November 2006 Archives

i was reading a discussion of atheism vs theism the other day, and a point was made. i'll rephrase it slightly:

take a given theist (e.g. a jew, muslim, or christian) and you've got a person who has rejected N other theist creeds in favor of their own.

an atheist has rejected those same N theist creeds, plus one other.

the problem with dogmatic theism is, of course, the question of which one is right? the jew will tell you the muslim and the christian are wrong, the muslim will tell you the jew and the christian are wrong, and the christian will tell you that the muslim, the jew, and most other christians (e.g. catholics, eastern orthodox, yemeni christians) are wrong.

the atheist embraces all these views and classifies everyone as wrong.

how difficult should it be for a dogmatic theist, who already rejects N competing dogmatic theisms, to appreciate the POV of an atheist, who rejects those very same N, plus one (out of a very large N+1) other?

dogmatic theists, imho, miss an important point: other dogmatic theists are just as convinced of their own correctness -- and since both are convinced solely on the basis of faith, there is no rational reason to choose one over the other (e.g., islam over christianity) (this is a simplification that ignores whether "one over the other" can take into account the repugnancy of a given choice's proscriptions and prescriptions). to put it less nicely, why choose one fairy tale over another?

there's an answer, of course, and of course, it comes from crowley. choose what works.

the yogis (the real ones, the spiritual scientist ones, not your local "yoga mat" toting spandix wearing yoga bunnies) seek union with the cosmic consciousness.

crowley sought "knowledge and conversation of the Holy Guardian Angel".

the kabbalists sought direct experience of the godhead (aka gnosis, which is, of course, what i was referring to in the previous two examples).

if you'd like to "feel the presence of god", take a trip down to your local black gospel church.

these are four very different religious dogmas, and yet they all feature a remarkably similar spiritual experience. surely there is a mechanism at work behind them all? that mechanism is the root (if not the aim) of many such dogmatic religions (theist or not). most dogmatic theists are so preoccupied arguing over how many angels can dance on the head of a pin (or whether homosexuals should be tolerated in society) that they fail to become curious about why spiritual experience is a universal human trait, achievable within their own religious framework, but also perfectly achievable outside of it.

crowley did not believe literally in his "Holy Guardian Angel." He chose the title specifically because he thought the concept to be ridiculous. he chose the title to emphasize that the mechanism is more important than the name. the mechanism is more important than the system built atop the mechanism.

religious symbolism is symbolism -- codifications of extra-verbal experiences and pointers to others who wish to follow down the path.

along the way, much dogma has accumulated on how to prepare oneself for such experiences (purity laws, taboos, law (e.g. talmud, shar'ia, etc.)) and how, simply, while we've got your ear, to be nice to one another.

but moses, and jesus, and mohammed (and the buddha, while we're at it), out there in the desert all alone, saw something, and if we listen carefully to what they each have to tell us, we can find the way as well.

all roads lead to rome, but some are shorter than others. some are fraught with peril. why take the hard ones when the easy ones are so well marked?

and why pretend that yours is the only road when you can so plainly see the hundreds of others, leading the same place as yours?

and finally, why blindly accept the nature of your road? is it not better to examine your road and see how it is constructed? to compare it to other roads? otherwise, how will you know if your road is the one you should be on?

i found this sign in phonix SKY HARBOR (ha ha ha i can't say or even think "sky harbor" without laughing at the absurd unwarranted-big-headedness of the name. gimme a friggen break. you're a lousy regional airport, not a fucking "sky harbor") :

see the funny bit?

no?

i will explain it for yous:

what do you reckon the odds are of finding gourmet anything right next to "fast food"?

that's right, zero.

and yet we keep on calling *$ "gourmet". uh huh. it's fast food. it's right next to mcdonalds. they don't put a gourmet diamond store right next to pic'n'save, they don't put a gourmet coffee shop right next to mcd.

(they put it across the street).

my reaction to eating a white castle cheese"burger" :

yum.

technically, since the night is still middle aged, i should work on my novel or whatnot, but i still need to documentarize my thanksgiving visit, since it is, after all, the last of my "visits". and a blog entry is easy to write, right? oh, no, it isn't, since my novel, if it turns out to be that, will be written in the same voice as my blog voice. so what's my justification? ah yes, the ardbeg which shattered my no-buy month has rendered me incapable of serious writing, and since i'm only writing, after all, about meeting for the first time the parents of my wife to be, i needn't avail myself of my full, sober faculties. i am hard pressed to think of a fluffier, non-demanding topic than that.

so, as i was saying... wait, what was i saying?

PLEASE PAUSE AS I RE-READ MY PREVIOUS POSTING.

oh right. twas the day 'ere thanksgiving, and all through missouri, not a creature was stirring, not even that one what rhymes with missourri.

on the evening of 11/22, being the evening of our arrival, 203 and i engaged her parents in a quadruel of wits: a four-way scrabble game. at least, i think thats when it was, some of the days have blurred together already, and as we all know, a well peated scotch is really not the best tool for unblurring memories. so: scrabble. i was still stinging from my humiliation at her hands in front of my own folks, and she went and did it again in front of hers. and afterwards, though not soon afterwards, she had the gaul to tell me she loved me.

PUBLIC SERVICE ANNOUNCEMENT:
my usage of the word "gaul" back there was 100% intentional. i can do shit like that because i'm a writer and writers make puns.

WHERE WAS I?
Oh yes, I was abusing my caps lock. funny story: I dont use capslock, i just hold down shift and type along. LIKE THIS< SEE? YOU CAN TELL I"M NOT JOKING BECAUSE SOME OF THE CHARACTERS ARE WRONG.

now, after she proved to her folks that i wasn't half as smart as she'd led them to believe (that is, if the scrabble game did indeed occur that night, which is not at all clear in my mind. other things that are not at all clear in my mind: "young americans" is by david bowie, not elton john. color me informed!) we went to bed, after which, we awoke the next day, which, since time flows in missouri in the same direction that it flows in california, happened to be 11/23/2006, the titular date of this rambling posting. her dad, a spry <VERY BIG NUMBER> year old, had cooked cinnamon rolls for our breakfast, and by the time 203 and i hauled our poor, chronometrically displaced arses out of bed, the cinnamon rolls were halfway consumed by 203's siblings and her in-law, who had arrived as we slept. they marveled and jeered at the complexity of our coffee making procedures, but we had the last laugh.

HA HA HA HA!

There it was, the last laugh. Stop that! No more laughing or that won't have been the last!

Since we woke up late, we only had time to shower and brush our teeth before it was time for turkey and stuffing. That may not be strictly true, but it's how I remember it, and that's much better than true anyhow. Accompanying the turkey was ham, stuffing, pineapples (evidently for the ham), some vegetables, some squash (both squashed and whole) and a yam dish. Also some other stuff, including 203's dad's from-scratch rolls. 203's peckishness is evidently genetic and i did not want to embarrass myself by eating more than the crowd. well, that's not strictly true. i did not want to embarrass myself by eating more than 2x the table average, so i did not. i stayed right at 2x. it was all yummy.

THEN CAME THE PIES.

i had forgotten about the pies. fortunately, since i hadn't pigged out to my own genetic potential, i had plenty-o-room for pie, but i pretended i didn't, to fit in. the fitting-in was going really well, too, until i expressed a desire for ice cream with my pumpkin pie, which, while a perfectly reasonable request in my estimation, is apparently an outrageous proposition in 203's family. i got my gorram ice cream but it was hard and i took a lot of guff to get it. the pie was yummy but not as yummy as the pie that i was to have later on... but i digress!

THIS JUST IN: i remembered a couple of things just now. actually i remembered the couple of things before i wrote "THEN CAME THE PIES", but I planned to put "THIS JUST IN" in all caps and putting two capitalized exclamations adjacent to each other would really bugger up the flow, so i waited until i had a paragraph to separate the two blocks.

THIS JUST IN: sometime between awakening and eating turkey we called my folks to find out what birhtstones are which, on account of 203's parents have no internet. also, we went outside into the forest/yard where sister #2's husband, a seasoned hunter, gave us all a lesson on tracking deer. i learned many things, including: how to track deer. i would have tracked one that very day, but alas, hunting season had come to a close, which was the other thing i learned that enabled me to claim having learned "many" things instead of "just the one" thing.

after that, we went and had turkey. well, probably we did a lot of other things in the interim but maybe you're just not getting me when i say I DONT REALLY REMEMBER. it'll come back to me, i'm sure of it.

now, after we had the turkey, we went for a walk. 203 had been telling me for months how her ma and pa walked a mile after each meal, and, although the previous day i had not gotten a thorough tour of the property, on account of it was dark, by thursday post-turkey, i had seen enough to realize it was possible to walk a mile as long as one took the road. like, maybe a half mile walk down the road, then a half mile back. but no, no sir, no sir indeed, this was not the way it was done.

her parents have a track on their property, an honest-to-graud track. we did laps. six, to be precise, i think, was the number of laps required for a mile. so we went out and did laps. 203 and i walked for a while with sister #2's son #2, until he couldn't keep up and stopped. 203 and i took this opportunity (since we did not all walk in one group) to take some seemingly-inconspicuous smooches at the far end of the track. sister #2's husband, with his zoom lens SLR camera, soon after the walk, revealed with a sly comment that he knew we'd been smooching. caught!

203's sister #1 is in the air force, and sister #2 is in the army, unless it's the other way around, but i honestly do not think it is. they walked together, and skin me if they didn't march. i joked to 203 and sister #2's son #2 as we did our laps that they (sister #1 and sister #2) should be marching, and then i looked at them, and what do you know?

no really, what do you know?

not much, eh?

one thing i know: sister #1 and sister #2 were marching. in lockstep. it was later revealed that they didn't realize this at the time. ho ho ho!

after the laps we all gathered around the porch and threatened to descend the bluffs behind the property in search of a fabled cave. finally sister #2's husband got tired of our boastful claims and 203, myself, sister #2, and sister #2's husband all set out, not along the threatened route, however. we took a different route that led down a rather steepish gorge lined with slippery leaves and rocks and discarded metal things such as a fridge and a tire. ha ha ha! it's all fun and games until someone gets the lockjaw.

finally we arrived, after everyone (i think) had fallen at least once, at the end of the gorge, to discover that there was indeed a cave-like structure beneath us, but we couldn't get at it on account of we were directly over the 20-30 foot mouth of the cave and didn't have a rope. i located a side route and while i was discussing how we ought to take the side route to reach the ground near the cave, sister #2's husband took the side route. soon, we were all taking it, and after several hilarious close calls with rusty barbed wire, and one very close call where 203 hurled a boulder at me (foolishly forgetting that she was not yet entitled, as an unmarried person, to my life insurance policy) we made it to the bottom, to find that it was more of a big indentation than a cave. no matter, though, for we were within close walking distance of a big field which we surmised would lead us back home -- nobody wanted to ascend the slippery gorge and i certainly didn't want to be on loose footing with my wife-to-be hurling boulders at me.

so along the brambled fields we walked, until we spied along the bluffs what appeared to be a cave, moreso than the cliff-face indentation we'd just come from. the four of us ascended a briary slope to get to it, but only 203 and i had the will to enter the small crack at the back of the cave. we traveled in this fascinating cave for a solid 10 to 15 minutes, crouching, crawling, sliding on my stomach (203 was able to stay fully upright the entire time). there were parts where i could stand up all the way, but mostly i was crouching. there were stalactites and stalagmites. it was super cool. there were monstro crickets the size of small rats, and small rats the size of burlingame. no, actually, there were no rats, but there was a pile of poop that probably belonged to a bobcat, which neither of us, crouched over in a cramped cave, would have been capable of startling.

after a while, we reached a point where 1) forward movement would have required prolonged stomach-crawling and 2) i had to rip a turkey fart. we decided on these grounds that we should depart, post-haste. we had only one flashlight between the two of us, and this slowed our retreat from the relentless pursuit of my tryptophan explosion. still, we made it out of the cave before the exhaustion of our oxygen, none the worse for the wear. we made it to another cave a bit later, where i managed to fall and scrape my tender elbow in full view of 203's laws and in-laws. oi! after we made it back home, the three of them complained of perceived itchiness on account of all the grass and bugs we'd been exposed to. lightweights! i wasn't itchy. just another day in the bush for me.

some things happened which i do not recall.

then, more things happened which i do not recall.

somwhere in there i had more pie. tart cherry pie from 203s parents cherry tree (i think. have i mentioned that my memory is fuzzy?). and more cookies. and fudge. and coffee cake (BREAKING NEWS: COFFEE CAKE DOES NOT CONTAIN COFFEE. why the heck is it called coffee cake, then? search me. HEY NOW! not without a warrant, you fascist!) and probably other bad stuff but NONE OF IT HAD SUGAR ONLY SPLENDA so it was healthy. or, at the very least, it left a healthy aftertaste.

and then, when the others had left and it was just the four of us, we played scrabble once more and I won, reclaiming my lost image from the bowels of apparent stupidity. or, as 203's mom put it (to paraphrase), "pshh, six points is barely winning". yeah, well, it's true that i didn't have a 400 point lead on 203 like she had on me at my parents house, but a six point win is still a win, gorram it! and i did it without cheating or taking pity words.

then we went to bed, or maybe we did some more stuff, or maybe we didn't even do that stuff until the next day. hell, i dunno. i do know for sure the following things:

- we did go caving on thanksgiving day, making 11/23/2006 the coolest TG ever as far as spelunking goes
- the next day i carried 203 for part of our final lap around the track
- i didn't have any ticks from our cavort through the bush
- i had a heinekin, for the first time ever, after our post-turkey adventure. it tasted just like a rolling rock, as far as i could tell, which is to say, it met the barest minimum of requirements to be classified as "beer", but just barely. last night i had one of my own from batch #4 and i must say, batch #4 and heineken really aren't in the same universe. maybe not even the same multiverse. i mean, one is slightly carbonated, slightly bittered, danish horse pee, and the other is BEEEEEER. i leave it to the reader to discern which is which. HINT: mine is the one that isn't horse pee.

all right, that's enough for now. in fact, that might be enough for good. so that i dont have to write another big-old-long-old post, i shall now summarize the remainder of the trip:

- 203 finished my hat. it rocks. i've worn it every day since she finished it.
- we had a nice, big, long layover in PHX on our return trip. the arrival gate was no more than ten feet distant from the departure gate. nice.
- we did some laundry.
- we bought some lumber and some bananas. no gelatin-free yogurt in missouri, at least not in the boonies.
- i will miss oreganos. i wish there was some equivalent here. still, flagstaff has no "tabla", so i guess we're even.
- i ripped one in front of 203's roommate. a big one. a loud one. one that she could not have failed to notice though i hope to god she did fail to notice it. i forgot where i was. i'd just gotten off a plane and i was tired and disoriented. it was past midnight. i'm such a bad person.
- i had a crazy-ass british expat as a cab driver from SFO. he was new and didn't know what to charge. he wanted to run a red light to make an illegal u-turn after he took the wrong exit. i told him i wasn't in that kind of a hurry.
- i horrified the 203 family by eating my leftovers cold. dammit, i like cold TG leftovers! except for peas. bleah.

there were many other great things that happened but alas, i cannot remember them right now, and even if i could, i really ought to get to bed. suffice to say: this was my first TG away from my own parents, but i certainly felt right at home the entire time. and that's what TG is about.

one more thing: in my own family, TG is a somewhat solemn affair, with a familial ceremony of thanks, where we each state a thing we're thankful for before we commence feasting. 203's TG dinner lacked this formal solemnity, but it did not lack the none-too-subtle bonds of familial love and fellowship that TG is all about. TG is my favorite holiday, because i'm not a xtian, and were i one, i'd be peeved that xmas is more about santa than the jesus. but i don't have to deal with that baggage on account of santa and the jesus are basically the same in my book, so that leaves xmas as a redundant TG. since TG is an american holiday, i can feel all patriotic in celebrating it. so score on that one.

in any case, as i was saying: 203's TG felt much less solemn, much less of a production than what i'm used to, and yet, it lacked none of the beautiful meaning that i've grown used to. my entire visit was entirely enjoyable (even the embarrassing bits -- they were all part of the hazing) and i still get smiles when i remember it.

16.5 days.

SIXTEEN POINT FIVE DAYS.

holy crap.

linky

this sounds familiar.

guess i'm not the only one, hm?

yesterday i was feeling too poetic and hopeful to write a documentary of my thanksgiving adventures. today my home network lies in shambles and the stuff i'm getting paid to do doesn't work and i still, after a week, don't know why. i'm in the perfect frame of mind for non-poetics.

so where better to begin than the beginning?

come on now, i'm waiting!

right, then, we'll start at the beginning.

my flight from sfo to phx was delayed. it -- oh hell, that's boring. i made it to flg right about on-time with a bit of holiday stress but a minimum of holiday lateness. also, i got to run over a mile through the god damed airport. that was swell. 203 had my sangwich waiting and it was consumed by the time we arrived at her place.

then i got the usual small-town-airport-night-of-no-sleep and we were up in time to be at the airport before 7am.

we checked in for standby: our flight wasn't until late afternoon on account of 203 had not expected her wednesday classes to be canceled, but they were, on account of thanksgiving, which was to be the very next day, hilariously awkward sentences notwithstanding.

the nice lady at the counter told dreary-eyed me and my blushing bride-to-be that not only were there no seats on the plane, the flight was overbooked. still, in good holiday cheer, 203 and i maintained hope. or rather, she maintained hope while i made the best of things by purchasing and consuming a small-town-airport croissant ham breakfast sandwich. yum. we hadn't had coffee yet, there hadn't been time to brew it.

while we waited to hear of our fate some small-town-newspaper reporters sauntered up and interviewed us for their annual small-town-newspaper-wonder-holiday-travel article. they were tickled pink that i'd be meeting 203's parents for the first time. they put our picture in the paper, dear reader, and it's online, dear reader, but i won' t link it, dear reader, because it's got my name in it, dear reader, and that would violate my policy of never posting my name on this blog, you wanker.

anyhow, as the people lined up to be groped and have their shampoo thrown out, we waited anxiously to see if we'd make it. 203 did a count of the gropees but we weren't sure just how many seats were on the plane. we thought they were short.

we moved to a different couch with a better view of the ticketing counter, where our fate would be decided. to our great despair, a trio of sorority-or-middle-school girls (hard to tell. kids these days!) bounded into the 'port and hit up the counter. being maroons, they apparently thought they could buy a ticket for the flight 5 minutes after checkin had ended on the first flight out of flg on the day before thanksgiving. seasoned travelers. they took their disappointment very well.

then came two older women and a kid or something. they already had tickets but had apparently missed out on the latest developments in the past 5 years of airline history, where you now have to show up and get your boarding pass before everyone has already made it through security. as the uglyish fat one carried on and cried, 203 and i guiltily suppressed our hopefulness that we'd get on the flight. we were torn between shameful glee that we'd get to arrive in MO before sundown and empathetic remorse that we'd be doing at the sad expense of this poor, fat, ugly, whiny, stupid, lazy woman who didn't get up as early as we did. actually, to be honest, perhaps we weren't all that torn, after all.

as the poor, fat, etc. woman doused the airport lobby with her poor, fat, etc. tears, the nice lady behind the counter motioned discretely for us to approach the bench. 203 and i could hardly contain our smiling excitement, even without our morning coffee, as we bounded up to the counter. we had made it onto the flight, the lady told us, not needed to specify at the expense of whom. not only that, she was waiving the $50 fee for switching flights, and had arranged our connection and we were all set to get to MO way ahead of time. i told her she was my favorite person for the week. her week expired just yesterday.

SIDE NOTE : during the last week i found myself on a total of 8 airplanes with 4 connections. every single one of those connections save 1 was TIGHT. guess which one featured a departure gate RIGHT FUCKING NEXT to the arrival gate? that's right, the one with the 3 hour layover. guess which one featured a departure gate a solid mile away from the arrival gate? that's right, the one with the -5 minute layover. thank god for running shoes. oh right, i wasn't wearing those because someone told me it'd be cold -- too cold for my well-ventilated running shoes.

we got to MO and landed in the nation's murder capital. once we found our way out of the capital, we encountered signs for white castle. i'd never been so i forced my vegetarian sweetheart to pull over and get me a couple. man they're gross. so gross that i repeated this exercise on the return voyage, bringing my lifetime consumption of white castle sliders up to 4, and probably removing as many years from the tail-end of my life.

the girl BTC at the first WC asked about my bracelet. "is that a bracelet?" she asked. "it is," I replied, hoping that none of her copious eyeshadow had made it into my greasy undersized pressed meat product. she said something witty-ish, and i said something equally witty-ish, but now all i can remember is that she had lots of eyeshadow and that the "burger" was gross.

now. where was i?

oh yes. on the road again.

we made it to the parents house and i was introduced with hugs to everyone except 203's bro-in-law, from whom i received a hearty handshake. i wasn't there for 5 minutes before i was included in the story of how the bro-in-law was accused of farting in order to cover up his roll-stealing-induced odd behavior. it was to be a weekend of fart jokes, culminating when 203's mother went, to my great horror, into the bathroom right after i had despoiled it. even with the fan still on, i knew it was to be an embarrassing moment, and i froze in terror as time slowed down and she inched closer to the closed door. hadn't she seen that i'd just been in there? didn't she see the closed door? what was she thinking! I tried to warn her but could not. 203 saw my frozen expression and knew what the score was. she broke my panic by asking me if i'd put the fan on, to which i blurted, "yes!" but it was no use -- 203's mom opened the door, made a face, and shouted to me in her own special way, "YOU KNOW, THERE'S SPRAY IN HERE!"

i hadn't been able to find it. lord knows i'd looked.

it was then that i realized how true had been 203's assessment of our families' interchangeableness.

now, back to the linear narration. where the hell was i?

oh, right, fart jokes and introduction.

the relatives:
203's mom, dad, sister #1, sister #2, sister #2's husband. later i would meet sister #2's son #2 and sister #2's husband's brother #unknown. all but the brother were present for thanksgiving dinner, the son was not there when i arrived.

203 and i arrived just in time for a meal. i have no idea what time it was, my internal chronometer still hasn't coped with all the time jumps. we all sat around the table and joked and had a grand old time.

THINGS I LEARNED DURING MY VISIT:
- cave crickets are fuckin huge
- leaves are fuckin slippery
- how to play canasta
- the difference between knitting and crocheting
- football players crochet to de-stress
- the difference between allergies and asthma
- splenda has an icky aftertaste when used in pies but sometimes the pie is still good
- MO really isn't all that cold
- i really should pass sometimes.
- various slivers of military jargon, history, and so forth
- how to hang laundry
- i don't like cold peas
- i do like molasses cookies
- some people use drums to medidtate
- i use squats to meditate
- bucks scrape bark off trees to mark their territory
- the tsa's new slogan is 3-1-1, which means "3 ounces, 1 ... um... one... uh..." (reaches for cheat sheet)
- something else really important that i can't remember, gorram it!!

my thanksgiving weekend was so full of stuff that i find, once again, my blogging time draws to a close without providing me enough time to say all i want to say.

perhaps there will be a part 3 of the 11/23/06 chronicles. in case there's not, here's a summary:

- i had fun
- i think the fam liked me
- if i can keep her dad and my dad from talking politics, i look forward to them meeting next year
- i traveled well for a change - no major problems aside from the usual you-know-what, which, if you read this posting carefully, was clearly not a problem for the entire visit
- less than three weeks to go

LESS THAN THREE WEEKS TO GO

11/23/2006: my first thanksgiving away from my own family. my first thanksgiving as part of a new family. my first thanksgiving as half of my own family. do please note the date.

in the shower this morning, i thought:

christmastime is drawing near
but november is my time of year
from distant places a family converges
and all 'round the feast, what matters, emerges

I bungled my departing line, which I had devised the night before. I told 203s parents that I had never before felt so welcome in someone else's home (though rictor/veg's parents run a close second) and that they (203's parents) deserve either my thanks or an award for such fine acting. i said "reward" rather than "award", which kinda changes the whole meaning, but i think they got me. they may not know that i'm a writer and not a stand up comedian. or maybe they didn't not know that -- i find that i have little trouble making them laugh. laughter, in that family, is a heritable trait.

lots of things happened over my TG break. lots of events and details and so forth. but more importantly, impressions were made. guesses were confirmed. paths were glimpsed.

my dad has imparted two great pieces of relationship advice to me:
1) you marry the family, not just the woman
2) why buy the cow when you're getting the milk for free?

in regards to the latter, i am a failure. i bought the cow before i'd even had a full gallon of milk.

i didn't want to walk away two evenings ago in flagstaff airport, but i did, and it wasn't the worst of our partings. when i got home i deleted the visitation counter, because our next visit will not involve a parting, and i changed the caption of the other counter to better reflect the impending breakdown of my life.

one of my favorite sci-fi stories involved black holes (aka singularities). i do not remember the name of the story but odds are good that it was written by david brin. in the story, it is theorized that the "other end" of a black hole becomes a new universe when "this end" of the black hole collapses. in our universe, the hole sucks in matter until the event horizon collapses, and, like a drop of water falling from a faucet, the pocket of universe becomes self-contained, exploding (unlike a drop of water falling from a faucet) in its own Big Bang to a new creation.

that is what will happen to my life in 18 days: implosion followed by a new Creation. nobody knows what is inside a black hole because by their very nature, information cannot pass out of a singularity. likewise, i cannot see what lies beyond the singularity in my own life that will occur on 12/16/2006, but i knew when i stepped through that "security checkpoint" that i had only 18 more days of this separation nonsense, and that when 5/23/07 rolls around, i'll be marrying the best family i could have hoped for.

things are looking up, and up, and up.

perhaps it's just the music i'm listening to. impressions are more important than events, i think. lessons are more important than teachers.

tomorrow, perhaps, will be a day for events. today i will enjoy music, impressions, and climbing. i will be happy that i spent last week with people that seemed happy and active, and i will be happy that in less than 3 weeks, things will get weird, in the best of ways.

so much to say. life continues to explode.

countdowns updated to reflect reality.

more later.

it doesn't get better than this:

~7AM

TSA: Sir, I'm gonna need you to take your little vest off.
me: whaaa?
TSA: Your little vest. Take it off, please.
me (not wearing a vest, little or otherwise): my what?
TSA: Your little vest.
me (realizing they mean my size LARGE, FULL SLEEVED JACKET): oh, ok.
me (removes jacket for... scanning?)

me: it's a coffee grinder. here, gimme your finger. i'll show you.

the problem with my younger, stupider years was that i didn't realize just how young and stupid i was, and so i laid out massive quantities of energy trying not to act young and stupid. as a result, i missed out on many of the joys of being young and stupid.

and now, in my hoary old age, i look back and marvel at just how young and stupid i really was, even though i was trying desperately not to let it be known.

i wonder: in another two decades, will i look back on this period in my life and marvel at just how young and stupid i was in my late twenties?

my twin consolations against my stupid, youthful neglect of my young stupidity are thus: at 29 i am more physically youthful and mentally agile than i ever was at 19, and, at 29, i've managed to channel the unused youthful stupidity from my younger, stupider years into the present, where i can afford much better liquor and cleaner hookers.

i think that this is one of my superpowers, that though i squandered my youth, i never gave it up. my writing, my climbing, my lifting, my loving, my laughing, is play and i think that comes through in all of these. i think a lot of people go through their young and stupid years and think, "okay, that's that, time to be a grownup," and then indeed, "grow up" into dour, unjoyful responsibilityniks who miss the entire point of being a grownup, which, as stated, is the better liquor and cleaner hookers.

pink floyd says: the memories of a man in his old age/are the deeds of a man in his prime.

how sad that many would choose to have their prime during their young and stupid years. how sad those of us at 29 who spend more time looking back than forward.

'course, if my plane crashes tomorrow, i reckon i'll wish i'd primed around 19 on account of i haven't got many prime deeds to remember at the moment.

I used to think that people were basically good, that, given the right circumstances, meeting the right people, maybe growing up in the right area, a person would tend to grow up into a decent human being. I figured that all the evil in the world was perpetrated by anomolies of humanity. People who had come up without a chance to become good folks, perhaps having badness instilled in them by their rotten parents or their rotten circumstances. In my expert opinion, then, the world had the potential to be a better place, as long as people behaved like me -- someone who, though not an active doer of good deeds, was at least a conscious practitioner of do-no-harm.

I only thought that because I'd forgotten about Denis. How did I manage that?

One time, I had an idea for a story. It was about a guy who was very similar to me, who became bored of the blandness of his life. He'd grown up a loner and never managed to break out of the mold he'd set for himself. He kept to himself and didn't have many friends. As a character, he was very similar to the guy in my other story -- the only socialization he did was online, and that, with only a few people. Bascially, he didn't get out much.

Over time, though, he developed an "online persona". On the computer, on the chat networks, he was a different person. Bold, funny, personable, talkative. On the IRC, he was his own opposite. He talked to strangers, he talked to girls. He talked on subjects he'd never have discussed in real life.

This story took place in 1998, before everyone and his cat had an online persona.

He grew to hate that term, "real life". For him, his online life was far more satisfying -- socially, intellectually -- than what he had with his phyisical acquaitances. And that's just what they were: acquaintances. Online, he had folks he'd call his friends. Off the network, the people he knew never got close enough to be called friends. There were a couple people who he knew both online and off; they were the rare few that saw both aspects of this guy. Time went on, and his online persona became more and more extroverted while his offline self drew ever more inwards.

One night, in a fit of boredom, this guy came up with an idea. He would "spin off" a new personality in his offline self, and this personality would be inhabited by his bolder, more fun-loving jocular online self. He like the term "spin off", and he liked his plan, too, but he didn't really have any substance to his plan beyond terminology. His plan languished for a while as he tried to figure out a means to implement it.

In the meantime, he noticed changes in the way he was interacting with people: his classmates, the checker at the grocery, his offline acquaintances. He was funnier, and less awkard. Flirty, even, at times. And he realized that, without consciously implementing his plan, his plan had implemented itself. As more and more of his offline personality fell under the sway of his online personality, the guy began to get a little frightened. He hadn't expected his plan to be so effective, and he wasn't quite ready to surrender his reticent ways. Though in many ways he resented his shy, quiet lifestyle, it was still the only life he'd ever known, and he wasn't so eager to give it up. He wanted compromise.

But his online persona, which accounted for more of his behavior each day, wanted no such thing. So, in one way or another (I didn't get around to figuring out the details), the new persona subverted and sabotaged and suppressed the old one, effectively murdering it. The guy was never the same afterward, and lived "happily ever after", in some sense, but in another sense, it wasn't "him", since "he" had given way to the "new" persona.

I had planned to throw in all sorts of interesting meditations on identity, and evil, and the urgency of life that, once grasped, did not permit a mild living. Maybe a new-persona-kills-somebody-while-old-persona-helplessly-watches twist or two, while I was at it.

Instead, I went and found out that some damned Brad Pitt movie had beaten me to the punch.

In the beginning of my time with Margie, I struggled. Life itself is a struggle, of course, but traveling through it there is a certain hope that as one grows older and presumably wiser, the struggle will become less intense, or at the very least, less difficult. Of course, as one grows older and presumably wiser, one realizes that the struggle never ever eases, not for a moment. Life is a struggle from the very first gasping inhalation to the very last silent exhalation, and any time your guard goes down, any time you relax for just one second, you've pulled yourself that much closer to that last, silent exhalation.

As Weird Al so aptly put it: I'll be mellow when I'm dead.

My struggle with my relationship was based in my own bitter regret of my wasted youth. In summary: I spent my youth studying, learning the sort of obscure, pasty-skinned, technical stuff that led to my eventual college degree and high-paying job. In college I kept my nose in the books and talked to nobody. I "got out" of school as quickly as I possibly could and never drank, got high, or got laid. I never had any fun. I ended up a "success," I suppose, if your yardstick is salary and self-sufficiency. I'm not especially wealthy, but I'm smart enough and well educated enough to keep myself off the streets. That's something, or so I thought. As I grew a little older, though, I realized that on the contrary, it wasn't anything at all.

Margie, in contrast, had fun in her early years. She wasn't a bookworm by any accounts, and missed none of the youthful fun that I steered so far away from. That, in itself, did not distress me. I knew lots of people like that, when I was in school and when I was out. Those people quite often ended up "losers," in cruddy jobs with cruddy houses, or, as Dr. Dre so aptly put it: no wheels and no keys, no boats no snowmobiles and no skis. Some of them I knew were not happy, and it was my consolation that all my hard-nosed work (for it had not been hard work) had been for some greater purpose, some foundational work on my life. Or something.

Margie was no loser. She was the happiest person I'd ever met. I never begrudged her that happiness -- indeed, without that joy in her eyes, I'd never have married her. But still, it was that joy that rankled me, early on. Because whereas I'd struggled through college, joyless and alone, building up a life and persona that would eventually bring me the sort of peaceful happiness that everyone on this planet desires, she'd had all of that all along. Somehow she'd figured out early on what it took me nearly two decades to *know*: there is no governor anywhere.

There are no rules, and Suffering Now To Be Happy Later is bullshit. Later doesn't always come, and even if it does, when it's Later, you'll still remember how much Now sucks. How much more effective is it to live Now as happily as you can, while still preparing for a pleasant Later. Maybe some folks don't have what it takes to manage both at once, but once I got the hang of it, it really wasn't too hard.

And that's what I had to struggle with way back then. Not jealousy or resentment, envy or greed. No, I had to deal with the fact that I'd wasted a huge chunk of my life that I'd never get back, and the biggest reminder of that fact was the face I'd wake up to every morning, and the embrace I'd fall asleep to every night.

I liked that explanation, and it defended me well from my own shameful disappointment, until I came to believe in fate. Damnable fate! Fate was not compatible with the All Was As It Must Have Been theory, because fate itself is one of those same theories. You see, if I was fated to meet Margie -- and there can be no other explanation -- then I may as well have partied hardy during my wasted years. I'd still have met Margie. It was fate. And so, again, I'm faced with the inescapable fact that I surrendered the best years of my life to pointless (and to some extent, unrewarded) bookishness.

Didn't I say that there's no end to the struggle?

One time, I had an idea for a story. It was about a guy who was very similar to me. This guy could work magic. Real magic, not that David Blaine crap. He could turn objects into other objects. Apples into bananas, socks into hand grenades, and so forth. He thinks this is a really cool trick, of course, and tries to show it to his best friend. When he does, though, his friend fails to obseve the transformations. When the guy turns a red sock into a blue sock, the friend swears the sock had been blue all along. Similarly with other changes.

Still, this doesn't stop the guy from using his skill to win the adoration of women and professors. He goes on turning events to his advantage until one day he has some kind of seizure and wakes up in a parallel universe where subtle but significant differences exist: there's a different person in the white house, his best friend has a goatee, and so forth. In fact, he doesn't just wake up in a nasty parallel universe -- he wakes up in a back alley of a nasty parallel universe, getting his ass handed to him by two guys with pool sticks.

Fortunately, our hero is armed with magical abilities, and he uses them to get the drop on his attackers. He figures that maybe he ought to spend some time figuring out what's behind his abilities. He goes about this, somehow, and comes to the conclusion that there exist an infinite number of universes, each representing subtle, minute differences -- one universe where he chose to part his hair to the left this morning, and another universe where he chose to part it to the right. Two universes for each choice, adding up to a really big infinity of universes.

Somehow, intuitively, the guy has figured out a way to jump from universe to universe. So when he appears to himself to be changing a turkey sandwich into a hamburger, in reality, he's "jumping" from a universe where he was holding a turkey sandwich into a universe where he was actually holding a hamburger. The reason his friend couldn't observe a change was because from the friend's point of view, there was no change.

And when the guy jumped from one universe to another, the "him" that lived in the destination universe was "swapped" with the jumping "him". Did the swapped-out "him" notice any change? Maybe, maybe not. Surely, he would have been confused.

So, this figured out, some things happen, and then some more things happen, and it becomes apparent to the guy that his evil-self from the universe he was stuck in had figured out how to jump between really drastically different universes, instead of the easy kind of jump between universes where the guy was manhandling a different kind of fruit. This evil-him had jumped out of the present universe, because in the present universe his girlfriend had dumped him for being... well... evil. So he'd swapped out our hero and gone on to our hero's universe to cause mayhem.

The guy then jumps back into his home turf, finds that the evil-him has already raped and beaten his girlfriend, and then there's some mumbo-jumbo about how he can't undo the bad deeds of his evil-self -- or can he? It's implied that the guy can use the same techniques he's used to jump between universes to jump into God Himself, and of course, God can undo any misdeed.

I thought this was a pretty good story idea. So good, in fact, that I actually got around to writing it down, quite out of character. When I finished it, it was my first short story since high school, and it felt damned good to have written it. It had been an act of creation like no other, and years coming. I was proud of it. I edited it, and polished it, and showed it off to a couple of friends.

Then, a couple months later I went back and reread it. I was embarassed at how amateurish it was. The characters were totally undeveloped, plotting was unclear, and most of the important developments were explicitly revealed to the characters rather than unveiled for the reader by the characters' actions. In short: it sucked.

That's what I get for writing, I guess. That's why I don't do it anymore.

"Write about what you know," they say. I never knew enough to write about what I knew, so I resorted to fiction, instead. But at the same time, I wasn't a strong enough writer for the characters to stray too far from my own personality. So what little characterization I did manage to squeeze into my stories, whether written down or simply narrated in-head, was all very familiar to me. Most of my stories involved a guy very much like me, going along in his life, happily but bored, oblivious, until Fate stepped in and scrambled things up. I suppose that's the recipe for most stories, yeah?

In general, though, my stories feature a character who manages to wrest control of his life from the uncaring grip of Fate, and betters himself through his own hard work. It's fantasy. It's wish-fulfillment. It's just me, building up a fanasy world in which someone-like-me gets rewarded for the sacrafices of the past. It doesn't work like that, though. Fate is a tease. She'll let you think you're holding the reigns just long enough to show you who's really leading your chariot. But a writer has more power than Fate. A writer can give his characters more than Fate would ever allow, he can expose them to the sort of content happiness that exists only in fairy tales. A writer can bless his character with every good thing ever imagined and let that character die happy -- and there's not a thing Fate can do (short of killing the writer) to intercede, even though she'd love to, I'm sure, since writers tend to ruin her reputation with all their happy endings.

Anyways, I performed magic once, and because I did it in a scientific fashion, I
managed to convince myself to no small extent that it worked, and that my grasp
on Fate's whim was akin to a rancher's grasp of a bull's nose ring. I figured I
was in control. And though I no longer believe in that level of control over my
own life, I still have no explanation better than magic for how I met Margie.

When I was fifteen, I had a crush on a girl named Ida. Nowadays, and probably even back then, people stopped having "crushes" around the age of 12 and just got on with things, the whole "telling her" routine followed by the "kissing her" and, if that went well, the "getting some." Not me, though, not for a lot of years. I don't think Ida ever even knew how I felt. I was shy, and I was quiet, then, so I didn't mention it. But I hung out with her as often as I could, and she was cool with that.

Not her brother, though. He didn't like me. Denis was seventeen, and he had a moustache. He was so proud of his little wispy young-man moustache. I hated it as much as I hated him. He and his scraggly moustache played for the football team, and every girl in school fawned all over Denis and his stupid little moustache. The teachers let him slide through classes without accountability, and the administration took every opportunity to fail to discipline him when needed. I know this, because, of course, he picked on me. At school, on the schoolbus, around town. Whenever Ida wasn't around, he'd punch me in the guts and tell me what a jerk I was. Only he wasn't as nice about it as that. He must have really enjoyed making me miserable, he certainly devoted enough time to the endeavour.

My consolation, back then, the consolation of all smarty-types when they're young and getting beat up by jocks, was that I'd end up rich and married to his sister and he'd end up married to a cow, spending his spare time serving me fries instead of beating me up.

As it turns out, that's not how it turned out.

Denis and Ida had younger sister, Sally. Silly Sally, we'd call her. She was five and a half, and always underfoot. Whereas Ida's presence would restrain Denis' punishment, Sally, evidently, did not command the same adherence to the golden rule. Denis would go about beating me up and insulting me right in front of her. So besides the normal, fifteen-year-old attraction I had to Ida, the aspect of protection encouraged me to spend time around her.

One day, I got out of school early. That didn't happen often, not in high school. But my last teacher for the day was out and they couldn't find a sub, so the class was canceled. I got on my bike and rode home. I took my usual route, the one that took me behind the local Target store. As I approached, I saw a kid doing tricks on a skateboard, swerving and jumping around the trash cans and empty cardboard boxes. I got closer and saw that it was Ida. She must have been ditching school. I never ditched school. Ida was a bit more adventurous than me.

"Hey," said Ida.

"Hey," I said.

"You wanna skateboard?" said Ida.

"I haven't got a board," I said.

"That's no problem," said Ida. "You can use mine."

I got a little bit scared at this point. Sharing skateboards was a rather intimate suggestion. Maybe she didn't think so, but I certainly did, and I wasn't ready for our relationship to move out of the realm of Secret Crush into the realm of Embarassing Rejection. So I sputtered out an excuse.

"Uh, no thanks," I said. "I've got to get home for a doctor's appointment." Smooth.

"Okay," she said.

And with that, I was on my way. I cycled a couple more blocks and approached Owers Ave. Ida lived on Owers. Four more blocks and I'd be home. I took my usual shortcut through the little alley between Ida's house and her neighbor's. That was a mistake. Denis was there, poking a stick at something furry crumpled on the ground. He heard my approach, and looked up, and grinned when he saw me.

"Hey there, fuckface," he said. He meant me. He dropped his poking-stick and balled up his fists.

I tried to ignore him and cycle past, but there was no avoiding him. The alley was too narrow, and he'd positioned himself so that I'd have to go over him rather than around him. I couldn't turn around without stopping and dismounting.

I braked, reluctantly, and tensed my stomach muscles. It was no use, he still knocked me off my bike when he punched me. Sally wandered into the alley, meandering between the garbage cans. As I lay on the ground, wrapping my arms around my head, I saw Silly Sally pick up Denis' stick and poke the furry crumpled thing.

"Doe-gee," she said.

"Get back inside, fuckface," said Denis. Sally started to cry.

"I thought I was fuckface," I said.

Denis found my remark about as funny as I found the kick he delivered to my stomach.

The only story I ever wrote down was the one about the guy (similar to me) who could perform magic. But that wasn't the one good piece of writing I managed. My best effort was one I never wrote down. Instead, I lived it.

Like the character that stood in for me years before, one day, after I'd been working for a while, I decided that though my online life was exciting and characterized by well deployed vocabulary, my offline life was far less satisfying. Why not do what my surrogate had done and merge the two into a better, more interesting, more outgoing me? Nothing to it, right? I'd skip all the insanity and killing parts, and come out a better, more happy, or at the very least, less bored person. So, unlike when I plotted out the original story way back when, this time around, I had to fill in the missing details of how to actually merge the two of us.

So I sat and thought about it.

when i really get into my writing, i move my head around like ray charles, and smile and leer at the screen.

i'm really putting on quite a show for these random strangers.

Character


Copyright 2006, Rusty Penn

I'm the worst kind of writer there is: the kind that doesn't write.

When I get around to it, I can usually scribble down a sentence or two that holds together, or if the muse is with me, maybe even a whole paragraph. But I've got libraries of novels inside me and they never seem to find their way out. When I walk around outside, going about my business, doing my daily whatever, I narrate inside my head. When my activities are too dull to warrant narration, I plot and I characterize, and I compose. But I never write that stuff down, because I rarely have any paper when I'm doing my daily whatever. It's there, though, always. Ever-present in the back of my mind, narrating, composing, telling stories. If I could write all that down and sell just a tiny bit of it, I'd make a fortune.

It's a shame, really. I have some aptitude for it, I guess, at least my teachers always told me I did. It's just that it's hard and I've always been a bit of a slacker. I managed one good piece of writing in my life, and one piece of magic. Real magic, too, not just a slieght-of-hand trick or a smoke-and-mirrors illusion. That's not so bad, right? That's acheivement, yeah?

I snorted myself awake and gathered my bearings, quickly wishing I hadn't. My bearings had been fine where they were, lost in the twilight of a pleasant nap. Way down from my perch in the bleachers, clean shaven Prof. Beardsley continued to draw supply and demand curves on the blackboard -- the very same activity which had prompted me to doze off in the first place. I glanced at the wall clock, but it was too far off to tell me the time, so I checked my watch. I still had an hour and a half of economic torture to endure before I could go to sleep proper.

My notebook was still open, and I could see where the writing transitioned from barely coherent economics notes into totally incoherent sleep scribbling. Then, curiously, the sleep scribbling transitioned again, this time into actual writing. That was odd, to be sure. I must have written something in my sleep.

There is no governor anywhere, I had written. Ah, I thought, very cute. This weren't my words. I read them in a book, and the author of that book read them in a book, and so on, backwards in time, until ancient China where someone named Zhuangzi wrote them in a book. I didn't know any of that history back then, except, of course, for the part where I had read the words in a book.

I had read them all right, and even written them in my sleep. But I didn't get them. Well, I "got" them, I just didn't get them, you know? Later in life I came to use the word *know* (with the little puckers, to distinguish it from plain-old-know) to describe the state of deep, internalized, personalize comprehension of a subject. Heinlein called it "grok." Same idea. I got my word (puckers and all) from a video game. It's hard to be creative all the time. Sometimes you've just got to borrow.

Anyhow, I knew the words, but I didn't know them with all my heart, with all my mind, with all my being (I borrowed that, too). That *knowing* would come later.

One time, I had an idea for a story. It was about a guy who was very similar to me. (All the stories I thought up back then were about guys very similar to me. I had a narrow field of experience and my imagination was limited to extrapolation.) This was back in the days before the Internet had become popularized. In those days it was the realm of college students and one or two AOLers. The good old days.

So this guy spent a lot of time on IRC, which was the good-old-days equivalent of modern day Internet chat rooms. He didn't get out much at all, and pretty much all of his socializing, such as it was, was done online. But one day, one of his chat buddies, who lived across town, invited him (the character, the one based "loosly" on me) over to watch a movie or something. The guy walks over to his buddy's apartment (the guy doesn't have a car) and knocks on the door. Nobody answers. The guy knocks and knocks and knocks, and, this being set in the era before ubiquitous cellular phones, gives up and walks back home.

With nothing better to do, he hops back on IRC, where the very buddy whose apartment he just failed to visit is sitting there in the chat room. The guy asks his buddy where the hell he'd been, and the buddy is confused. The buddy swears that he's in his apartment and has been all day long. The guy confirms the address, and it's just what he thought it was. So he sets out to visit his pal again, and, arriving once more at the apartment, knocks on the door. Once again, there's nobody home.

Angrily, the guy walks back to his own apartment. But as he's walking across town, he notices something odd: all the shops are vacant. There are no cars in the streets, even though it's mid-afternoon. He sees no people anywhere. The guy walks into a grocery store and there's nobody there. The power is all on, and the video cameras track, and the automatic lettuce waterers still seem to work. But no people.

Spooked, the guy continues on back to his apartment where, once again, he hops on the IRC. All his buddies are on, and he tells them what he's seen. They tell him he's nuts.

Anyhow, over the course of a few hours and days, this guy determines that, for some reason, he can communicate with his friends and his parents and strangers and anyone he likes via electronic means, but outside his apartment, nobody else in the entire world seems to exist. Stores are empty (but open and stocked), parks are vacant, streets are uninhabited. His mail is delivered but he never sees the mailman. You get the idea. You've probably seen a Twilight Zone episode with the same idea.

That was the set-up, I never did decide on the rest of the story. Maybe the guy decides to engage in a life of crime, stealing unattended bananas and diamonds and televisions and stuff. Or maybe he goes insane. Or maybe he doesn't -- since he's still got his friends online. Maybe he sets off a nuke to see if it shows up on the evening news, which he can still watch.

Who knows? Like all my stories, I never wrote it down.

I went to college for the same reason everyone goes to college: to find out what I wanted to do with my life. In my case, though, I had an edge. I was already good at something, and I knew I was good at it, and at the time, what I was good at was worth a lot of money. In fact, in the four years it took me to graduate with a degree in what I'm good at, the average salary for people good at what I'm good at went through a quick tripling. That was nice.

Since I knew what I was good at but didn't know what I wanted to do with my life, I came up with a plan. I would study hard, get a degree, and get a high paying job programming computers. Then, in my spare time, while raking in obscene gobs of cash, I'd figure out what I wanted to do with my life. Then, as the plan went, I'd do it.

Somewhere along the way, I lost sight of my plan.

I got that high paying job, and a bunch of raises, and a bunch of stuff that I bought with my bunch of raises. I wasn't especially happy with my job, or my life, but I also wasn't especially unhappy. That's how it goes, I guess, for most people. And just as most people, when they're not happy but not unhappy, don't make changes in their life, I let my life keep on going the way it was going. Which is to say, nowhere in particular.

I was supposed to be deciding in my spare time what it was that I wanted to do with my life, but I wasn't doing that. Maybe the problem was that I already knew: I wanted to be a writer. But In addition to my inability to actually write, so far as writing involves recording the thoughts of the writer, I also feared the transition from highly-paid computer programmer to destitute writer, "successful" or no.

Did I mention I didn't have a love life? Not that I had a lousy one. No, I didn't have one at all and I wasn't heading anywhere that I'd likely collide with one.

So. Things weren't really going that well.

i ran 10 miles

i learned to climb mountains

i traveled out of the state

i told a girl i loved her, even though i was afraid

i took a new name

i enjoyed the things that my life's work can bring me

i looked uncertainty in the eye and did not back down

i took a new name because the old one was for a different person.

as i pulled into the home stretch to approach the ticket-taker for sunol, i found myself trailing a police car. ugh. the last 2 miles are twisty and fun and 50mph, slow and boring at the posted 25mph. we pulled up to the booth and the cops talked to the ticket-taker for a bit. he waved them through.

when i pulled up i said, "i get in for free, too, right?" or something of that nature. the park employee said, "you know them?" to which i replied, "no, and i'd like it to stay that way."

that was the thing to say, apparently.

i nodded along politely as the gatekeeper -- a former business major, by his account -- informed me about the training of police officers. "you don't find a lot of yalies or mit grads in the force," he pointed out. "you know why?" i did not, but now i do: according to the gatekeeper of sunol, some departments give an intelligence test to applicants to weed out the ones that are too smart. we chatted along these lines for a bit, and i was dying to tell him that my fiancee is not only one of the smartest people i know, but also a former LEO. but i did not, for which i received the compliment that i had made his day. that put a smile on my face, even if the poor guy didn't realize that the intelligence test that PDs give to potential cops to weed out the smart ones is called a "job application".

i've spent a lot of time in sunol, and made a lot of memories there. whenever i go back i dwell in them again. the route i take is challenging, but it has its rewards beyond nostalgia. today, it was bright and sunny and lots of folks must not have wanted to expose their leashes to the warm elements, so there were lots of dogs running around. the dog owners who brought their leashes received a warm hello, the others received a sympathetic-to-203 scowl. i wasn't feeling so great. sometimes that happens on sat. morning hikes, not sure why. i considered that i was overtraining, particularly the legs, what with all the squats and climbing. then i considered that "overtraining" was often bandied about needlessly, and that in the past, if i pushed through, i'd feel better. so i huffed and puffed and sweated my way down the trail.

as mentioned, i've been to this park many times. i went there today because i wagered (correctly) that i'd find some sun there, whereas i probably wouldn't on the peninsula. i remembered three hikes there: one, with my hetero life mate where i discovered the joys of layering, one in may with my love, a hike that set in motion the then-inconceivable, and a little hike a few months before that, when i summoned, in the same way and for the same reason as 203, a trail-running girl with a very nice figure, whom i did not approach. at the time, i figured it was a simple combination of cowardice and politeness (i know i don't like to be hit on when i'm running. that is, i think i wouldn't. it's never happened. and since i can't see well through my running glasses, i might get in real trouble if i ever responded. ho, grandma!) but now i realize that the summoning i performed that day, which i thought to be an amazing success, was in truth an amazing failure.

subconsciously, i didn't approach the running girl with the nice spandex because i'd summoned the wrong girl. it wasn't until months later, in the same park, on the same trail, that i realized that i didn't just want a new relationship, i wanted a new relationship with her, and no other.

when i got to the "w tree rock scramble", which 203 and i had explored a little when we were there, i headed upstream. well, upstreamwards, as there was no stream to stop me this time, as there had been when i was there with the to-be-203. i scrambled up and over rocks, executing 1 or 2 "technical" moves when i found the opportunity, though there were very few rocks that would support them, much less necessitate them. after the gps said i'd traveled about a mile, and when i "felt" as though i was near Rattler Gate, I found a nice-ish hill heading in the proper direction. it was thin with poison oak -- i reflected that i'd prefer a dense forest of PO because it's obvious and easy to avoid, whereas the occasional poison shrub is harder to notice. still, i made it up the steep, crumbly hill mostly without incident. once at the top, i found that i was pretty much where i though i'd be: Rattler's gate. I ate one of my sangwiches in prep for the steep ascent. Also, it was lunchtime.

I spent a lot of time on the hike remembering the first week after my hike in this park with 203. i don't remember the sequence of our trips -- we traveled a lot around the bay area -- and i don't remember any of our conversation on that explosive R night. but i remember nothing more clearly than the first time i told her i love her.

i played the scene in my head as i climbed the hill.

sometimes, i think, my life seems to be going so smoothly and easily that i forget how hard i'm actually working to make it go so smoothly and easily.

that far-off post-hike evening and post-hike-day-evening represent some sort of event in my life that i still have trouble classifying. i won't inflict upon you, dear reader, another boring analysis, but i will say this: nothing in my life since (and probably before) was so powerful as her touch that night, and since then, all my actions, all my words, all my promises, kept and to-be-fulfilled, simply flowed as if what we have built is a luge of some sort for my life.

i've got it easy and i know that. that doesn't make it any easier.

that's the sort of stuff i come up with on the trail, or post-hike, in this case.

i got to "the rock" and turned back. i don't want to ascend it again until i'm with 203, with whom i originally ascended. on that high place, an echo of where my desert forebears worshipped so many centuries ago, the spirit of my fate was near, and i did not know her. but the next time i stand atop that sunny rock, i'll have 203 with me, and i'll once again change the past.

but the "artists" thereof really ought to refrain from lyricizing. to wit:

"i touched your skin/i smelled your sin/now i'm crying
i touched your skin/i smelled your sin/my love for you is dying"

omfg.

this is who and why i am going to marry.

another birthday, another blog post.

things are a little different from last year, not to mention the year before that.

i'll go to sleep alone, and i'll wake up alone.

but that will be the end of it. that won't happen 11/14/2007.

brutal honesty: i hesitate posting to entries in which i proclaim my "love" for someone other than 203. it doesn't feel right, somehow. and yet, that is my story. that is where i was, who i was, what i was back then. back then i could celebrate my squat milestone as i saw my future slipping away through my helpless fingers like a 350lb deadlift. as i saw 203 preparing to become 203 and me preparing to become alone.

i like to listen to guitar solos and interpret them. i found an album in my mp3 collection, by a group named "Solar Project". There's a track called "Time (Part 2)", to which I have been listening for about a week. I listened to it as I drove into JTree, as I drove around JTree, as I drove home from JTree, as I drove to meet my love, as I drove to depart from her, as I drove to and from my new friend the climbing gym, and even as I write this right now. I set myself a deadline that I would *know* the guitar solo's meaning by the end of today, and as i hit "rewind" one last time, I think I have it.

the song itself is a 5 minute guitar solo followed by some crappy lyrics. the solo speaks a different story than the lyrics. it starts off with thunder, and the guitar and cymbals and keyboard are quiet, near silent, and slow.

lonely.

they reflect upon their loneliness and live in it. they absorb it. they exude it. they *know* loneliness and sorrow. and then, they find something. a mystery. a way out. a future. the tempo picks up. the chords are played more forcefully. drums come in. the music strives for the future, for its escape from loneliness. it won't be done through quiet, sad reflection, but through decisive action.

it is a self-sustaining reaction.

as the soloist finds strength in his music, the music gains strength from the soloist. tentatively, it dares to soar, and finds it can fly. rejoicing, the drums join in, fading in from near-nothing to pounding thunder as the guitar finds just how far its wings will take it. as it unfolds itself into life it sees off into the future and cries out in happiness not for where it is but for where it knows it can take itself with what it has found....

and then, it's over.

nothing lasts forever

not even 28 years.

i sit here, listening to meaningful music, doing what i love to a keyboard, my own humble instrument, sipping my favorite rye (who's like us?), and reflecting on my own impending future: less than a month off.

closer than the distant thunder.

closer than loneliness.

i didn't squat any fancy weight today. i didn't even exercise. i'll squat tomorow but it won't be much.

but my gads, man, have i changed even just in one short year. i said something to my mom this last weekend on my visit, when i'd returned from bouldering and soaring above the cloudless skies of joshua tree, i said: "i realize now that you had no parenting manual, that you were making it all up as you went along."

i enjoyed hornby's "high fidelity" precisely because the main character undergoes many of the same realizations, the same epiphanies, the same understandings of growing up that i am undergoing. i reckon i'm doing it rather late in my life, but i reckon some people never do it at all, so maybe i'm not so bad off.

the trick to all of life is nothing more than what they've always said: believe in yourself. i am a man, not a boy, because i believe i am. i'm making it up as i go along, but for a long time now, i've been imitating a man, rather than a boy, so much so that i've now become convincing enough at it that i believe it myself. i'm very nearly an adult.

but as i commune with the repeating guitar and keyboard, i know that i am more than just that. i haven't (yet?) lost the important things, the boyish things, the innocence, the hope, the faith that things will keep on getting better even as they get worse. like the solo, i realize that what i've got is not nearly so important as where it can take me, if i put it to proper use.

at last, the kings of edom are being brought to balance.

nearly two years later i know exactly what i meant. the keys are scattered all around (silvia??!!?!?!?!?!!?) and they are not so hard to grasp.

but you see,

you see,

something's different.

i didn't squat today. i didn't fall down in the shower. i didn't write a whiney obfuscated piece about how i wished i had the fucking testicles to dump a girl i don't like and find one i do.

because this year, i'm a man. i've got just those testicles. and if i didn't happen to have the most perfect woman i could ever hope to have, what i do have is the confidence and self-respect to dump whatever non-perfect i was with and get on with things.

<crickets chirp>

yeah. i've got the testicles and the woman. (and the rye and the neverending solo.) i'm growing still. true, the writing isn't coming along as well as i'd like -- but the blogging is. and i'm climbing. and i'm socializing, something i've never done satisfactorily. i'm traveling, however modestly (still more than Kant ever did, apparently). i'm more refined. i'm stronger. i'm smarter, better, and above all, happier.

i was born in thunder, and now i soar above loneliness and muck on wings of rubber and music, looking at not where i've been or even where i am, but where i dare imagine that i can go.

i have not a single shred of sadness or self-delusion about my 29, and it could not be better.

i am the surprising, experimental, non-traditional off-note in my own guitar solo.

i am the wailing railing cry of down-fret defiance.

i am the steady drums of the future.

i am 29 and gray and i like it that way. i'm still getting better. how about that?

that is all.

I was alone, I took a ride,
I didn't know what I would find there
Another road, where maybe I, could see another kind of high there

Ooh, then I suddenly see you,
Ooh, did I tell you I need you
Every single day of my life

You didn't run, you didn't lie
You knew I wanted just to hold you
Had you gone, you knew in time, we'd meet again
For I adore you

Ooh, you were meant to be near me
Ooh, and I want you hear me
Say we'll be together every day

Got to get you into my life

What can I do, what can I be,
When I'm with you I want to stay there
If I'm true I'll never leave
And if I do I know the way there

Ooh, then I suddenly see you,
Ooh, did I tell you I need you
Every single day of my life

Got to get you into my life
Got to get you into my life

I was alone, I took a ride,
I didn't know what I would find there
Another road where maybe I could see another kind of mind there

Then suddenly I see you,
Did I tell you I need you
Every single day...

i heard some fool on the radio this morning whining about how his pet ballot initiative didn't go the way he wanted to because the electorate didn't understand the issues.

welcome to democracy, 'tard. that's the way it works. the uneducated hordes are compelled to vote by the bleeding hearts and the corrupt industrialists and they go do their things, much the way i did my thing yesterday, and then the corrupt politicians clean up the mess by giving construction contracts to their cronies.

that's the way it's always been and i lost my idealism in high school that it would ever be any different.

the problem with pointy headed intellectuals is that they think they'll do better as rulers than the anti-intellectual 'tards we tend to elect. wrong. tyranny is tyranny no matter who the tyrant. a swell recent example is B. Clinton, who by all accounts was a genius of some sort, certainly not a mental midget like our current executive figurehead. yet what was he able to accomplish? and of what he accomplished, how much remained once we swept him out to be replaced by a dunderhead?

in the long run, the dunderheads always win, because they are trained in the use of firearms. it's been that way since the first ape picked up the first rock and committed the first murder. then he jumped around the black monolith and we cut to the present.

okay, let's pretend we could elect a real genius into the newly minted office of american dictator (since there's no chance we'll ever pack both houses of congress with people that are both non-corrupt and non-morons, it seems the best we can ever do it one or the other, and rarely even that). like most geniuses, he'd end up whiningly frustrated (just like the dude on the radio, whom i doubt was any sort of genius) that the great masses of lunkheads just can't see what he sees and why can't they all be as smart as him and realise that his crap doesn't stink and we should really just go along with his plans because he's sooooo smart?

geniuses make poor leaders. this has been proven endlessly through history and most abundantly in the recent history of the silicon valley.

what i don't understand is why people can't see this?

also, my crap doesn't stink.

i tried to withdraw $200 from the dieblod ATM downstairs.

it recorded my transaction as a vote for George W. Bush.

Curses!

so often, the most important parts go unsaid.

at the core of my pessimistic philosophy of the world and how it works, candide is fertilizing his garden.

don't worry, be happy.

To lead a better life I need my love to be here...

Here, making each day of the year
Changing my life with a wave of her hand
Nobody can deny that there's something there

There, running my hands through her hair
Both of us thinking how good it can be
Someone is speaking but she doesn't know he's there

I want her everywhere and if she's beside me
I know I need never care
But to love her is to need her everywhere
Knowing that love is to share

Each one believing that love never dies
Watching her eyes and hoping I'm always there

I want her everywhere and if she's beside me
I know I need never care
But to love her is to need her everywhere
Knowing that love is to share

Each one believing that love never dies
Watching her eyes and hoping I'm always there

To be there and everywhere
Here, there and everywhere

i voted today. after my own particular idiom, i voted as a true american. i went in, refused to use the electronic republican voting machine ("are you intimidated by technology?" the snot nosed motherfucker asked me), and voted the party line on all candidates with a listed party, voted for smaller gov't everywhere else, and voted to stick it to my hated minority group.

i came away even more convinced than ever that democracy, particularly the one we've got here, is a complete farce. the only thing i knew about the people i voted for was their names and parties, and i'd never heard of any of them, except for our current governator, and him only because he's the star of the greatest movie ever made in the history of the universe. the rest? who? the initiatives or propositions or whatever the hell they were that i voted on, all i knew of them was what i could squeeze out of the 5 sentences on the ballot.

please tell me that what i did was irresponsible. please tell me that what i did was different from what > 50% of all voters do. please tell me that my uninformed vote is any less legitimate than your well-researched thoroughly-contemplated stringently-considered vote.

you'd be wrong, especially if my vote gets counted and yours doesn't. what good is all your research now?

i think in an ideal society, voters would take the time to educate themselves on "the issues". but this isn't an ideal society, and the mass of voters either don't bother to educate themselves or draw the wrong conclusions from their education. do i really need to cite evidence for this?

so, riddle me this, batman: what's the point of voting if well-informed votes get drowned in a smelly sea of uninformed, wrong-conclusion votes? there isn't a point. but i'll do it anyhow.

i don't watch tv. i don't read sample ballots. really, i don't have a lot of hope for "the system", and here's why:

each election season, more people are mobilized to vote to keep gay people from marrying than are mobilized to do any gorram thing about ending war, hunger, cancer, or corporate tax fraud.

get it? with all the bloody chunder going on in the world, including pederast republican congressmen and crank-addicted homosexual evangelical ministers (see? i do keep up on the news), here in CA, we're voting on whether we should use car tax money to pay for road repairs. what? the ship is sinking and we're worried about how the useless politicians we elect will spend their ill-gotten tax dollars?

why not just elect responsible people in the first place?

because we as a species are incapable of doing such a thing.

one of my coworkers said that on issues on which he is not well informed, he withholds his vote. i used to subscribe to this philosophy as well. now, i see that it is idiocy, although no greater idiocy than not withholding a vote. for every issue on which i, the responsible voter, admit that i am unqualified to vote, 100 decidedly unqualified people will "make their voice heard." every time i say "i didn't read all of the studies, i haven't formed a polished opinion, i won't vote on that", twenty high school dropouts have had their positions handed to them by a tv commercial or a robocall or a talk radio host and "rock the vote" on a highly complex, intricately worded piece of incomprehensible legislation.

here's something: i didn't bother to put much effort into my civic duty this time around because that's what our civic duty has become. we as a nation have put so much effort on "get out the vote" that we've forgotten that a successful democracy requires 1) honest politicians and 2) intelligent voters. we tell every doofus with a driver's license that they should vote and then we pummel everyone in the state with hollywoodized ad campaigns to confuse every little issue to the point where nothing makes sense any more.

at the end of it all, a democracy still depends on honest politicians and intelligent voters.

which of those things have we got?

really? then why are we voting on a law to tax corporations to fund political campaigns?

don't we have more important problems to tackle? still no cure for cancer!

speaking of cancer, i decided today to participate in the tyranny of the majority. i picked a group that i generally dislike and voted for legislation that would harm them. ain't democracy grand? i didn't do anything "wrong" or out of the ordinary -- that's what the system's for. don't like it? i've "earned" my "right to complain". all i had to do was check some little boxes. viva freedom!

i could go on and on with emotional arguments about the futility of voting when all we can vote for is laws or politicians, two groups of things which have never brought net benefit to the planet. but whining about the pointlessness of voting is even more silly than actually voting, much less thinking that voting matters.

meet the new boss, same as the old boss.

i like how i put that above right there, ya know? i'll say it again: as long as what we're voting for is laws and politicians, we'll never get anywhere. i was talking with a coworker this morning about some passage of Mathew, I don't recall the exact one. He quoted it and applied it aptly to the current world situation, particularly the behavior of the most recently outed gay tweaker john minister, and i pointed out that not only were the writers of the NT astute students of human behavior, human behavior hasn't changed all that much since NT times, especially the behavior of human priests and politicians.

they're still after the same thing: more rules, more power for themselves.

nobody feels that they need more rules governing their own lives, but we certainly need more laws governing how they are allowed to behave, for many values of "they". so we elect the same old same old to do their thing to oppress/liberate "them", while "they" do the same, and before you know it, we're arguing about who should be allowed to live where (why pay for jail for sex offenders when they can become productive members of society (i.e. priests), so long as they're NIMBY?) or put what in which orifices or pay for whose kids to learn self-esteem rather than spelling, while meanwhile people who thought they were going to go to college are getting limbs blown off for... what again?

so what should we do about it all? hell if i know. i am reminded of my very first theological argument from grade school.

troy the athiest: there is no god.
me: oh yeah? then who created all the people and all the trees?
troy the athiest: i don't know, but it wasn't god!
me: so you admit that god exists!

this illustrates two things: the sort of dreck that passes for "political argument" these days, reminiscent of grade school sophistry, where sides are more interested in "winning" -- or at least demonizing their opponnents -- than coming to any sort of useful consensus, and the fact that just because you know what the wrong answer is, you're not obliged to proffer the proper answer.

after all, there may not be one. some problems have no solution.

perhaps we're all on the kobiyashi maru.

the more i talk to people i know and find out what they're doing with their lives
the more i'm happy to have been so lucky to have stumbled into what i've stumbled into
by fate or happenstance i managed to net more than i had hoped to have
and while my friends and peers may be happy in their own way, their ways are decidedly not my way
and what they have is not what i want
what i have is what i want, and what i want is what i have
i think, perhaps i fool myself, that i know and focus on what is important in life
but after all is mumbled and sold, and hands are waved and squints blinked
so much of everything depends on luck and fortune

i made my luck to some extent, i suppose -- after all, i narrowed my "dating pool" significantly to exclude all but my people. but this is what we all do, after all. how was i to know that beyond that narrow intersection of hobbies we'd find so much more to bind us?

as the siren of the woods wails her lament to me i smile, blessed. how lucky i am.

When I told my pa last night that I bought a Mac, he responded with incredulity, claiming that I had refused consideration of a full scholarship for a double major at UC Irvine on the grounds that it was an all Macintosh CS program. I don't remember that, but I do remember that I turned down the Banana Slugs because our campus tour guide proudly claimed that UCSC had returned a million dollar donation on account of the donor had stipulated the funds be used to create a Ronald Reagan library. I was an idiot (read: Republican) in those days, so it's entirely plausible that I turned down UCI because of their CS hardware.

After all, I chose my actual alma mater because it was the only one where I'd get ethernet in the dorms.

No, really. It's true. I told you I was a 'tard back then.

Still, things turned out all right, after all, had I been a banana slug, I'd never have stumbled upon my holy beach, never have stumbled upon my 203, never have stumbled upon a lot of things. On the other hand, had I not dismissed UCB without even a visit on account of Rush Limbaugh didn't like it much, I might have come around to an all-BSD shop quite a bit earlier than this weekend.

Which brings us to the topic of this post: my humble abode is now 100% BSD.

Several weeks ago I purchased a MacBook. I've waited a while to get a feel for it before posting the inevitable review. Here's the inevitable review in bulleted form.

the good

whelp, it's been 2 weeks or so now and i still haven't made a post aboot how great mac os x is.

so here's just a little bit of goodness: i turned the blog's visitation countdown list into a dashboard widget. now if i'm near valis and wonder how many minutes are left until my love and i are (re)united, i just tap the f12 and there it is, along with my calendar and all the other useful defaults.

it took me a long time to figure out that my http response object was hosed because i was missing a key in my plist. sigh. i got it eventually though. once i'd had a little brain food snack.

i loves me the archovies!.

for today, for this evening, for this week, for this month, all i have are memories, and pictures, and pictures of memories, and memories of pictures. pictures of the long past and pictures of the short past, all of which are pictures of the recent past, so very long ago. looking at the ones from once upon a time upon a beach at here or there, i see a different person and a different pair of people. a very different romance looks out at me from my screen and i wonder if the difference is in the picture, the memory, the memory of the picture, or simply in my imagination. those days are gone when my arm would drape lazily, hesitatingly, awkwardly, askingly across her form, those days are gone when her smile is tentative, and wondering, full of hope only and questions many, and unfamiliar and unsure. could be those things were never in her smile after all but only in my eyes that saw the smiles long ago, but in the pictures recent and the memories so clear i see none of those things in her smile and none of those things in my posture and none of those things in my eyes. my arms embrace her because that is what they're for, her smile beams comfortable and secure because thursday is not the end.

never is the end, we see, in her smile and in my stand, my beam, my gladness, and her laugh, as the camera captures the memories and the memories of the pictures change. the past comes alive and reveals new secrets, new smiles, new hugs, new meanings inside meanings, as the present is lived 3.5 horus at a time. 3.5 by 3.5 by 3.5 adds up so quickly, never soon enough but soon enough it will seem as 3.5 alone and not a million times over. and then some day, some 3.5 by 3.5 far off in the future, we will look together at the pictures from today, our memories, and our memories of the pictures, and our pictures of the memories, and we will laugh: see us there? see how awkward we were back then, when we were only beginning?

beginnings shift as 3.5s compound. as time goes on and the memories and pictures multiply the span of the beginning grows. looking back now and seeing how shallow then was our deep love, how much deeper it will be when looking back to now we judge the now to have been shallow.