Zu Nord!

To the north indeed. This weekend is the annual trip to Orr, and I'm stoked. Weeks of office zombery, some really bizarre situations with friends and family, and probably the worst sleep I've been getting in two years has combined to make me one frayed-out white boy.

I'm really glad my parents took me traveling when I was little. I still think camping is fun (though I hate the spiders in some areas) and I loved canoe trips to the boundary waters when I was younger. I haven't gone on one in SO long, but it seems like an idea that will have to wait for a little while.

There's something about Sheep Ranch Road that makes me think of the time I spent as a kid out in the woods. Admittedly, we have this crazy awesome hunting cabin with actual beds and a generator (still no running water, but that's fine - we use beer) to make it cushier, but that's not what it's about. It's about all of us (maybe thirteen of us this year, phew) getting away from the cities and doing whatever the hell we want. I'm looking forward to putting my grandfather's rifle through its paces again, it's a fun little thing.

I'll never forget that first trip. All of us thought we were adults, sitting outside near a fire or in that tiny shack and playing card games, with no idea of what real life was like. Everyone was leaving for basic training/boot camp soon, the rest of us were going to college, and everything seemed big and limitless and scary. The night after we played frisbee - I've never seen so many stars, a sky so bright. It was like a sunrise, but it was just the light of the stars and the moon. I could have watched it for hours, had I not hated the skeeters and gotten creepy vibes after half an hour. Still, when I think of the first trip, I think of that night without fail. I think Brandon also fell off the bunk that time.

This trip has become a huge part of our adult life, and it started right after we graduated. Everyone has rituals that sets them apart from the world, and this one is ours. One weekend a year to just go do things that we can't do in the cities - shoot guns, play paintball, drink ourselves sick and then scarf mounds of amazing food for pennies on the dollar. Last year's trip was great, because we added quite a few more people than we ever had before. This year will be better - Pfeffer is coming out from Cali, and I plan to make sure he remembers why he's one of us.

The main question: can I hold out until friday? We'll see.

Also, I'm considering posting a journal of the life of an office zombie. I'll munch on that one for a while.

Some days.

Some days just ain't so easy.

Every day people do things they know better than to do. Whether they lie, fib, omit the truth, forget to clean the bathroom, drive on an empty tank and get stranded on the road, stay up until 3 AM on a workday because they were at a casino....

I'm fascinated by gray. That shade that isn't black and white, but that horrible real-life mixture of both that is everywhere and everything. I envy people that can see in monochrome. To be on the Hitchcock end of the television spectrum. I really, really wish that things were so easy. In Star Wars, there were characters that I found far more interesting than the others. Though Occam wants his razor to help us, the reality is that life is never so simple.

What's equally interesting is how much the phrase "hindsight is 20/20" holds true and still manages to piss you off. It doesn't matter if you should have known better, it still happened. Smug fuckers like me walk around with their heads in they air, pretending like they're helping you by being superior and telling you how you could have worked it out. Lots of people have better relationships than anyone they know, and are healthier than their friends. Opinions are like assholes - they spike their hair and drink jagerbombs. (That's how that goes, right?)


Cryptic emo bullshit. God, I'm everything I hate in the world. You know what, little blog? Let's try being honest instead of stupid. I have friends that read these and laugh, so let's just tell the truth. Someone I cared for hurt me today, and I knew it was going to happen. I'd say something jaded like "it usually does", but that's not true. I manage to stumble through life really easily sometimes, to the point where I've been told that I only succeed because I'm lucky. If this is luck, you can have it. I'm sick to death of it.

What's worse is that I can already tell that it's going to make me bitter, which is what I really need right now. I have a new job that I feel like leaving to go vomit, and I'm lying to my boss about having a migraine because it's easier than explaining things in reality. What am I, 12? (there's suddenly a conveniently placed kleenex box here. I am immediately suspicious of angelic intervention, but don't say that out loud.)

I love that I get to pretend to be adult about this, while she gets to post sad things on facebook and watch all the little boys who want to screw her try to make her feel better. If it works, great, a douchebag thinking with his penis and who lives and breathes ulterior motives are your real friends.

If I didn't have a coffee appointment after work I'd go home and get shitfaced until I had to wake up tomorrow morning. You know what? Fuck this. No one reads the blog, no one cares, and I'm a baby. I'm going to shut my trap, get back to work, and go home like a normal fucking adult. If I swear more it makes me feel better, so I'll just drop f-bombs under my breath all day, like that guy who pushes a cart down Grand Ave. full of junk.


At least I won money at Mystic Lake last night. I've never won money at a casino before. Always end on a positive note, right? That's how this works. I'm a cynical optimist, after all. Look on the sunny side of the compost heap. The glass is half empty, but that's because it's full of maggots, and no one likes maggots. Well, no one who hasn't got gangrene.

Fuck.

Islands in a Sea of Time

FILE 10012: Playback

I watch listlessly as the ships pass me by, riding the sea of Time. Graceful ladies, gliding across a dance floor that no man can touch, lest he wither and die.

Look at me. This is what happens when any sense of how normal time passes disappears. You wax poetic and weepy like some lovesick teenager. I'm not a poet, I'm a sailor of Time's Ocean who got marooned for something that wasn't his fault.

My island isn't that remarkable, considering the wonders I saw in my time as a sailor. At first the broken-down skyscrapers fascinated me, the crashed airship amazed me. A rusted geschunterlofter (whatever the hell that is) sticks its jagged "fingers" up into the sky, sheltering me from the wind when the skinny palms on my beach are too weak to. I took wonder with me into my exile, and for a few months (years, decades, seconds) it was my armor against insanity. Now I stare at the husks of a forgotten age, the remnants of tomorrow's yesterdays, and all I can think of is how cruel it was that they left me food and water to last a lifetime (week, day, epoch).

"You've brought this on yourself," the captain said. "You have only yourself to blame," the engineer told me. "It's a mercy, and one you don't deserve at that," spat the helmsman. You'd think I'd killed their mothers rather than rid them of the vicious carbuncle that was that boatswain, the way they stood in judgment of me. He'd stripped the flesh off of us in stripes that would shame a tiger, and stolen our food to boot. He'd sassed the captain, struck the engineer, and spit on the helmsman, and they were leaving me on my island in the Sea of Time to thank me.

Time's Ocean is not as beautiful as you are told. The colors that are written about do not do it justice, truly. They are colors you have never seen before, and they are terrible. You cannot describe them properly to someone who has not seen them, either. How would I describe to you the color of the distant past? The colored band that flows at the top of Time that could be either futures yet to come or futures that never will is a violent shade, an eyesore to bake your retinas and scratch your lenses. It's not a green, a red, a violet or a fuschia. It's..... monstrous.

Occasionally I hear voices pass in the night. Chronoships, cruising by, their crews giddy with excitement or heady with drink, thinking of plunder or discovery. My crew was kind enough to maroon me on the Island Closest to the Nexus, but we all know what it really is. This little prison of mine is the junk heap to the Ages, and it gets far more traffic than it should.

Every day (hour, minute, millions of years), more flotsam and refuse from Time washes ashore. On one occasion, I found an outdated portable toilet. On another, a wallet-sized computer that told me how many neurons were firing in my brain at once. Two bodies washed up (yesterday) a while ago, sailors that fell overboard. One of them had the head of a small child, the arm of a crone, and the breasts of a young woman. She must have fallen from a great height to be caught in so many Time currents at once. The other was clearly a Floater, uniformly aged beyond his years into a mummified husk by drifting on a current made solely of one timestream. He must have chosen.... poorly.

I can see the second island nearer to the Nexus from the top of the airship's crumbling frame. It's little more than a zit on Time's watery ass from here, but it still makes me giddy. It's South of my island and perhaps a bit East. Were there nighttime in this abyss I could tell for sure, but there is no sun here. Only the pulsating light of the Nexus. If my words confuse you, whoever finds this, North is any direction leading straight away from the Nexus. To find East and West, you must simply put your back to the Nexus and hold out your arms. West is clockwise from the nexus, and East counter-clockwise. Still, the island looms, tantalizingly close. If I can see it, I might be able to get there.

No, no, mustn't say it, mustn't think it. Shouldn't write it. No man, no woman, no creature can survive Time's flow unshielded. Even the great chronophobic ships that I used to sail could only protect themselves for so long. Time wounds all heels, they say, and every ship's chronofield will wear and fade if not tended to. Still, I can feel the rat that is madness gnawing its way into my heart, and the pull of Time is growing stronger. How easy it would be to leap off the cliff overlooking the condemned skyscrapers, to dive into Time as if it were merely a salty sea. I suppose I could even enjoy the experience, my body aging faster or slower by degrees depending on which currents were ravaging my frame. Who knows - I could find the legendary Static Stream and be preserved for eternity (until I reached the Nexus), a testament to the barbarism that rules a chronoship's crew.

I have no idea how long the power will last on this little device. I cannot read the glyphs on its surface, but a likely symbol seems to be half full. Of course, that could just be an indication that I'm half dead, for all I know. If it dies, it won't be my fault. No more than that bastard boatswain's death was my fault. I never meant to kill him. If I had, I would have made it clean. Not..... not like it was. No man deserves that fate.

Gasp! No, no, nonononono! How am I to survive?

Oh, wonderful. Thank you, tiny machine, for recording EVERYTHING that comes out of my mouth, rather than just what I want you to show. Too late now to make me sound less of a craven fool. As is clearly indicated by what I assume is a language scrolling across the screen of my companion (that's what I call this device now, it's the only thing here that gives a semblance of intelligence), it wrote down my panicked cries.

There's a Time Storm brewing to the North. I can see the bands raising up and outward, spiraling out of the Sea like a hand grasping at the sky. I don't even know if my little island is made of Rock - it might just be stone. If it is, I'm doomed for sure. I could be swept away and swallowed, island exile and all. If it is Rock, I may just have a chance...

Of course. The geschunterlofter. I knew I had recognized some of the plating on its "fingers". Bear with me, little companion. I may be able to build us a 'phobic shelter.

file corrupt, processing
* * *
resuming playback
-ays to me. So I kicked her down the stairs, and she never brought it up again.

Wait. Hold still, companion. Can you hear it? I think the storm is over. Yes, it is. Gods..... our island home has been torn asunder. Apparently there was some Rock to our exile after all, but not enough. We ourselves are safe, but I fear that the island has too little to sustain us. It's a good thing you reminded me to bring in the food and water (are you truly learning my language? remarkable!) when you did.

Still, most of the flotsam is gone. No more tools at easy access, no more alien devices and ancient writings to occupy my time. Not that I despise you, dear device, but I fear that if it were just you and I you would bore of me and deactivate.

My island is shredded. The sands and stone have vanished, replaced with the ravages of Time's Sea. We have but a small space left, and I'm afraid it's not enough. Look, little device, do you see? The Time Storm has left our neighbor island untouched. And this shelter of ours was malleable enough to be made into a hut, and has proven chronophobic after all. Perhaps...

... steel yourself, little pilot of the palm. Soon we shall attempt to craft a skiff to brave the currents. Our time on this little island has come to an end.

END PLAYBACK

Sisyphus had an attitude problem

Let's stop and think about this one for a moment. Sisyphus was doomed to roll a boulder up a hill for eternity. The minute the boulder reached the top, it would roll back down again immediately, and he would have to start over. He could not cease his torment, nor could the boulder ever reach the top.

Zeus punished him thus for his hubris in tricking the gods. Sisyphus died not once, or twice, but THREE times because he was so sneaky. When Thanatos, the god of death, tried to chain him, he convinced Thanatos to show him how the chains worked. This resulted in the god of death being imprisoned, and no one dying for a good long while. "Consequences will be dire."

I'll bet he got pretty cut after a while, eh? Low caloric intake, constant use of stabilizer muscles, etc.

It was on my way into work today that I realized that I hate the treadmill. Run as fast as you can, just to stay in place. I don't mean a physical treadmill that you use at the gym - even that has a point. The metaphorical, sisyphean treadmill that is the job market. Everyone is scrambling to get low-income jobs to get experience in a field. The field you want requires experience, so you can't get a low-income job on the ground floor until you have experience. You go to school to get experience and a good knowledge base for your field - and by the time you're done, you have so much debt it's hard to get a place to live, let alone a career you want. Somewhere along the line, you're expected to find a partner with which to limp along with, and do it all over again with your kids.

Something is missing. Something isn't right. Life is consistently giving us lemons, and we're not doing anything about it but flooding a saturated market with lemonade. We need to break out of the mold, Cave Johnson-style.

Can the myth of Sisyphus give us perspective on this? Definitely. King Sisyphus was punished for being clever by being doomed to repeat the same action for eternity. He was literally too clever for his own good, and was stuck in monotony for all time.

If this is the outcome to be avoided, then we have to try at all costs to break out of these ruts. Change what's happening in our lives.

Viktor Frankl spoke of logos, the meaning to life. When people told him they were suicidal, he would ask "what do you have to live for?" Not in a cruel or derisive way, but in a way meant to provoke thought. It turned out that the people who were suicidal could not see reason to live. They had, in essence, become Sisyphus. Locked into the same actions, the same cycle, with no reason to break out.

Evidence of this type of psychology at work can be seen in the program in Federal prisons that gives inmates puppies to train. Inmates almost universally reported a change in demeanor, and felt that their prison time had changed in aspect during the program. Cell Dogs, giving meaning to someone without it.

Where is the meaning in your life? Does it have one? I'm still looking for a good one, but that in itself can be a logos. Something that Frankl tried to get his patients to understand was that for mankind, searching for meaning could be meaning enough to move on.

Maybe I just need to find something to do with those damn lemons. Where are my eggheads?

On beauty

There is a very famous argument between Socrates and another man, in which Socrates challenges the man to define piety. I think it was Crito, but I'm not sure. Regardless of the title, the dialogue consists of Socrates showing his opponent that merely referencing other subjects and objects is not sufficient for definition.

Which is why the beautiful is so difficult to relate if you have no common ground. What is it, anyway?

Ask an artist what "beauty" is, and you're likely to get an earful. If you ask Jackson Pollock, he might say that beauty is an event, an action that expresses something. If you were to ask Claude Monet, you might hear of a sunrise over the water. Were you to ask Louis Armstrong, you would get an entire songful. Old Satchmo made a lot of people happy just by singing about the very subject.

These days, all you need is the internet to access what others find beautiful. Regardless of the form of the content, be it audio, visual, some amalgamation of both, even written word, you can find forms of the joy people find in the world around us everywhere. Tumblr in particular is a common form of expression, as is DeviantArt.

Still, it's the curse of the writer to see beauty in places that others usually don't. The film American Beauty was based on such a book, and sticks in the minds of many a moviegoer because of the images that it evoked. Even a plastic bag, dancing in the wind. (I think this one is a bit blah, but I'm just jaded.)

A good question might as well be where isn't there beauty? I'd answer, but good questions make for depressing blogs. Socrates was executed for being a dick, after all, and all he did was ask lots of annoying questions. Since I don't want to drink hemlock any time soon, I think I'll stick to the positive.

What then, is beauty? There are some examples above, but is there more? Of course. Ask yourself what you see, hear, touch, taste, and love in the world around you. What makes it beautiful? Plato thought that the things we find beautiful were that way because they mimicked the real form of capital B Beauty off in la-la-land somewhere. In most cases, I think that Plato's idea of Forms was a bit off, but here he might have something. When put to it, I find beauty in too many things.

A little kid's evil laugh as he uses his Ninja Turtles to give G.I. Joe a beatdown, for example. When someone strange on the internet knows exactly what you do in the shower. 120 dogs howling in unison because all they want to do is run, and their brothers are out doing it while the sun is high and the wind is cold. Landscapes, canyons, caves, birds, life, and cute girls.

One of the lines from Lord of the Rings is also quite true - there are things beautiful and terrible at the same time. Tsunami, earthquakes, volcanic eruptions, hurricanes.... not just natural disasters. Lions hunting prey, space seen from the hubble, the cell structure of a killer virus.

There are a few people in this world uniquely acquainted with the beautiful, and we call them artists, entertainers, and the talented. Seers, oracles, and prophets, sometimes. Sometimes they are leaders, like his holiness the 14th Dalai Lama. Sometimes they are merely pedestrian, a strangely hirsute man who could be anyone else on the street, but writes like a god (Patrick Rothfuss, choff choff).

To Aristotle, capital V Virtue was beautiful. He believed that by aspiring and living towards Virtue itself, we would in turn be virtuous people, inside and out. The self-examined life, is how he phrased it.

Unless you find beauty in death (and sometimes there is), and insist on making things more beautiful by killing (shudder), pursue it. The more people who strive to find the extraordinary in ordinary life in this world, the better. Our lives could all use a little picking up sometimes, couldn't they? All to the better if we can do so in a way that others can see and recognize.

If you read this, I'm glad you're OK, and it was good to hear from you.

Assorted cliches

"Why do we fall down, Master Bruce? So we can learn to pick ourselves back up again."

"One step at a time."

"Take care of the outside and the inside will follow."

"Speak out, don't keep quiet."

"Time heals all wounds, or wounds all heels."

"No man is an island."

"You can do this."

"When you can't run

I hate these. I really hate them. Nothing is more condescending than a platitude given glibly to a genuine problem or hurt, with the exception of when said platitude is right.

Someone I care about is hurting, and had the courage to say something. I did my best, but does it help? I think so. I think that anything can help when people really need you. People everywhere need help every day, myself included. The human is a social animal, we can't live on bread alone, and I'm spewing out trite sayings like a broken record. How do you help? How can anyone help with problems so deep they seem like a black hole you'll never get out of?

Not even Stephen Hawking is positive what happens at the center of a black hole, take comfort in that. Some physicists theorize it could lead to different worlds, different universes. Though a black hole's gravity swallows visible light, energy can escape the accretion disk in the form of x-rays and gamma rays. The same spectrum and base energy form as visible light - it just has to change first.

Cliche's and bad metaphors aside, people need you. They need each other. Sometimes all it takes is one person listening to another because they care. One small gesture of trust can be enough to make a difference. When we're in pain, we don't just hide it. Things slip out of the cracks - all you have to do is pay attention to see it.

Something that stuck with me (I know I'm a cult nerd, get off of it) was the second-to-last episode of Firefly. It's an old saying in a new jacket but still. "If you can't run, you walk, and if you can't walk, you crawl, and if you can't crawl, well..."

"You find someone to carry you."

I know that you're brave. Orlando Jones would be proud of you.


If you read this, I know you can make it. Trust me, I was a salesman.

Swinging at things

like a bad ballplayer who never got the praise, "good eye!" when he let a ball go by.

I'm back in Minnesota, in the cities (or abouts) and in what some people call a "groove". It's strange, my grooves look vaguely like ruts.

I've just started temp work at a law office in the cities, helping out until they complete the laborious process of finding a new office manager. This means I'm in a job where I have a handful of experience, working eight hours a day, and handling extremely sensitive material. I'd never witnessed a will signing before as an official until last weekend. Weird experience.

The lights above the desk are NOT energy friendly, and they're hot as hell. 95% of all energy put into a normal incandescent bulb is wasted as heat, by the way. It's all beating down on my head, even though it's in the sixties outside.

I still work at a restaurant, which is...... well, it's actually fun as hell. I love the staff, and sometimes breaking up a 20 lb slab of home-ground sausage with your fingers feels satisfying. Sometimes you just get greasy, but whatever.

Still, I almost feel as if I'm flailing about in a dark cave while someone ahead of me has a flashlight, but their body is blocking most of the light. It's like those dreams where you're driving a car, only from the back seat, and you can't see over the seat in front of you and you know you're going to hit some helpless baby in the road, doing god knows what on the pavement in his spare time.

Things are bizarre. I help my parents almost daily with a workload that steadily seems to be way too large for a couple nearing their retirement. Five acres, 2-ton branches of oak, entire pine trees falling, and a god-awful amount of yard care is just the beginning. They've redone the bath, the kitchen, and are thinking of new appliances and cars. All this is going to add up to a set of things that need to be done that neither of them want to do, and you can guess how eager I am about it.

Every morning seems cold and foggy (thank you, Minnesota, for this wonderful tribute to feeling happy) except when it's cold and the sun streaks into my window to blind me awake. That's a fun feeling, waking up completely stark blind, afterimages filling your vision for half an hour while you shower and pretend like it wasn't freezing for the first five minutes.

I've been seeing some old friends lately, and it's all kind of surreal. I remember jokes they forgot about years ago, stories that we shared at the time that they think I'm making up. Only one of them, Drew, actually picked up on anything while we were visiting. He makes a great homebrew, by the way. Many different varieties. We've told him to start a business.

Top that off with incredibly warped family problems, a splash of girl trouble, and a not inconsiderable amount of debt accruing from student loans, and all my wonderful direction has been lost. Someone stepped on my sextant when I wasn't looking, and I'm hissy about it. I hope they get scurvy and lose their teeth, and have to walk around with Norm Coleman-ish smiles for the rest of their life, scaring little children with pearly white dentures.

A very good friend is starting a security company. I want to get in on the ground floor, and I have the opportunity, but it's not a joke. You need training, you need dedication, and you have to take it seriously. Because I'm so good at serious, right? If I help out and it becomes a career, what happens to my doctorate? What happens to these tiny plans I love to make? Who knows.

In the meantime, I'm applying for jobs like a down-and-out boxer trying to make a comeback. See my new resume muscles? Manly! I can't lose to these snot-nosed kids who have bigger degrees and more wins under their Gucci belts, I'm the champ. Check me out, I have real-life experience - I don't need to practice my stamina.

Remember my drunk roommate from the two blogs ago? His ghost is chasing me down. Recently I've had to cover for two people (on the same day, ironically) by bending the truth, and I don't like it. Enabling was something I was supposed to get RID of, not recognize more easily and then cave to.

Not to mention some of the weirdest dreams I've had to date have started cropping up. I had a dream that started like 2001: a Space Odyssey. Instead of the monolith towering over monkeys, it was my fridge, towering monolithian over my bed. Same creepy music, but it was my fridge. When I opened the fridge, lights spilled out around the edge in too many colors, a seizure-inducing display worthy of Stanley Kubrik. Just last night I had a dream where the frogs in my window well started to talk in normal tones of voice, explaining that they were tired of being exploited. One finally called a vote, and to my shock and terror, produced a sign reading "First National Union of Pissed Off Frogs". NUPOF. They then proceeded to picket my underground window, banging their little signs against it and shouting in tinny voices that hell no, mos-qui-to.

WHAT?

And nice guys still finish last. Doesn't that just suck. Someone I've been seeing a lot more often suddenly loves to turn that into a pun. Pun or not, it's still true.

I told myself two years ago that I wasn't going to stop swinging for the fences. It's hard not to want to swing at faces sometimes, but I promised myself the fence was the goal. That promise is one I intend to keep. Weird is not that unusual to me (still weird, mind you, just expected at this point) and I've got plenty more chances at bat before the game is over. I proved on that damn mountain that I could move anywhere, make friends, and be a success, and I'm going to beat this if I strike out 20 more times.

Time to nut up or shut up.