Weekday Morning

A pile of emails, follow-up questions, research that could take all morning; documents to proofread full of tables and obtuse register descriptions; a presentation or two to hone; floating above all that the directive to Do More, Do Something Big, so that I get noticed in some positive way and can edge away from the ever-present threat of being perceived as less competitive ... What more to do, though, is never clear. Not to me.

Success in a corporation requires being good at being successful within a corporation. You might say No Duh but many people, many of us, myself, we tend to assume that if we are good at several aspects of our job and bring a unique personality and creativity to meeting the needs of our various customers -- from hallway colleagues to foreign factories -- then we will be successful. We are wrong. Those things must be done. But the differentiation between the successful and the not-so have little to do with the work actually done or the cheer and humor we managed to bring with it.

I'm leading up to what does make people successful. I'm not getting there. I really don't know. There is a vague concept floating just out of reach of making the right impressions on the right people -- ensuring the next level of management knows who you are and not for the wrong reasons -- but I can't quite grasp it. It doesn't make sense to me. Work makes sense to me: Explaining architectural details, debugging failures, controlling the public documentation. Protecting my position in the annual ranking and rating does not make sense to me and I am finally old enough to know it never will.

So I look at my screen and I am filled with a wish to inform and entertain, not the next level of management, but real people, people who like to read, people who would like to read what I have to say if only my mind was quiet enough to choose what needs saying and to find the words that work best for it. The capability is in there. Most of us have it, really. Everyone has an amazing story to tell and most people have many. The trick is in molding that internal clay into an external sculpture, a thing of beauty, wisdom, strength. Only so many of us are driven to do that and though the capability is in there, it is buried under years and years of trying to grasp how to be good at being successful within a corporation. That's a different sort of creativity altogether.

Today, I feel I've tried to trade one sort of creativity for the other, only to find I've cut one in half just to bring the other up halfway and can not succeed at either one. So I'll go downstairs to the cafe now, breakfast on a few things, and come back to at least do the things I know how to do. There's more than enough of that to fill the day.

Writing about Whining and Whining about Writing

Part I

Where have all the writers gone? Gone to Facebook, every one. I think they've given up on the social aspect, the groupthink. Remember the camaraderie we used to share? The wit? Gone. A writer hooking up into Facebook and all its games and article-sharing is like a mathematician on a daily dose of sloe gin. Was blogging not as bad? Was it a shot of caffeine, or just thin hot chocolate? It did provide a challenge. The challenge was to produce some quality every few days. Few ever met it. Most everyone seems to have given up.

A few still write. Away from the crowd, as perhaps it should be done. NaNo should be that way. I will go to coffee shop meetups because I need social interaction, to feel a part of things. But writing is essentially solitary.

I'm guessing the bloggers decided either they would ride the Facebook to nowhere or would just get their writing done and quit talking about it. I hope so. Writing is all I want to do when it comes to brain-work.

I want NaNoWriMo to start and the rest of the world to end.

Part II

Writing is all I want to do when it comes to brain-work. I falter at my job (or so it feels sometimes) because it requires studying technical stuff and collaboration with other people on technical stuff. But when I light the fires under my brain it doesn't lean that way. No, it wanders off in search of dreams to mold, and characters to build, and vibrant language. It's a daily chore to switch the train over onto the right track and chug it up to speed. Today, that didn't happen. All my train did was crawl out of the shed, take a slow turn around the yard, and idle at the back edge, leaking steam.

And it's no secret and I don't care who knows it. My old brain is just plain tired of trying to fit. That engine wants to get lifted out of the old iron frame that hauls freight around on rails and settle into something light and buoyant and start tracing words and music into the ripples of a trackless sea.

This is a bad attitude. I want my boys to get through college without any financial hitches and so crank away, crank away, crank away is what I need to do just like everyone else. Just like everyone else. It's funny: Part of me is still the youngest child who thinks he is special and unique and can get away with relative poverty because no one needs to depend on him. The major portion is of course a man engaged with the world in some productive way who knows we are all in the same boat together and thus holds the deliberately unproductive (this includes lazy and/or under-talented writers) in low esteem. This tension won't go away.

And yet, still I want NaNoWriMo to start and the rest of the world to end. Except for music. Music can stay. And food. Music and food and warm autumn sunsets. The rest of it, begone. Begone, I say! People with nice smiles can stay. Nice people, food, music, sunsets, and the sound of rain or of a distant train passing. All that can stay. But the rest of it: End! Begone. We gots writing to do, doesn't we?

South Southeast by Southwest, Part I

I have to vent over my quest to get a wireless internet connection in Anthem, Arizona. I thought Starbucks offered this service, so long as you buy something. I wanted a mocha anyway, so I found one at the corner of two of Anthem’s many identical boulevards (which are not laid out in a simple grid, by the way, but meander like coyote trails, no doubt to make the brand spanking new suburb seem a little less like a brand spanking new suburb). Stood in line awhile and then asked if they had a functioning wireless. Only if I had a Starbucks card, quoth the barista. I don’t buy memberships so, no, I had no card, and I left feeling very annoyed that the silly woman could at least have tried to sell me one, or clarify that I’d get access for free if I bought something, or otherwise been encouraging. But no! All she could do was suggest the library. Libraries generally don’t serve food and drink. So I went back to my cousin’s house to search again.

Right, my cousin has internet, but not wireless, and for reasons too obscure for me to grasp, when I connected the RJ45 on the back of her cable modem to the RJ45 on the side of my laptop, a network was detected but never connected, and I was simply never able to do what I needed to do. Which was mate my work machine to the net and get a VPN going and do some triage on a couple days’ worth of work email. Really wanted to spend a lot of time doing that.

“Wireless network anthem az” netted me a possibility in the form of a café at the local Safeway. All right, I could do work at a grocery store, why not. I meandered along the coyote trails at a crawling forty miles an hour really enjoying the fact that Maricopa County had decided to impose a thirty five mile an hour speed limit on roads that could easily support eighty, and eventually, after many long hours passing decoratively transplanted saguaro cacti, found the Safeway and the Starbucks within. I asked if the wireless worked, the guy said probably, so I tried and sure enough caught a signal. Fool optimist that I am, I bought a venti mocha and a piece of pumpkin cake and sat down to enjoy my breakfast while wrestling with warning pages and out of date certificates and all manner of general network dysfunction. Money well spent! The workers had no idea. But by now I had eaten something and decided the library was worth a try.

I had a vague idea it was down this way and indeed I found it, nestled within the grounds of the local high school. I didn’t feel like waiting in line at the information desk so I took one of the plush little reading chairs in back and found a network and enjoyed the familiar experience of warning pages and invalid certificates. I went back hopefully to the help desk line and at my turn was told that indeed their wireless worked fine, I just needed to have a library card. All out of quibble, I bought a thirty-day one for five bucks, was given some codes and instructions, and, nestled back in my corner, was finally able to plug in to the employer matrix.

As usual, about a dozen things had blown up since I left the office late Wednesday afternoon, and by the time I had addressed a few of them well over an hour had passed and my enthusiasm for doing work while on vacation was getting thin. So now it is noon, I am back at my cousin’s house, and everyone is either out getting their toenails done or lying around fast asleep. I guess that’s standard for mid-day in Arizona. Well, I’m on vacation, and the idea presumably is to relax. But my nerves are humming like harp strings. Only one thing to do: Get a beer, find a cool place, damage my eardrums with the very loud music stored on my netbook (I don’t own an MP3 player), and read the Raymond Chandler short stories I brought along. That’ll do me, for a little while.

Cold Weather Has Its Points

More Pix

You didn't ask but surely someone wants to see the rest so here. (Sac Decom 10 Oct 09)

Poetry of Phone Spam

Outlook and Communicator are integrated with the phone system, so missed calls and messages appear in an email folder. This means I know the number of every phone that tries to reach my desk.

Sometimes I punch unknown numbers into a search engine to see what I get. If they are phone spam, which unknown numbers from some other area code usually are, I find a bulletin board where other people have reported the same number. They complain about the sales pitch, or the rudeness, or what have you. I don't leave complaints. I just do this to validate my suspicions.

Found the most interesting complaint today:

me git a call and tey hang up. i duont call back. i get messege and man is dead but spirit caling. he is ghost. -- melikileya kootamaata

Not interesting: Inspired. Is this the reflection of a distant culture, a person late of the forest who sleeps with spirits and has recently moved into a world of flashing lights and cell phones? Or was this someone with a poetic sense of irony, who sees many existential layers at one time and has made their phone spam moment into an opportunity to create beauty?

All of the above and more.

Okay, now I wish I had a stronger sense of humor, cause this was probably really funny and I missed it.

Conference Whines and Chicks on Cop Cars

Wonderful to have a job and not minding at all the 7pm to 9pm phone calls with engineers of various sorts eight time zones to the west who are focused on technical issues of enormous significance to a computer manufacturer over there, and the company, and in some small way myself -- small in that the socio-political dynamics that determine who gets the fame and who gets the blame are entirely beyond me hence I proceed with the confidence and certainty of an eight-point buck in a thinned-out forest full of deer blinds.

SO, that all leaving me without time to write stuff but still wanting to publish something, anything, I will print without further comment one of the better pictures I took last weekend at a party. We've found a fun bunch of people to hang out with.

Fun Where the Hell is Waldo Game!

I Spy ...

A naked thigh!

A truck under a portable carport!

Eight hundred seventy two lost or stolen bicycles!

In the center of each these images is our campsite. We erected the carport Monday (Aug 31st) after sundown during a rising wind. Imagine tying two hundred square feet of waterproofed canvas down to a brace of lightweight aluminum poles while the wind kicks up to thirty and brings about a pound of dust per cubic yard of air with it. But once it was staked and roped and the truck was under it, all set up for campin', it was quite comfy.

The scene on Monday September 1st:


The scene on Saturday September 5th:


Now for fun that will engage your favorite eight year old for hours and hours!

Find the above location on these two images!

Satellite photo, Sep 1st

Satellite photo, Sep 5th

Better yet, pour a strong drink and crawl around these crazy wacked-out scenes yourself.

All right, here's a Burner's-eye view. Tame. We're not up to the level of creative camping yet, we just like to survive. But it's hecka comfortable in there. (Supportive carpentry illustrated here.)


Some more general notes:


A - Our little campsite

B - Camp shower, trailer mounted, cold water from 55-gallon drums, complete with surrounding evaporation pond

C - Some weird art car made out of a golf cart that showed up one night

D - Li'l Pearl the Turtle, about which more later maybe

E - Open bar and general mess-around dome tent for our neighbors the Karma Chickens (another Sac crew)

More random shit will follow as it hits me to slack off at work and post it.

Written While The Meeting Starts

I call in and the coordinator is talking.

"... and I don't even--"

Beep!

"Hello, who just join?"

"This is Don."

"Hello, Don."

"Hi!"

Silence. Extended silence. I open Live Meeting and nothing is being shared. A full minute passes.

Beep!

Silence. It's weird. You never know if they're just being relaxed about starting, or have gone on mute and are discussing secret things. Of course we are all one big happy corporation so there are no secret things. But who knows what goes on in the minds of the inscrutable transpacific--

Beep!

More silence. I guess we're waiting for someone whose presence matters. Live Meeting has four attendees, then six, then eight. More beeps, more silence. She doesn't ask about them. Why did she ask about my beep? Was my beep different somehow? Did my phone beep with an American accent?

Ah, we start. I must listen carefully. The phone system muffles people and everyone has an Asian accent of some sort or other, including the two other guys based here in the States. It's not uncommon for each sentence to be about one third incomprehensible to me and another third context-based guesswork on my part.

Honestly, I am very impressed when folks for whom English is a second or third language listen to folks for whom English is a second or third language, and whose first languages are radically different, and who can understand one another better than I can understand either one. Imagine a gentleman in Bangalore explaining technical matters to a lady in Beijing while I am listening in California, and I have a hard time understanding either one yet they have no apparent difficulty understanding each other. It's frustrating. Makes me feel like nothing but a dumb old white guy who never got out of Mayberry and I hate that because I grew up in a famously cosmopolitan college town surrounded at all times by folks from all over the world. This should be like nothing to me. Urgh.

Ah, we have a visitor from a circuit design group explaining the root cause at the silicon level of an issue that, as is often the case with issues that come to my attention, was discovered during customer test. In other words, a great big OEM that provides a lot of our revenue found the problem that's our fault before we could. We really hate when that happens. Normally, or at least preferably, we find our own mistakes and fix them before anyone else finds out. Anyway, he's in Texas and speaks with what to me is a slight Hispanic accent despite the fact his name is entirely Italian.

You wonder why I am fixated on accents. One reason, it's cause I can't tell you what we're talking about so I say what it sounds like. Another, I'm not always a very effective teleconference guy and I've isolated thick accents as a reason why. If they're going on and on in excruciating detail about verifying adjustments to factory test parameters (which has little or nothing to do with me) and they are doing it in the particularly difficult accents of Malaysian Chinese, I easily lose the thread and wind up faffing about on the internet and undercutting my career prospects and I end up a permanently unemployed old fart in his fifties because who the hell would hire a fifty-plus white guy to do engineering work? Get real, people. You can get twice the energy at half the cost if your prospects speak putonghua or yue and have their green cards. They're more focused, too, and probably got better grades. So to avoid that scenario I'm being more aware of accents and how I should avoid letting them enable me derailing myself. Clear? No? What?

Hot Desert Dude Seeks Friend for Mutual Cup Cleaning

God that sounds nasty. But I really was hot. Even in a woman's shirt that I got at the BRC Boutique and cut the sleeves and collar off of to make a vest, I felt prickly and overdressed. And my sippy cup was pretty nasty by this time (see image in prior post).

Anyway this picture has been in my pictures to be posted directory awhile and I don't feel like waiting anymore for the right context so here. It's the only one taken of me at Burning Man despite about twenty five thousand pocket digital cameras going off constantly. I made the necklaces out of .223 brass I'd been saving since my amateur survivalist militia days in the early 1980s. I finally found a better use for them.

Party Time

Burners can't sit still. It's Decom time! And ours is a lot more fun than SF Decom (which is the next day) because it's small and intimate and you'll make real friends and not just add Friscoite Burners to your contact list. Come one, come all! Or just watch.

Short Post in Celebration of Life

I'm pretty much hating on life these days -- all of it is entirely my own fault, and knowing that does wonders for my mood -- so I'm following the advice Roy gave awhile ago to just blog a little every day. Makes me feel better, somehow. Even just a little bit. Not that this will improve my writing. But surely it can't make it worse.

I want to know what the expected outcome is of being married a long time. Through both the internet and actual real conversations with actual real people, I've seen that there is a lot of ambivalence out there. People, both sexes, not really excited about who they're devoted to, but it's too god damn much trouble to make a change. Now, the dumb ones, who think they're clever, go and explore and have affairs and get caught and wind up in the shit, and if they're well-known and powerful they make the news and we all get a laugh. But the rest of us don't act up like that, we just sort of live the habits and accommodations and look up once in awhile to notice, wow, another year has gone by, fancy that.

I'm struggling because on the one hand, I'm sick of living a half-ass life, and though I married someone who never lives her life half-ass -- in fact, she pretty much kicks ass, every day -- I can't just flip a switch and start wanting to be full-ass specifically with her. No: Ambivalence; and a long history; and way too much shit boiling up from the state of our lives when we got together as well as from all the years before, dating right back to when I was a one year old. Seriously. All those long arcs of personal history are converging to this point, focused like sunlight through a lens, and that intense light beam is slowly but surely lighting the fuse.

Sort of a crisis that strikes at mid life. That's why they call it a, erm, you know. But what I'm wanting to know is, what do all the other poor saps (and sapettes) do? Right, some go off. Maybe I will too, at least something happens. Some (men particularly) push it deep inside where it twists around and they wind up being seriously outlived by their wives. Some manage to look (at least outwardly) quite happy. Typically those are men of faith. That fact bugs the shit out of me.

I understand faith. I understand it as a form of mental organization that human beings evolved as a means to survive. More accurately put (because too often, evolution is described backwards, as if changes are adaptations when in fact they are accidents that happened to turn out as advantages), the mutation that allows for faith and god and all that provided a psychological advantage that, in the unforgiving primal forest, led to more successful reproduction. So we all have it. I just don't choose to use it. Faith is like fire with all its risks and benefits, but now that we have central heating, why set part of your house on fire just to keep warm?

Yet there they are: Men of faith who have defined and narrowed (or maybe broadened, wtf do I know) their lives and found their bliss is in what they've spent the past couple three decades building. Well. BULLY FOR THEM.

I have to get back to work but my whole hating on life point is that this conundrum and a number of related side issues that I'm not going into here have me so distracted that my job performance sucks which only makes things worse and I'm supposed to feel better now that I've written it out and done so publicly. Yeah.

Take-off

Back in the 60s they tore down one of the area's oldest farmhouses to put up a gas station. An ugly, ultra-modern, Jetsons gas station.

Now that gas station is really cool, and I hope they never tear it down. These old Orbits should be preserved forever as historical architecture, reminders of a bright and brief moment when the future was coming and boy did it shine.

I took this because I'm afraid they will tear it down someday when I'm not looking. I tore in the other morning because I had to take the Jeep to work and it was dry. It was dry because the Jeep was the college boy's car until he moved away. Now it's more or less mine again. That doesn't mean I get to drive it. At the beginning of the month (yesterday) it went off the car insurance. There's way too much wrong with it to drive it enough to justify paying for insurance. But I drove it on its last legal day because the Mustang was in the shop. The Mustang went in because the differential sprung a leak. Turned out to be the pinion seal. No big deal because we had it fixed before all the fluid leaked out. Suppose we hadn't noticed the leak and didn't go in until it sounded like we were being chased by the cops everywhere we went? That would have meant a new differential, and that would have sucked.

But it didn't suck, and neither does this classic old gas station which I hope is still there when we really do have flying cars. Maybe by then tail fins will come back too.