Sunday Sundry

It's not over. Merely continuing to evolve, and more interestingly in these interesting times. Serves me right for getting personal on a blog, now I feel like I owe updates.

Really hating on meetings. As I type this I am online with Tokyo and Penang. The subject is not exactly trivial. But I am deeply annoyed at the level of detail people need to launch into. Especially technical detail about a couple of options the customer might choose that we all know in fact the customer will not choose (the customer is a well-known OEM). Oh, management needs to know all the angles! But no, they fucking don't, not if they have any god damn common sense. And they often do, actually. But due diligence is expected of the troops anyway. Maybe I'm just old and cranky and no longer have the patience to weigh all that wasted time against the corporation's expectation that we all execute as programmed.

My neighborhood is not THAT good. The man across the creek who started his own company must for various complex business and personal reasons put his house on the market. That's of interest to the rest of us who wonder what our homes might be worth. But I think we all agree that the price he's asking is a we-e-ee bit of a stretch. Two thirds of it, maybe. If not half. Of course, I wish them every penny of success. And granted, it's a hell of a lot nicer property than ours. But at that price I don't expect any change in neighbors before spring.

Good thing I love classical music. No one else wanted my father's four linear feet of phonograph records. The eye-catchers are classical records with album covers designed in the 1970s. Very colorful, even psychedelic, but still the music of Vaughan Williams, Shostakovich, Dukas, Respighi, et al. Since these records are worth approximately nothing in the vinyl market, my only plan is to digitize them so they might get listened to again, by me. I only mean to do it once in awhile so the project will probably take decades. Is there something else I could do with them?

Not why I got sick! You take your own cup around Burning Man in case someone is serving drinks. By the end of the week mine had held multiple samples of beer, vodka, whisky, wine, coffee and tea. Oh, and water. Other than that I never bothered to wash it. And stuffed into the water bottle holder on my bike, it was also subject to the elements, i.e. a thousand square miles worth of dust blowing around. This is what it looked like by the time we got home. I still think I got sick from talking to some dude who liked leaning in and tended to splutter.

Exciting Lunchtime

I left at twelve eight and went to the big box bookstore. Shelves had been rearranged since my last visit. Books and people filled the space. The books were on lines of shelves. The people were spaced evenly among them. Mostly women, schoolgirls, men of retirement age. Once I walked in I felt like leaving to go find a quiet space to write. But there is no such space, so I stayed.

I found a book in the section for 19th Century American history and took it to a deep and well-worn leather couch. I read about Theodore D. Judah’s career in the 1850s as a brilliant civil engineer. People thought him monomaniacal on the subject of a Pacific railway. Eventually he earned his fame by solving the problem of crossing the Sierras. I learned that as a side job, while in California between bouts of learning how to lobby for railroad funding in Washington City -- a place then obsessed with the looming problem of secession and war -- he laid out the railroad that briefly ran within a mile of my house. Nothing is left of it now but a short causeway in the park, and a cut in someone’s yard down near the old Lincoln Highway bridge.

I am fascinated by details and remnants. I examine the landscape as I pass it by for signs of changes made to its natural flow. An old weed-filled railroad cut excites me. So do the foundations of a long-gone bridge, or a long-forgotten roadbed scarring the hillsides above.

At the end of the chapter I put the book away and went outside. My car radio clock said it was one oh four. Time to go back.

In Which I Ramble On While Hiding Away In A Random Unused Cubicle

Yes, there are tales of Burning Man in the oven, but they are slow going. Mostly because I am slow going. Like most men I don't handle being sick very well. For ex, last night, after a long and (I thought) fairly pointless telephone conference with a customer in Tokyo, I came home so wiped all I could do was nuke some old pizza and crash. The good news: I may have slept ten or eleven hours. The bad: Though I needed the sleep, today I'm not any better. So my brain remains a fairly useless organ, and that's not always bad news if some other organ rises to fill the gap, but alas these days it is my brain and no other that is needed most.

Some of that writing got done on the trip this past weekend, bouncing down I-5 in the back seat of our crew-cab pickup. It was an environment. I've read that more often than not, in order to be productive a writer must create a space to exercise his craft. For me this is certainly true; and it's typical that I've responded to this requirement by doing nothing about it. I have nowhere at home to write. No one's fault but mine, I hasten to add, and now that our number of at-home children has been cut in half I have even fewer excuses. I look forward to fixing that, once I get this done ... and that ... and the other thing ...

Lately I've been daydreaming to distraction about the open road. It seems I want nothing so much as to just hit the highway, with a reasonably dependable car, my little netbook for travel-blogging, and sufficient funds. What funds would be sufficient? I don't know. I hate to spend money on lodging if all I'm going to do is sleep but it seems unavoidable. I would camp a lot to save money. Crash on dark unpatrolled side roads (the Mz and I used to camp in random locations when we were young, it was fun AND free). I don't eat a lot. Maybe I wouldn't need so much. Really, I don't know. Probably the adventure would devolve to hitchhiking and taking buses. Possibly you would never hear from me again. I am quite looking forward to it. Maybe next year I will find a way to make it happen.

Of course, that's false. I would get lonely, and then I would get tired of it all, and then I would go home again. I predict three, four weeks.

I would visit friends, however, friends made via the internet, old friends from school, as well as my cousin, and my brother. Actually, no, I wouldn't get lonely. Not right away.

The meat of such daydreaming remains unwritten. Given the nature of daydreams, that's appropriate.

This open-road daydreaming is a direct response to driving nine hundred ninety nine miles this past weekend, down to the dark side of the state and back. A lot of folks hate I-5 because it goes on for hundreds of miles with little to look at. But all that does for me is make me want more. Not necessarily more of nothing to look at. But there is so much world out there, and so many people in it. Every single person has a story, and every little place too. Everywhere you turn, everywhere you look was the defining space at some moment for some life somewhere; a place of birth or death, of unexpected sex or romance or drama or pain, of hours and hours of brutal life-changing labor. I see worn old scars along the hillside and wonder about the men who spent years making those scars in the course of their lives, lives spent scratching a living the best way the knew how, herding and fencing cattle, building flumes and canals, planting orchards only to find a decade later that the climate just wasn't right for it. The remnants of hay barns, of houses, of dormitories for migrant farm workers long since converted to one-night shelters for itinerant homeless families; and rest stops.

Deep in my distraction I read about rest stops. The state puts these up along the freeways. We've all used them. They're bloody necessary when one is driving for hours and hours. They are also homeless shelters of a sort. Some of the larger ones, it is alleged, are home for entire families living in, say, a camper van that they move every few days while they live off the largesse of other travelers. At our last stop a lady asked for gas money. I said I had no cash. Frankly, if you are in your fifties, you need to have run your life a wee bit better than to depend on guilt-ridden strangers who never learned not to feed the animals, as it were. Sorry, but cold truth: I don't believe in encouraging and enabling destructive behaviors. We are all better than that. And yet it pains me, especially when there are children involved. The world is a huge and very cold place if you are not so fortunate as the rest of us, the rest of us who had a role model or a parent or some means of support while growing into adulthood. Honestly, I've always felt a kinship with the homeless, a kinship yet to be explored and explained. This kinship does not make me more charitable: The homeless are fellow human beings to me, and not merely opportunities for giving. The fact that I get to eat when I want does not translate into a moral need or directive to "give". I see them much more deeply than that, and (this is weird, perhaps) have always felt but a couple of steps away from being one of them myself. Does this explain my less merciful attitude, the fact that I don't see a fence between them and myself? Perhaps subconsciously I see giving to panhandlers as akin to giving myself a break thoroughly undeserved, and every bit as harmful. I don't know, like I said, this is largely unexplored.

I have thought of spending my next extended vacation partially immersed in that world. Talking to people, serving in kitchens, living as though I don't have a credit card and a bank account and can escape whenever I want. Slumming, you call it, and to many it is thoroughly despicable, an opportunity to see how much "better" we are than others, to get insight into how those others somehow "deserve" their unhappy state. Yeah, I don't know. Maybe you're right. In honesty I can't say what my motives really would be.

There is research, of course. One of my reasons for wanting to experience everything is so I can write about it with authority. Imagination is fine, but we've all read novels where the novel situation just doesn't ring true, and others where it does. The difference isn't just in the author's skill. You can tell if he's ever been there, and if he has not. And thanks to life's opportunities, I've been here and there and I have worked those experiences into (NaNoWriMo mainly) attempts at story-telling. But there's more, always so much more.

And if I have to choose between experiencing life and writing about it, I will choose the experience. Let some other poor sod who sits all day do the writing, if that's what it takes.

All right, enough hiding, I'll go back to work now.

Screw Facebook

Yes, I keep going. I have to know what's going on! But are we gossipers, or are we writers? As I make more efficient my real life, I plan to make more time for writing practice, not less; not for Facebook, nor the endless sharing of links that some people's lives have reduced to. Note to peeps who fill Facebook with links to other stuff: I ignore almost all of it.

Why am I writing this note? Moment's distraction. So much to write, no time to do it, but at least now I feel like I wrote something even though I really didn't. Till next time ... !

Jeez, Peeps

Don't panic. I said nothing I wouldn't have said a month or a year ago if I was sick and tired of being sick and tired and didn't care what anyone thought. Mostly tired of watching what I say here. So here's the word: This is a blog, which means it isn't true, except when it is, which means that it isn't. I will be passive-aggressive enough to delete it, though, if anyone I'm related to mentions it to my face.

I'm weird like that.

So we're on the cusp of a major milestone, the younger kid being set to enter dorm life this weekend, and us the loving parents driving him down tomorrow to make it happen. For years and years this has been the milestone before which no decision can be made, no matter what. But no: Hey, we did our job. Parenting's first stage is well and truly done. We can do what we want! Especially if that means get divorced! Yay!

But what if we don't? Will you be disappointed?

The other day, or some day other than that, I don't know, I got analytical about why we stuck it out this long. One, we love each other. Duh. A pretty good pairing. But I've done some stupid shit, and some of it she knows about. She's pulled her pranks too, though I'll be the first to admit none of them were deal-breakers, just fucking annoying consequences of having her personality. So no one's perfect, yet even so I sometimes wondered why I was unable to get within miles of considering a split. I decided it was about passion: I'm impassioned about parents sticking together. Somehow the experience of parents divorcing when I was four coupled with a childhood in which both of them found that ignoring or being ignorant of their responsibilities was a lot easier than actually raising their children (right, this is one of those annoying spoiled yuppie moments where the self-hating "adult" blames it all on his now elderly parents who actually did the best they knew how to do), all that, once understood by having my own parenting experience, led me to a point such that it was simply impossible to do to mine what was done to me, and we stuck it out, and here we are:

Too old to move on, too young to settle.

Thus the dice remain in the air where they've flown for years now. The difference really is that our youngest is an adult now and about to spend the rest of his life living elsewhere. The psychobabblish effect this has on our attitude (well, mine) is immense. I really don't know what's next, I don't always care, but sometimes I do, and most of all it needs writing about. This is very likely the wrong place for it but, once again, with feeling: I don't give a shit.

And so your visit isn't a total loss, here is a recent photograph that nicely summarizes the subject matter.

Dazed, Confused, So On

I am deeply dazed and confused. It seems my job is nearly incomprehensible to me, even though it has become easier and simpler in recent months. It seems my wife is almost complete in her conviction that our marriage has run its course. It seems I am unable to develop any sort of cogent counter-position. It seems I lost ten pounds at the Burn and subsequent illness and am only getting soft and weak as I gain them back. It seems I've had the same headache since I was in a semi-dehydrated state in Nevada two weeks ago. It seems any ability I may once have had to focus on anything that needs doing has left the station for good. It seems my kids know I am on the verge of an explosion yet behave towards me as if everything is completely normal. It seems long-understood concepts of normal living are now grown foreign, and having a job and a place to live or not having a job and a place to live look to me the same. I don't want to alarm anyone, but this isn't the sort of thing you put on Facebook (which I slowly but steadily grow less interested in) or keep to yourself or hide away in a journal if in fact you are trying to quit journaling, so, yeah.

Here's an unrelated or only partially related note that has been on my mind and might as well get noted down here: If you know me personally, I would appreciate it if you never mention that you read this here blog. As a sporadic public diary, it does not exist to provide fuel for polite conversation. It exists in a world of its own, and any and all feedback must occur within that world, i.e. within comments. Whenever someone I know says, "I read your blog ..." I feel an immediate desire to find it and set fire to it and crush the ashes until there is no more evidence that it ever existed. Of course, it being on a Blogger server, that's impossible, and deleting it strikes me as a misguided over-reaction, so typically I forget about it until the next annoying mention. And the next, and so on, so nix on that, here's a note instead. Don't mention it.

You wonder why it's over. I wonder why it wouldn't be, even though I love my wife and want her happy. Loving someone and wanting them happy is a far cry from sincerely desiring their company in every circumstance, and since I don't know what long-term marriages are built on, I don't know what else there is to focus on. Not real charmed at the idea of being an old couple that comfortably ages forward because they've made a good life and can now cruise with it awhile. Lack of passion is lack of life. I've never known an old couple that was happy, barring Art and ML of recent mention, and frankly I wondered about them too, countless times over the past few decades of observation. Besides, I've dropped broad hints in the company of numerous females that things are not what they seem and though I never meant to start anything (nor did I) I'm pretty tired of such half-ass vicarious attempts at adding interest to life. As I've said to Herself, it makes more sense to me than anything to take this midpoint in life, rake it all into a pile, and set it on fire. People who've had this done to them, people who've done it, and people who's lives took a sharp turn simply because they were unable to prevent it all look to me about as happy as the long married couples -- which isn't to say much. Indeed, after we've hit fifty or so and our offspring are in theory able to support themselves, evolution provides no more useful capability or purpose, and frankly I don't think it matters any more what we do. The dice are in hand.

In Case You've Ever Wondered How Big Burning Man Is

I'm almost back from the worst flu of my life. I'm actually at work this week -- I don't give a shit, but I'm here. Last week was a near-total loss. The week before that was spent on another planet, from which tales may or may not emerge. Meanwhile, to mark my potential return to Earth, here is a graphic that gives an idea of the scale of Black Rock City, and why you must have a bicycle and a good pair of walking legs.


Larger, original size here.