in one? Can a table be in a bird? Can the night be the day and the day be the night? Is the butterfly in the worm? Who is in the vulture?"

When he finished, he stared at me and waited for my reply. I told him that a one uninhabited by a two is a sad one indeed, and that both spring and winter are in the vulture. The others, I left for him to wrestle, and without further discourse I departed for the evening.

"There was nothing to protest," I told Victor, "even if I did kill him. In the story -- you know, the fiction? -- the guy is killed by the character, but that's only because the guy is unhappy with the crimes committed by the character. The character realizes that the guy will eventually kill him off, as writers are wont to do, so out of self-preservation he kills the guy."

"Which is obviously impossible in the real world," said Victor.

"Obviously. Although it could be interpreted as suicide, but in the story, the character goes on living. So it couldn't be an actual suicide. But also in the story, the character sees the physical corpse of the guy, so... I dunno. So something. The story was intended to be a little weird."

"Like you," said Victor.

"Like me and you," I said.

When I was in the tank, they didn't let any light in. I had to radiate my own or I wouldn't have had anything to read by.

"Can a word be a sword and a song?" asked Victor.

"Any word worth using, old friend," I said.

thanks to my homies over at mefi, i discovered several new bands that it seems i like. one of them is a band called
"m83"; i've listened to and enjoyed two of their albums today.

i suspect that they are an "emo" band and therefore as lame as "the cure", whom i also like. i'm man enough to admit that i enjoy crappy music. i also like beethoven, so suck it, haters.

it's (mostly) slow, droning, simple chord-transition "post-rock" with samples and electronic noise stuff and no wailing guitar solos or dance beats. kind of like moby back before he got full of himself. not exactly good music for running or otherwise kicking ass, but not bad for concentrating on writing or programming. relaxing? maybe. good stuff, overall. somewhat reminiscent of the slow pink floyd. brings to mind the final scene of "repoman", too. moody but i guess not miserable enough to be goth. are "emos" miserable? i really don't know. if they're supposed to be, then this probably isn't "emo" because it's at worst apathatic, definitely not miserable.

or maybe i'm just projecting!

planescape: torment is the video game that changed my life. i, too, wept at the end: i'm man enough to admit it. i played and re-played it and i think i 'yotter play it again before the year's out. truly a masterpiece, although with my expanded perspective and my new-found preference for outdoors activities, it may not be so enjoyable this time around.

for everything, there is a season. the season for PS:T may be in my past.

here.

he addresses directly and by proxy a sort of creeping realization that i've previously discussed in private conversations, namely, that at the end of the day, western guilt will get you nowhere and you've just got to suck it all up and party. i'm a disturbingly self-aware hedonist, now, though that may just be a phase, as was my disturbingly self-aware ascetic phase. the point, though, is that there's no escape anywhere. the choice of life is ultimately between happiness and misery, selfishness and benevolence. i am not a saint and i do not pretend to be. i think the blog author has shed the same pretensions.

i spoke previously on this topic ages ago, wow did i sound angry then! things have changed rather quite a lot since then, but evidently i shared some of the same sentiments as the other blogger-dude, namely, that wherever you go, it's all about you (or "me" in this case) since whenever you stop enjoying your dysentary, you can go home but the poor souls who have to live in your exotic roach-infested vacation paradise cannot. they are home, and it sucks for them. or it doesn't. it depends on the "them" and maybe that's the point: perspective.

but my point was and is that i enjoy, appreciate, and perspect this destructive greedy american life enough already without finding out just how miserable i am making the rest of the world, up close and personal. it is my (evidently) long held belief that short of activism, a person can have no significant direct influence on world affairs -- not by voting, not by consumer choice, not even really by dumping money into a charity. so, logically, said sir bedevere, since a) international travel "isn't real" in the same sense that watching a show on the discovery channel "isn't real" and b) seeing poor people might make me appreciate my privilege a little more but i already appreciate it more than most, even perhaps most that travel, and c) the world sucks and there's nothing i can do about it, it follows that the best course of action for me is simply to devote my energy to increasing the happiness of those that i care about. and that's no new idea for me.

(the hole in the reasoning, of course, is point c, because it's disingenuous to say there's nothing i can do about it. could the sentence have borne it, i should instead have written that there's nothing short of becoming an activist or holding political office (though that is probably of quite dubious efficacy) or (more likely to matter but even less likely to actually happen) infiltrating and siezing control of a giant multinational corporation that i can do about the awful condition of the world at large. all that seems like a waste of my energy and talents; best to leave the world in the hands of those that think they're able to change its course and focus my attention on, as i said, increasing happiness at the local level. ultimately, would more people have such an attitude, instead of seeking and consildating power and inflicting non-freedom on their fellows, the world would be a better place. of course, anyone who begins a sentence with "if only more people thought like me!" is clearly either a hippie or a dolt, there being, besides happiness, very little practical difference between the two, most notably when it comes to actual impact on world events.)

of course, this is not to say that i will not enjoy international travel, and i'd better enjoy it, since soon it will no longer be a choice ;)

i still have all my high-school idealism and cynicism. i'm just more articulate now. funny, that.

laces of salt air
too much beer and pizza pie
tattoos hurt? i laugh

go here and check out the "before and after" shots.

the ui is lame but keep poking at it until you figure it out. when you get one of the "before" shots, you'll know it.

wow!

remember how yesterday i went for a little run?

and then today i was gonna go for a trail run?

well, i did. i drove me and my gear up to purissima creek and did approximately 2.5 miles. approximately, you say? mister saint toad, ksc, please, sir, do you not have a gps device which will tell you the precise distance of your run, monsignor?

why yes, i do. i mean, no i don't. the thing is a piece of garmin shit. it's sposed to have the new great sirfstar 3 chipset that has reception in basements and nuclear bomb shelters and submarines and shit but it can't even find a fuckin satellite if you're standing within a quarter mile of a redwood. my older handheld garmin was bad in purissima but i expected this to be better. it's not like purissima is dense, it's just light cover and stubby redwoods. but this HOS couldn't hold a signal lock so all i know is that i ran for about 26-27 minutes and my pace felt around a 10 minute mile so that makes 2.5 miles. the other gear held up nicely, except for my builtin gear: i was tired. i wore my new toy hydration belt but didn't drink from it. my road shoes are more or less sufficient for trail use though i wouldn't want to step in a puddle with them. i wore thicker "trail socks" and i dunno if that did anything in particular but i didn't get blisters or bloody toes so i canna complain.

that done i drove a bit south on the 1 to my editing beach and slathered on some SPF 50. chomped down a clif bar, sipped more gatorade, ate another fistfull of pistatios, and then hit the beach. with my shoes on. i ran at least 3/4 mile to a nice lonely spot, and tanned on the beach in my running clothes. my running clothes are made of special space-age beach-sand-repellant fabrics but i am not. i got sand all over my skin but i sure don't mind. after i felt a little burny, i put the shoes back on and ran back to the car.

minimum running distance so far: 4 miles.

on the way to my sunspot and on the way back to the car there's a little creek that runs down the beach and into the pacific. in neither direction was my leap sufficiently gazelle-like to clear the creek. my feet got wet. as they say on the internets, ohs well!

so i slathered some more sunscreen on my thightops, because i'm the kind of guy that can learn from a burn, and headed back up the 1 toward home. lots of really annoying slow people but you know me. or you don't. either way, i passed many of the slow people, with safety. when i got home it was only 2pm or so. i didn't want to be inside (i knew that when i left the beach) but i was drawing a blank on what to do to get outside.

then it hit me! I'd do something i hadn't done in a while, something outdoorsy and fun. Something that would help me catch a couple of rays and maybe get my heartrate pleasantly elevated in the process. I'd go for a run!

So I dug out a clean pair of socks, laced on my mostly-dry running shoes, grabbed my magic sunglasses and my infected mushroom, slurped down a clif-energy-goo-packet (yum!) and went out for a run. I wandered and found some nice new streets. I didn't bring the HOS garmin so again I haven't got precise numbers (the 8.19 figure from yesterday was not precise either, btw, because the HOS lost signal in a couple places. gimme a freaking break). but it felt like about 4 miles, and i was gone approximately 35 minutes, so it's safe to say at least 3.5 miles. which brings my minimum, conservative distance estimate for the day to 7.5 miles. bringing my weekend total (assuming I don't go for another one) to 15.5 miles.

i don't know from where the impetus, much less the energy, for this is coming. well, i reckon i do: boredom and endorphin. since i'm a winner who doesn't do drugs, how else am i supposed to stimulate my heroin receptors?

why would anyone

want to put a tan on a goth chick??

(argh. my stupid auto-image scaling needs a little work, eh?)

NIH

i express myself in a number of ways, but all those ways are me doing something with me, not someone else doing something to me.

i express myself physically through exercise and endless training. i express myself otherwise through writing and coding and knowing and cooking and arranging and even occasionally creating thingies. i express myself with the spoken word. a tattoo would be someone else expressing themself on me, and that's just not my bag, baby.

so, i have a couple other ideas of how i can use the theme i planned for the tattoo to continue to express myself creatively, which, as it turns out, is really the "spirit" of the symbol i had planned.

remember how i said i despised itunes?

well, i just realized that rockbox has firmware for my ipod mini. i am going to squirt that on there and see if i can eliminate itunes from my life completely. won't that be sommat!

EDIT:

Okay, I installed rockbox. it rules. it's ugly as sin and i hear it uses up more power than arial sharon's life support, but gorram it, i can drag files onto the ipod from explorer and the ipod will play them! that's all i need.

(of course, i haven't sampled the audio quality. that may suck. but why be negative? i'll find out on monday perhaps.)

i've decided not to get a tattoo at this time.

i dont think i trust anyone to do justice to my design (least of all me) and i dont feel like shelling out fifty bucks to find out if they can.

of course, that's only half of it. it simply wouldn't be me. i dont think my motivations for wanting a tattoo align with the design i want, or even with my persona. i look at the spot and don't particularly want anything there. i tend to think that if it (the design) is important enough to me to want it inked on my arm, then it should be important enough for me to create my own art with it as a theme. imho, a tattoo is a piece of creation, but it wouldn't be my creation and thus would lack much of what i hoped it would symbolize to me.

in other words: i'd rather paint it on canvas than have someone paint it on me. not least of all because in order to paint it on canvas, i'd have to learn how to paint on canvas.

also, i really dont feel it's worth giving up two weeks of sweating. screw that.

also also, dean karnazes hasn't got one (at least not any that i could see).

no nipple irritation! go underarmour!

(but my legs feel kinda funny. whoodlydoodlywhoah...)

was it my training this week?

was it my eating?

was it my hearty corn-subsidized breakfast?

was it the hour i spent in the presence last night of crazy man dean?

was it the mild weather?

was it my magic sunglasses? my magic underpants? my magic shoes? my magic socks? my magic superfeet? my magic Infected Mushroom?

was it my POE?

was it the humility and trepidation which sat with me before i began?

was it the $30 hydration belt i bought last night but didn't really use? was it ... i really dunno. will i do it again? i reckon so, since when i stopped i felt just as i did two weeks ago after 6 miles, only much much less thirsty: like i had at least another 2 miles in me.

here's the 1000 word version (click it, youse):

1 hour 18 mins, 8.19 miles, 1800 feet of ascent, 1800 feet of descent, all at a 9:33 pace, that's faster than my "weekday" 3.5 mile pace of about 10:00. that's 2 miles past my previous best distance. i lost 5lbs and i'm not hungry or tired. yet :)

i drank a little of the gatorade i had strapped on me, but i did it more because i bought the gorram thing and i bloody well wanted to give it a use the first time out. well, that i did, and i learned how to properly close the little bottle if i don't want to spill gatorade all over my pants. i didn't resort to eating the clif-brand energy goo that i bought. i'm 1 0 for many on eating goo during physical activity.

i didn't do laps like i did for the 6 miler, either. i explored and found some excellent little neighborhoods with some really nice little hills.

and tomorrow, according to plan, i'm going trail running for the first time ever.

meanwhile, my bench press is plah-toe-ing, but really, how much can i complain when i'm still busting records of one sort or another?

someone advised me yesterday that the key to maintaining a marriange is patience. i had to laugh. if i haven't learned patience by december, i'll simply be insane. those are my only two choices: complete, babbling, hallucinating insanity, or patience.

i realized this morning, in these words exactly: my girlfriend is the lorax. the prairie dog lorax. she speaks for the dogs.

i accidentally attended, while shopping for running goods, a talk by ultramarathoner dean "i'm totally fucking insane" karnazes. that rocked. when he spoke, i heard some of my own philosophy coming from his mouth. i think that means i'm on the right track. i already felt good that i am planning to push my distance limit tomorrow, now i've got a little extra inspiration. i laughed when he said he was 42. he looks 30 to me. he once ate 28,000 calories in 4 days and still lost 5 pounds. he says his next book will be a diet book. ha!

traffic school. wow, that sucks. it really really really really really sucks.

today was rough. i think i'm lonely. and bored. oops, there's my 203 on the phone.

i didn't get to blog much today. barg!

there's some kind of cycle i go through between visits. it's weird. it's most pronounced this time because the distance between visits is the greatest so far. i've passed some kind of threshhold now and the prospect of seeing my love again actually seems real.

two days ago it was dim and far-off. now i actually believe on a conscious level that it will happen.

it's all very exciting.

then, i'll see her, my joy will peak, we'll be very sad, i'll be desperate for a week, and then she'll be back. oh, that's an atypical cycle.

then we'll begin a more typical cycle: my joy will peak again, we'll be very sad, i'll be desparate for a week, then i'll mellow out and feel happy with my single-ish-ness, and i'll stay that way for a while, then i'll pass the threshhold again and the looming visit will seem no longer so phatasmic (oh my, someone please smack me for using that word, or making it up, as the case may be).

how much? 99c. too much. oh well.

"How'd you do that, anyhow?" asked Victor.

"Do what?" I asked.

"Conjure up Buckyman Jim the other day," said Victor.

"I'm a writer," I said.

"Oh, right."

they're coming back in bits and pieces. previously while empyong the phrase "sausagefest" in a letter to 203 i remembered a scene from last night where i made an off-color gay joke (is there any other kind?) and offended 203 and everyone else within earshot.

just now i remembered that during the same dream, at one point i had a conversation with ken lay. can't recall what he said, but i'm pretty sure it wasn't "sorry".

every once in a while i go read something i've written and, if i've accidently left my humility in another room, i enjoy a momentary suspcion that perhaps 203 isn't all wrong in applying the b-word to me.

most often i only enjoy writing my stuff, but in that case, i really enjoyed reading it, too. "roaming undead"! ha ha! i slay me, with my +1 vial of holy water.

i was thinking (and writing, too, before i hit the wrong thinger and lost my post) about how some folks, when you know them casually, seem like "normal", happy, perhaps-interesting-but-not-especially-bizarro people, and then, if you scratch a little and dig a little, they turn out to be totally off their rocker. secondary examples include my anti-evolutionist friend(s?) who is (are?) of above average intelligence but just a little outta the norm (for this area!) when it comes to evolution.

primary example: me. who else? this is my blog, after all, and i'm #1 around here. always.

the other day i was recounting the story of my engagement to an acquaintance at work. we're close enough that he knows me (i presume) as a somewhat funny, smarter-than-dirt, active, amiable, amicable guy. when i tried to explain why exactly i took my fiancee-to-be down to pismo for a weekend, i had to struggle a little bit. i told him it was for a hike on a beach, which he took to mean "a trip to a secluded location where a couple could get it on". in all honesty, this was exactly my plan, but it didn't end up happening that way, probably because the couple in question was still too shellshocked from the goings-on of the previous evening (read: the engagement) and the goings-on of the previous evening (read: none of your business).

i didn't tell him the real reason that i was in the pismo area, which was to see if my soul-home, my magic beach, my fortress of solitude, my spirit-muse, my happy home liked her.

i offered my fifth proposal without the explicit consent of my magic beach, because i realized (subconsciously, of course, where the magic beach operates) that my soul-home was in contact with me at all times, and as such, had already given me the neptune's thumbs up, or at least had not given me any thumbs down, which i surely would have noticed. it was not strictly necessary for her to plant her soles on my soul-home for it to make up its mind. i knew before we even made it into pismo. i knew in the waiting room to my fortress of solitude, my very own Holy Econolodge, where we shall stay for our honeymoon and our anniversaries, unless we decide to stay at the Econolodge of Zombies in AG, which is also very nice, though noisier, on account of the roaming undead.

You see, to my acquaintance, i was just a more-or-less normal guy who took a girl down to the beach and asked her to marry him having known her romantically only three weeks and having never dated her. but the truth, such as it sort of may be, is actually far weirder, making me, your favorite blogger, far weirder than meets the eye.

the fun thing is that i actually sorta believe all that stuff about "soul homes" and "the roaming undead" (okay, not that last, that's just silly). but you wouldn't know it from looking at me. unless i have that look on my face. you know the one i mean. all the cool kids do it. it means "hi". that's the one i'd be doing while you were looking at me.

i hit the wrong thinger and lost my entry.

gorram it!

Things didn't quite work out as planned this weekend, and instead of spending my Saturday at the 14th Annual Home Cheesemaking and Beekeeper's convention in Pacoima, I ended up sharing quality time with a mechanic. It turns out that Fran's Caravan had a bad tensioner. Well, that's how it turns out, but to get to the point where it "turns out", the geniuses over at Delaney's had to bill me four hours of labor. Then they helped themselves to another 2 hours to fix the problem. The convention was still in full swing Sunday, or so I've heard, since I blew my admission and gas money on fixing up the Caravan. Still, by my accounts, I'm far ahead of the game since I got the thing so cheap.

Anyhow, I called up Victor around noon and surprised him with my suggestion that we go have lunch. He wasn't surprised by the suggestion so much as the venue: Chancellor's. Neither of us had ever been to Chancellor's any time other than a Wednesday late-night. Victor mused that this was an opportunity to find out whether our post-Aikido taco stop actually existed in spacetime outside of 10:30 on Wednesday nights. A chance to see whether a falling tree makes any noise in a deserted forest, as it were.

So I picked up Victor in my Caravan, the new tensioner purring happily, and set out for Chancellor's. Victor sat himself in the back row. It was about a thousand degrees outside so we had the air conditioner going full blast, which, in a Caravan, doesn't really do much since there's so great a volume of air inside to condition, all of it starting out at about a thousand degrees and desperately trying to stay there, aided and abetted by the thousand degree air pummelling the windows and sneaking in through leaky seals. With Victor sitting in the back, the air conditioner blasting noisily, crusing down the road at speeds which caused all sorts of interesting vibrations to course through the body panels of my marvel of American engineering, it was noisy. Victor, in his naturally soft voice, decided to strike up a conversation.

"Mmrrm hrrrmmrm mhrmr mrmm," said Victor.

"What?" I shouted.

""Mmrrm hrrrmmrm mhrmr mrmm."

"You need to speak up or move up or something, man, it's noisy in here," I said.

Victor got the idea, I guess, because he started shouting. Well, he started doing what for Victor counts as shouting and what for most other people counts as talking in a normal voice.

"When's Margie coming back?" he asked.

Margie has been gone since Thursday afternoon. Her office flew her all the way to Rochester for training. The guy giving the training seminar, Col. F. L. Farnsworth, ret., lives in Chattsworth and conducts seminars in Chattsworth in the winter, and Rochester in the summer. Since it is most clearly summertime at the moment, and since Margie's got to have this training long before winter, the company flew her out to Rochester, along with eighteen of her coworkers.

"Two weeks," I said. "Her seminar lasts two weeks. Then she'll be back."

"You don't think she'll screw around on you in Rochester, do you?" asked Victor.

The guy's mind goes places my mind would never even stumble upon by accident. That's why I like hanging out with Victor. My own viewpoint is limited by my world view and my tact. I don't think Victor has either. He just says what's on his mind. How things manage to get on his mind has always been a mystery.

"Why would you ask something like that?"

"Well," said Victor, "that's how they are, you know?"

"No," I said, "I don't know. That's how who is?"

"People. Everyone. It's biological. Human beings have a built-in biological imperative to mate with as many people as possible over their lifetime. Monogomy is a completely artificial construct, and a recent one, at that. It's only been around for a few thousand years but polyamory has been around for millions of years." Victor paused to take a breath and finished up his lecture with, "Very few species in the wild are monogamous."

I didn't know what to say. Margie and I will be celebrating our seventh wedding anniversary next month, and here was Victor, speculating that she's taking the two week trip to Rochester as an opportunity to obtain a little extra biodiversity.

"We're quite happily married," I told him.

"What's that have to do with anything?" he asked. "Do you know how to get to Chancellor's?"

"Of course I do, we've been going there for more than a year."

"Sure, but never from this direction. We always go from the dojo to Chancellor's and then home. Now we're reversing the last leg of the trip but the roads may be different. Are you sure you can find it from this direction?"

"Of course I'm sure," I said. I paused for a bit to give Victor a chance to continue with his previous line of discussion, but it seemed as if his diversion into navigation had distracted him from his biology lesson. I knew that wasn't the case. Victor had never in his life had a relationship that lasted more than a month. It would be simplistic and petty of me to say that he was jealous of me. I think it would be more accurate to say that he was mystefied by my experience, though perhaps not particularly envious. I don't think Victor was really interested in anything that had the potential to last longer than a month, which is probably for the best, since I can't imagine a woman who'd care to be around him for longer than that.

We drove the rest of the way to Chancellor's in silence.

I did manage to find the place, even though we were approaching it from the opposite of our usual direction. It wasn't nearly as easy to find parking at noon on a Sunday as it was to find parking at 10:30 on a Wednesday, but I managed. We had to walk a couple blocks, in the sweltering heat, and Victor, who is naturally endowed with a high metabolism and imagines that this gives him a free pass on exercise, was rather sweaty and tired by the time we reached our hangout. That's a shame, because, as it turned out, the whole city block was at that very moment experiencing a rolling blackout. There was no air conditioning inside Chancellor's, although they weren't closed because the gas grills were still working enough to cook up most of their menu items, and the beer still had enough residual chill to be served. We went in and took our usual booth.

The crowd was different on a Sunday afternoon, which is to say, the alcoholics at the bar were even sadder. Cheekie Charlie wasn't there, though that may simply be a new development as of last Wednesday. In his seat was an old woman with only one arm. She didn't have a prosthesis, just a safety pin to close up her sleeve. She sat with her back hunched over, and when she spoke to Javi, the bartender, her eyes never left her drink. Occasionally, she'd look from side to side, but she wouldn't lift her head -- she'd just swivel her neck so she could see while keeping her eyes downcast. She spoke softly, without enthusiasm in her voice. Her hair looked like it hadn't been brushed in a week. I looked at Victor and cast my eyes toward the one-armed woman at the bar.

"Broken Betty," I said.

Victor nodded his assent to the Christening. Everyone has a nickname; life and circumstance are not always kind in the revealing of them.

Broken Betty's cocktail must have been a little hard of hearing, and Broken Betty really wanted it to know all about her life, so Broken Betty raised her voice.

"Things were never the same after the accident," said Broken Betty. "That's when Aston left me, you know, right after the accident. He said that I had changed, but he was wrong. It wasn't me, it was him! He changed. Nothing had changed in me, I was the same person he married. I was off my feet for a couple of weeks but I wasn't any different."

A waitress brought us a pair of menus. As she approached, Victor motioned for her just to give us the menus and leave, quietly. Her name tag read, "Anne." I'd never seen Anne before. I wanted her to leave quietly also, but I didn't lack social skills in the same quantities as Victor.

Broken Betty had more to say, and, Anne having retreated to the kitchen, we were without distraction and able to focus on Betty's tale. Javi, the bartender, was also interested in Betty's loud story, it seemed, as he moved closer to listen.

Broken Betty continued. "Eleven years. About to adopt, too. I don't think he even cared about what happened, he just wanted to move on, so he did. I wasn't any different. My mind is still as good as it used to be! I could still do everything I used to do. "

"How did you lose it?" asked Javi.

"Lose what?" said Broken Betty.

"The arm."

"My arm? What's that got to do with anything?"

"That's why he left you, right?" asked Javi. "The arm?"

"The fuck!?" said Broken Betty. "I was born without an arm! He left me after I sprained my ankle playing soccer!"

Victor and I blinked at each other. Broken Betty had a few unkind words for Javi and then she brought her voice back down to where only her cocktail could enjoy the rest of her story. I looked over my menu and picked a lunch. Victor appeared to do the same, and, that having been taken care of, he turned his attention back to more pressing matters, namely, the presumed-finished conversation from the ride over.

"So you think she's never cheated on you?"

"Dude!" I said, continuing, eloquently, with, "What the hell?"

"I'm just saying," said Victor, "it's biological and perfectly normal. We're not meant to be with only one human."

"Yeah, you said that before, so let me set you straight. Fundamentally, there's only one way to deal with that question, and that's to not worry about it until you need to. Going about obsessing about the faithfulness of your partner is insanity, especially if they have provided you no reason for it."

"Sure, but --" began Victor. I cut him off.

"Look, man, there are only so many things I have time to worry about. That's real low on my list. I could get food poisoning from lunch or smashed by a falling meteor, but worrying about those things isn't going to make them any less likely to happen."

"Ah, so you admit she's likely to sleep with other guys?"

I sighed. "No, man. That's not what I said. Regardless of whether she's going to do it, worrying about it before it happens isn't going to make my life any better. I do what I do, and if that's not good enough, she's her own person and she'll do her own thing. But there's more to it than that, between Margie and me. If there wasn't trust and understanding, we wouldn't be married. People have been murdering each other in their sleep for longer than they've not been. Why don't I worry about waking up with a knife in my chest?"

"Maybe you should," said Victor. He wiped some sweat off his forehead and shook it off his forearm onto the floor.

"Or maybe I just trust that she won't cheat on me any sooner than she'd stab me in my sleep," I said.

Anne returned to take our orders. Victor and I both ordered the BBQ pork. I figured the conversation was over but I guess I figured wrong.

"How can you have all this trust? Look around you, man, people -- married people -- are stabbing each other in the back every minute!" He gestured toward Broken Betty. "You heard what she just said, didn't you?"

"Yeah? She's also got just one arm. What's that got to do with me?"

"I'm saying Margie can do to you what her husband did to her: find something better and move on."

"Well, dude, what can I say," I said. I could say a lot more but Victor doesn't like to "lose" an argument even when it's not really an argument. This wasn't an argument yet but it could develop into one and even with Victor, I had better things to discuss. I conceded, in an attempt to end it, "I guess that's just a risk I'm taking."

"As long as you know that," said Victor.

Victor liked to think of himself as everyone's older brother, full of hard-earned wisdom to thanklessly dispense on any topic imaginable. Even when he hadn't "been there," he wanted folks to feel that he had. He wasn't condescending or contemptuous, he was absolutely sincere. The way that he cared for the people around him was through his advice, which he thought was valuable beyond all else. In his own mind, he was a humanitarian. An honest-to-goodness bodhisattva. A modern-day Jesus V. Christ.

"Trust is a funny thing," said Victor. Inwardly, I sighed. Just when I had thought it was over...

"Yeah," I said.

"Yeah," he said. "It takes a lot longer to build than some people seem to realize. After seven years, you might know Margie enough to trust her, or not. But what about Buckyman Jim?"

"What about Buckyman Jim?"

"He married Cleo after knowing her only two months. How could he have had time to find out if she was trustworthy?"

"I don't know," I said, "why don't you ask him?"

"Good idea," said Victor.

"All right," I said, and conjured up Buckyman Jim. Bucky pulled up a chair and sat at the end of our booth. It's wise not to sit too close to Victor; nobody knew this better than Buckyman Jim. There was no more room at my side of the booth.

"'Sup," said Buckyman Jim. Victor nodded to him and I did the thing with the eyebrows and the neck, you know the thing, all the cool kids do it. It means "hi". That's the thing I did.

"Sure is hot today," said Bucky.

Anne returned from the kitchen with two glasses of water on a tray. The water had no ice in it. She stood behind Buckyman Jim, who turned his head around to get a look at her. "Icemaker's out," she told us. "Electric. I didn't realize you were having three."

"He just got here," I told Anne. She pulled three menus from her apron and handed them back out.

"You can't have the pork," she told us.

"You're out, again?" asked Victor.

"No, we're not out, we've got plenty of pork, you just can't have any, because the power's been out all morning and the pork is no good any longer. Health codes won't let us serve it."

"So what is good any longer?" asked Victor.

"The grilled cheese sandwiches." Victor looked at Bucky and me, and we each nodded our assent.

"Fine," he said. "Three grilled cheese sandwiches."

"Make mine a double," I said.

Anne went back to the kitchen. Victor looked at Buckyman Jim.

"I've been explaining how humans are just like any other animal, genetically programmed to mate with as many other humans as possible over their lifespan. How monogamy is an artificial construct that can't possibly ever work."

"Oh, that one again, huh?" said Buckyman. I grinned. Victor was not amused to have his pearls of wisdom taken lightly.

"How are things with Cleo?" he asked.

"Fantastic," said Buckyman Jim. "She's really enjoying the move to New York. Well, not the move to New York, more like New York itself. You know what I mean."

"Uh huh," said Victor. He wasn't interested in smalltalk, and got right to the point. "Don't you think you married her too quickly?"

"No," said Buckyman Jim.

"You don't think you could have gotten to know her a little better first?"

"Sure, I could have. So what?"

"So then you could know with more certainty whether you can trust her," said Victor.

"How much certainty do I need?"

"Well," said Victor, "that all depends -"

"Exactly," interrupted Buckyman Jim. "I got all the certainty I needed and then I married her."

"That's ridiculous. After only two months, how can you be sure that she deserves your trust?"

"What you mean to ask," said Buckyman Jim, "is after two months, how can Victor be sure that a woman deserves Victor's trust, and the answer to that is, he can't. Look man, this whole trust thing is your problem, this whole getting to know you business is your business, not mine. I needed to know some things before I married Cleo, and I found those things out in two months. Everything else -- and of course there was a lot more -- was gravy."

"But what if you're wrong?" asked Victor. "Spending a little more time with her before marrying her would have allowed you to have greater predictive powers. Greater probability of certainty."

"What if I'm wrong? What if a whale falls out of the sky and lands on my head? You're not listening to what I'm saying, and, even if you were, you're asking the wrong questions, man."

"It is human nature to betray and hurt those that we are attached to," said Victor, hoping to score one last point. Buckyman wasn't going to let him have it.

"No, Victor, that's your nature, and people are attracted to people that share their nature. The 'human' in 'human nature' comes from being able to overcome our nature, if we must. In my case, I didn't have to. In your case, you might want to try and get over your primal mistrust of humans. It's not always productive."

Buckyman Jim turned to me and asked, "When's Margie coming back?"

"Two weeks," I said.

"How do you stand it?" asked Buckman Jim.

"I get by."

when the world seems like kind of an okay place?

could be better, but all in all, it's not bad.

listening as i type this to "umberfold - neon tetra", a very very good song that i got by accident.

today my brother said some things to me which sounded like my own soul coming out of his mouth. to paraphrase, "i'm 26 years old and i need to get on with things." i think 26 is about when i figured that out also. and now look where i am: all alone in a hot room listening to crappy techno blogging about how happy i am!

Reg/Victor's interview went well and it seems there's a nonzero chance he'll be returning to his kingdom of mountain view. I have beer to rack.

Got a letter from my love, and though I have a suspicion that she was perhaps not entirely sober while writing part of it, three things struck me: the incredible joy and excitement of reading a letter from her, even though we talk nightly (and today once in the afternoon as well) for hours on end. there's still so much to know and so much life to hear about. second, i realized while reading a passage in her letter that i'd maybe grown a bit in the last week or so. or maybe i haven't grown so much as changed a little. or perhaps it's simply that when the whole world seems right, a little bit of what previously seemed wrong seems less so. or maybe it's simply that i'm handling being separated and am becoming less selfish. maybe it's hormonal.

the final thing that struck me was an image put in my mind by the letter, of how we'll fall asleep each night. i've no doubt it's true, and though i just got finished blabbing about how i'm ready to let go a little, i still suspect that the goodness i found in that paragraph, when lived, will be so overwhelming as to be impossible to give up so soon, even a little.

it happens.

i counted wrong.

the list should be:

1 - b st. billiards after my first desert death hike
2 - post-hike bbq
3 - geocaching
4 - ps visit
5 - drinks at the gay bar

so i tooled it on down to pen. infiniti today before going into work, to get my front plate put on in accordance with CA law. they didn't require an appointment and got right on it. after i got tired of waiting i moseyed on outside to see what the holdup was, the service guy saw me come out and told me it would be right out, they were busy washing it. cool.

so now i've got a front plate on my clean car. i asked the service manager where the nearest police station was, since i wasn't here getting my plate put on just for fun. he told me his loaner fleet had been getting lots of fixit tickets lately for no front plates, so he well knew where the nearest CHP station was, which happened to be just down the block.

officer CHP at the CHP was friendly, at least friendlier than officer scabby-head mcfrowny, who wrote me the ticket. this officer had a tattoo that was nearly but not quite covered by his sleeve, so i asked him if CHP required tattoos to be covered up. he said they did, but it was a new rule, and there was no grandfathering, although his pal with tattoo sleeves isn't being forced to wear long-sleeves. bully for them. he checked off my ticket and asked if infiniti had made me pay to have the plates installed. they hadn't. they're not allowed to, he said. i thanked him and drove off.

when i got out of my car i noticed that they'd given me a license plate frame, too. so on the front i have a plate frame that says "peninsula infinti" and on the back i have a plate frame that says "palm springs infiniti". all righty then.

after lunch i was stopped in the right hand left turn lane at a big intersection and a skittish motorcycle cop with a penchant for changing lanes unsignaled pulled up next to me, having seen my driver's side window down. he asked me how i liked my car, to which i replied that i love it and can only recommend one to anyone who asks. he asked if it had the sport package. i said it did not, though i regret that, since i skipped it only because i didn't want the stiffer ride but i understand the ride with it is not really stiff enough to notice. he said he drives his brother-in-law's g35 with sport package and likes it. he went on to tell me he's gotten it up to 120. i told him he ought not to drive that fast, and he told me, "it's okay, i won't get a ticket." then he drove off.

i've never talked to so many friendly leos in one day. isn't that special?

by the geniuses that cash my rent check each month:

( edit: added closeup )

i think i've finally found the nippletastic shirt i was searching for. i suspected as much a week ago but i didn't want to jinx it by touting my discovery. now i feel that it's proven itself under a variety of conditions and i can triumphantly announce: my UnderArmour size Fucking-Tight tank top shirt is nipple-friendly, in cold weather or hot, short runs or long. I'm not sure whether it's the sizing, the fabric, or a combination of the two (probably the combination) but i haven't yet had any problems.

but oh man does it smell bad. it's like uncooked meat that's been left out too long. yeah, rotten uncooked hamburger. one could argue that that is what i smell like, but then i'd have to smack one.

on a related note, i tried my usual run today in the opposite direction: first time for that. i got a little bit lost on the interchange from crystal springs to my home street, because it's not exactly easy to navigate that area, but i think i like my run the traditional way better: front loaded. uphill at the beginning and flattish at the end instead of flattish at the beginning and downhill at the end. i was less-ready for more at the end of it than when i go the other way around, though maybe that was because of general tiredness.

i had to give the stainless blade one last try, because, dammit, it's stainless, and that's cool. i "got" the blade much better this time and think i did much less damage to my neck. only sunlight will reveal the truth, but i think it gets another go tomorrow.

there's a fine line to be walked between using too much pressure (= irritation) and using not enough (= bouncing = cuts). i think this line is finer with an SS blade than a carbon steel because the SS is thicker, less flexible, and thus less forgiving. that's my theory, at least, but it felt today as if i were close to the SS sweet spot. until next time.