Spike's Ego

The Throwing of the Snit, Vol 42 (with duck)

2009-12-18T08:39:00.000-08:00

12/18/2009 11:16 AM – 11:36 AM

Well, it’s finally cold here. I’m cold. My room is fine but the regular trips out to the stairwell to smoke creeps into my skin and lingers. I’m tired and grumpy. I want to go to sleep, but if I did that, I would have really completely wasted the morning. I was up by 8, but I spent the morning on YouTube and Wikipedia. Researching things that I’m only mildly interested in and have nothing to do with what I’m working on.

Grr. Grumpy Spike. Empowered to be sullen and dull. And the sun is shining and I have no reason to be grumpy. I haven’t written, according to my stopwatch program, in three days. I actually like the new project but I’m having trouble doing what I need to be doing – getting up, putting ass to chair and writing. I actually got up on time today. I put my ass in the chair. And then I did nothing but goof around on the internet. Aside from this stream of whining, which I have been engaging in frequently in my head, I’ve been thinking about love. It isn’t really there, you know. Not like death. That was me making fun of myself by the way. My humor is lost if I’m not there to be overly dramatic in person. It is fun to say the most horrible things that you can think of in public and be amusing with it.

I figured out a long time ago that no one really want to know what you think about things really. They want you to be amusing. Dance fat monkey. Dance. See. Grumpy Spike. Sullen and dull. So what magic can I whip up to save face? That’s the problem. Not just boring, I’m running on empty. Grr. Hot soup. Hot soup is the answer. Hot soup and hot shower. Together at last. Together forever. So I walk into this Duck Store and I say, “I’d like to buy a duck.” And the clerk says, “What kind of duck are you looking for?” And I say, “The kind that makes you happy.” And the clerk says, “Oh. In that case, you might want to try the Highly Improbable but Thoroughly Entertaining Daydream Duck. I’d recommend you have a side of fries.” The duck was tasty but ultimately impossible. You wanted more within a few minutes of finishing. What’s duck like? It’s like you want more duck. The clouds are rippled like old nylon batting, fallen from an over-used department store pillow. More adverbs! More adverbs, he cries. But adverbs I have none to give, Ebenezer. Circling. Circling the words. Circling the words, always looking for the joke. The one thing that makes unknowing palatable.

Small Worlds

2009-12-15T07:04:00.000-08:00

12/15/2009 9:37 AM – 10:01 AM

And so now I’m going to be listening to some hipster music. Well, I’m going to try anyway. Not at the moment. At the moment, I’m listening to nothing but the quiet crackle in my headphones. When I was working on the detective story, I listened almost exclusively to pop dance music. It has a driving beat and doesn’t really capture the attention. Perfect.

I think that hipster music is music written by musicians for musicians. The rest of us get the occasional scraps of accessibility, but to really get into it, you have to be at least at a 4th level remove from the non-musician. Doesn’t mean it’s not good. As far as I can tell, it is. But people that are obsessed with music listen to it a lot and want to create it. For the most part, music is in my background acting like a sheet between me and my boredom. Since I moved from Buffalo and don’t have that 50 minutes of walking to work to dedicate to giving an album its 3 good listens to, I haven’t listened to any new albums. I’ve listened to some old albums for the first time, but mostly, I’ve been catching up with “classic” rock singles, because I wasn’t allowed to listen to it as a kid.

At a certain point, it becomes more difficult to be the noob. Maybe as my co-workers get steadily younger. I fake knowing. Mostly because it just saves time and ridicule. I’m not bashing ridicule, by the way. A light-hearted ridicule can be a good spur to action, but I’m getting old. I’m not old by current standards, 70 is, after all, the new 60, but in my line of work, the grunts of which I am a member are usually younger than me. With my brain, I should be better employed. Or I should be in the loony bin. The wash is that I’m a dishwasher. The problem with my upbringing, any tightly closed upbringing, is that, unless I was going to stay within the confines of the childhood world, most of the things that I had packed into my brain became useless. I’m too restless for that, so out here in the average world, I’m one step behind the rest. Even philosophy, universally accepted, is a self-referential world. Maybe that’s why I liked it. So we’ll try again with the hipster’s earwigs. Because self is all I've got. Because nothing is more self-obsessed than a hipster.

No. It's the Universe That's Weird. Stupid Lions...

2009-12-12T09:40:00.000-08:00

12/12/2009 12:14 PM – 12:35 PM
It’s sunny out. Quite sunny but the sky isn’t that perfect crystal blue that means it’s really cold. It’s cold, don’t get me wrong, but not that really, really cold that makes the blue really blue. A plane just flew through the tree. It was a very small plane apparently, as it didn’t hit any of the branches. It flew very slowly for a very small plane.

Despite the sleeping pill, it took me forever to fall asleep. And now I’m up late and will be able to squeeze in about twenty minutes of writing. I might have to attempt the impossible and try writing after I get home from work. That is not the time during which my brain works. Nine hours of sleep, I think that’s unnecessary. But there are no babies to make me feel that it is, so I sleep. Or I could just do what I know needs doing and wake up when I’m supposed to and write and be really tired for a week or so until my body re-acclimatize to the new schedule. But I wrote a book! A short one! That’s two novels in my life time! Two more than most people! But that will slowly change. At least amongst the educated classes. To fit better with my demographic, I should be thinner and in better shape. And married.

On the married thing, I think I’ve still got a few years before I become an outlier. Which means more time to play at being a novelist. Well, if I married a girl eight years younger than me, I could probably get away with the 5-years-before-kids thing and that would give me another seven or eight years of playing. I froze there for a second; the strange confusion of the idea of being someone’s parent disoriented me. I almost ran into the lions that were sitting this chase out. Stupid lions. It is still weird to me that people that I know and did wonderful stupid youthful things alongside are issuing forth our replacements. And it has been this way for a long time. Long before my grandparents were born. It feels like there should be a universal system in place in which people that do stupid kid things are stupid kid things and people that admonish stupid kid things should remain people that admonish. That stupid kid things transform into people that admonish is just weird. Seriously. It’s weird. It’s not the occasional “whoops! We made a baby!” This is something that happens over and over again to most people. I'm 33 and I sleep in a twin-sized bed in the “big room” of my upstairs “apartment” in the house of my college roommate and his wife. This oddly makes sense to me. I’m a stupid kid thing. I’m not weird; it’s the universe that’s the weird one.

Writing, Dishwashing and Monkeys (Stupid Monkeys)

2009-12-11T09:36:00.000-08:00

12/11/2009 12:09 PM – 12:30 PM
Oh. Right. Here’s this thing that I’m doing. So I didn’t even bother to set my alarm last night. I woke up at 11 after not being able to fall asleep until sometime after 2. This is bothersome. If I take the sleeping pills, I’m lousy tired even after I wake up, if I don’t take them, I don’t fall asleep. But here I am now. I watched “Bones” and drank coffee. Oh, and ate a maple frosted doughnut.

I haven’t worked on “real” writing since Wednesday and that was only like a hundred words. This new project is confounding me. In my head it veers back and forth between The Chocolate War and this YA fantasy that I can’t remember the name of but I read it as a kid. The one that I read that I can’t remember the name of ended up being an elaborate “it was all a dream” thing but you sort of knew it going in. The protagonist went from sometime in the early 20th century to some other fantasy world with magic by way of getting his head dunked in a barrel of water. The end of the book ended with him getting his head yanked back out, no time having passed. But while he was there, he fulfilled a prophecy and became king and did heroics. You know, “low-fantasy” typical stuff.

Or is that high-fantasy bookended by low-fantasy? I never figured that particular genre classification scheme out. Once again, there are a billion things that I should be doing with my mornings in addition to writing. I am not doing anything including writing. A brief rest and then back to work, that’s what it was supposed to be. Bah. I cut myself twice last night at work. Both wouldn’t have hurt if I hadn’t been soaking my hands in dishwater for four hours previous to the incidents. Dishwashing as a vocation has certain drawbacks. I find it odd that people assume that it’s an easy job. I don’t think that there is such a thing as an easy job. The amount of work that I have to do sandwiched into eight hours is not physically possible unless you’re Barry Allen. That’s the Flash. DC. From the comic books. Admittedly, most of the time, my mind doesn’t really need to be fully present to accomplish the task at hand, but it’s still not “a job a monkey could do.” A phrase that I have heard an unusual number of times in my dishwashing career. Often from bosses. Often from non-bosses. Seriously? Then buy a fracking monkey. For the initial laydown of 10K, you should be able to get ten years of excellent dishwashing for banana’s and the occasional cage cleaning. But I’m thinking about work while not there. That’s a no-no. Back to something.

Stuff and Intellectual Property Rights

2009-12-09T07:30:00.000-08:00

12/9/2009 9:51 AM – 10:16 AM

I really need to get back into the habit of early to bed, early to rise. I’m not up as late as I was yesterday and I feel slowly coming back aliveish. It’s snowy outside but that’s getting melted by the scattered rain. It looks like March outside. At least my bones arent’ cold. Actually, I rather like today’s weather. All gray and windy.

I really need to remember to get good coffee. I’ve been drinking the backup can of Folgers for almost a week now. It takes a lot of cream and sugar to make it drinkable. Which is why I keep forgetting because I make good coffee with lots of cream and sugar. Yesterday didn’t go so great on the writing front. I added about 300 words. I’m behind already. It’s okay though, I’ve got 49 days now. That’s a lot of time. I still have to get the rent. I puttered about yesterday and then it was too late. I have this theory about the future of artistic endeavors. It’s not particularly profitable. Thing is, where would I be if Hammett and Chandler hadn’t done it? And what if I had to pay them for blazing the path?

If a law becomes unenforceable, does it cease to be a valid law? There is a long-standing argument within the libertarian camp about the nature of intellectual property. St. Ayn maintained that all property springs from intellectual property and therefore, intellectual property must be guarded. There are others within the fold that hold that intellectual property is a nonsense phrase. You can own the original painting, but the copies of that painting are not yours. And someone had to invent farming, should we all still be paying his descendants to farm our own land? I still haven’t made my mind up on this one (bit torrenting included). Then there’s the question of medicine – for some reason, people maintain that it’s wrong that pharmaceutical companies make lots of money off of the drugs that they created and tested. Obviously, I say: bullshit. However, once the drug has been created and sent out, there’s a brief stall while others try to figure out what they did, but honestly, that stall is about 6 months tops. Drug companies aren’t’ going to make up the cost of R&D in that 6 months, are they? Don’t know. Just like I don’t know how much pay is too much to pay a CEO. Never had to do it. And my silly little detective story? I emailed it out to about a dozen people. Who owns it? Bah. I don’t know. I don’t know a lot. And I get pissed when people who haven’t done more than repeat a party mantra that they read in an Agitprop pamphlet claim that they do know. You. Don’t. Know. Damn. Nit.

First Day Portents

2009-12-08T07:56:00.000-08:00

12/8/2009 10:31 AM – 10:52 AM
Well, today is the first day of the new project and I’m not sure about the normal world problem that’s supposed to be an echo of the fantasy world problem that the novel presents. And I woke up late. And I’m supposed to go to the bank and get the rent since it was closed by the time I got there yesterday. And I ate all the soup last night so I don’t have any for lunch today. It was good soup.

The project is 65,000 words in 50 days. That was actually accidental. I was just figuring out how long it would take to get to 65,000 words if I was writing 1500 words a day, except for one day a week when it’s only 500 words. Also, I gave myself only 500 words on holidays. It ended up being 50 days exactly. Synchronicity. And they say the age of magical thinking is dead. Wow. I want to sleep. Sleeping is awesome. Yesterday, I slept until 11:30. I couldn’t fall asleep the night before, so it only ended up being 9 hours, but now my body thinks it should be allowed to sleep until at least 10:30. Habituation. This is one of mankind’s saving/damning thingies.

Maybe I have an idea about how to give the hero a real-world problem… Anyway, maybe I won’t even get to it today. Though I probably should. I think YA stuff you need to get to the action pretty quick. This will be weird. No explicit violence, no swears, no sex, what is there to write about if not those things? Ah well, I’m sure it will make for an interesting 7 weeks. And I can’t think of things to write about and I’ve got five minutes left. There is my wart. I don’t know how I could get a wart, five days a week I spend at least four hours a day with my hands in semi-caustic chemicals. The sky is overcast. At the moment, there is some pale yellow that kind of looks like a frozen lightning bolt down in the far corner of my window. When I was waking up, which took two hours, the sky was all red-tinged. I kept thinking “red sky at night, sailor’s delight; red sky in the morning, sailor’s take warning.” Also, “hey, that looks like New Mexico.” It’s always red sky there. No, not really. Only in the morning and evening. Sailors are confused. Especially since I’m not sure what a sailor would be doing in the middle of the high desert. I just went down to put in the second load of wash and discovered that all my work pants were in the bottom of the basket. Dress pants to wash dishes!

On the Agonizing Moment

2009-12-05T10:54:00.000-08:00

12/5/2009 1:38 PM – 1:52 PM

And this will be a short one. I woke up very late today but, for once, I feel rested. It would seem that I get my agony moments in story-making while I’m in the shower. When I got the one from “Angel’s Share” I was in the shower, and instead of writing today, I was going over some old notes for my next novel.

When I was in the shower, getting ready for work, I realized the worst thing that could happen to my character. It was so bad it hurt my soul. If I have one. It was the same thing for Angel’s Share. I wonder if anyone will notice that moment, the one that hurt me to write it? I doubt it. It’s infused with humor. Everything that I do seems to be infused with humor. One of the bad guys in Angel’s Share says that that is the best defense that we have when staring into the face of oblivion. Unfortunately, I think I agree with that. At least today. Hopefully, not tomorrow. The Moment of Greatest Agony is a story concept that I picked up somewhere in the few years, I’m not sure where. It’s just that the emotional climax of a story should occur when the protagonist. .. Crap word for what I’m writing… hero. When the hero of the story has a realization of how crap the crap is and has to make a decision.

And the decision should be bad. Not in the sense of “he made a bad choice and there was a good one” but “he made a bad choice in the face of only bad choices.” But, if the hero is truly a hero, the choice should be the right one. Story-telling, at least the kind I’m doing at the moment is not reality. It’s a ridiculous lie that makes the ridiculous truth embraceable. And this is depressing. Well, this is the Ego. And I’m off to work. Drink well and long.

In the Year 2109...

2009-12-04T08:50:00.000-08:00

12/4/2009 11:21 AM – 11:41 AM
Okay. Now I’m typing. Now I’m just sitting in my chair, glancing out the window, looking over at my sweet new TV. Well, it’s an old TV, but it’s newer than my old one. I paid cheap. Maybe too cheap. I might feel guilty about it for a while. I’m suddenly almost overcome by the desire to sleep. I could. Grab a little nap before work.

I didn’t get much sleep last night. Despite the Nyquil, I couldn’t fall asleep for almost two hours after I got into bed. Which is weird because I woke up early enough yesterday. I wasn’t even super stoked to get the TV today. I didn’t know it would rock this much. But it does. Now I can watch my downloaded TV shows on a TV instead of on my computer. Sweet. It’s chilly but not cold out. The sky is mostly cloudy but it’s not solid. Still a lot of light. Arg. I have so much to do when the weekend comes around. Pay rent. Buy a bunch of household supplies. Clean. Hopefully, buy a bunch of Christmas presents.

And then mail them. I haven’t mailed anything in, like six years. And no car. And what do I buy? So much. I want to sleep. Just thinking about it makes me want to sleep. And I wanted to sleep anyway. Maybe I will. An hour nap. That might be nice. Or it might suck. I’ll get up groggier than I was. Meh. I’m an American living in the 21st century. I have it better than, like, 99% of anyone anywhere anywhen, thus far. So I shouldn’t complain. Of course, if I was born 100 years from now and we don’t do that idiotic “lets freeze the economy so nobody hurts their poor little selves because we are so obviously smarter than the unwashed masses and so obviously more moral their evil profit-seeking employers” crap that we seem to be heading towards, it would rock more. You’ll be able to smoke and it will be healthy. Dishwashers will be able to buy hover cars that drive themselves. A perfect hamburger will cost you only the cost of the wattage that it takes to power the replicator. It will rock. But right now, my keyboard is acting up. Needs new batteries, I think. It’s annoying. It. Keeps. Stopping. Stupid magic keyboard. Man. I want a nap. Naps will not be necessary in the future. You’ll be able to scan yourself and - poof! - a two hour nap. Or you can still do it manually. Ah, the future!

Dual. Screen.

2009-12-04T07:37:00.001-08:00

Yeah. I gots it. And yeah, that's Mythbusters, all hangin' out, looking at my keyboard.

I bought a used TV for wicked, wicked cheap (but still legal). Runs the cable channel's fine, but it had an S-Vid hookup and I thought I'd give it a try. After some shenanigans... it rocks! Now to figure out how to feed the audio out to the TV...

I Assure You, We're Open ...Again

2009-12-03T09:16:00.000-08:00

It's only been... what? A year and four months or so? What's a year and four months or so amongst friends?

Writer's Log: 12-03-09

2009-12-03T08:54:00.000-08:00

Current Project: Untitled Novel
Day: -5
Days Left: 55
Today's Goal: 0
Total Written: 131
Written Today: 131
Time at Desk: 10 minutes

I'm not sure what it is yet, so I don't know what to say about it.

Welcome Back to More of the Same Old Crap!

2009-12-03T08:43:00.000-08:00

12/3/2009 9:30 AM – 9:51 AM

Okay, alright, being up and awake. For a while now. I guess that I’m not going to start Apophenia. That will remain there on the hard drive, waiting for me to pick it up again. No. I’m going to start my children’s fantasy. We’ll see how that goes. I’m not sure, though. Maybe it will end up being something else. I haven’t actually started it.

It’s mostly cloudy outside. There’s this very bright strip of sunlight all along the horizon. I’m recovering from last night – I spent about six hours at work pissed off. Spike doesn’t spend more than an hour pissed off. It was stupid. A Perfect Storm of dirty dishes – pastry piled it on, retail piled it on and there was a little bit of crap left over from the morning shift. I still got out fifteen minutes late, which is right on time for me. There are things that you learn after a year at a job about how to cut corners. You just can’t do it every night or they’ll catch on. The only thing that was obvious that I neglected was the giant puddle of muddy water around the sink. I was too pissy to realize that that would need to be cleaned before I left. When I got home and calmed down, I knew it, but it was too late by then. I’ll probably get a smart-ass comment about it when I go in today.

Oh, fugbutter. Let it go. I know, I know. On to today. I have so much crap to do around the house. Most of it can wait until Sunday, but I’ve run out of some items. I’ve been washing with shampoo for about a week now. Hmm… I could just take the foaming soap from the bathroom sink. That might take it a few days longer… I trimmed the beard yesterday. Right after I took the picture of my NaNoWriMo Beard for my facebook profile pic. It looks good. Hair is still all crazy though. Yeah, this is good. The odd thing about my six hour tantrum is that it was even possible. It wouldn’t have been a few months back. Longer than an hour, and my thoughts would have drifted to the pointlessness of being in a world where we can’t really know anything about God, which would have led to a panic attack. So a six-hour bad mood was a good thing. Yeah. That’s what I’m going with. We’ll see how it goes today. Today, I start something new. That’s always a good thing. Can I finish it by January 26th or so? Yeah. Probably. If I don’t do a lot of crap that I need to. Actually, before I started this new writing binge, I was letting crap slide. I just need to schedule in some housework time. Schedule. Yes. Schedule. The clouds are going by. I need to print out a new calendar. Yes. And work on a new schedule. Is the time up yet? Nope. Still a minute to go. I can’t think of anything more. Here are some words: improbable. Unlikely. Unknowing. Swine. Flu. Tyranny. Tyrannous. Rex. Good-bye.

PSA - Spike's Net Connection Gone 'Til After Move

2008-07-26T07:45:00.000-07:00

Naughty Verizon cancelled my connection a week early, telling me that the Disconnection department "works ahead sometimes." They are still charging me for the connection until August 12th. Very efficient. Anyway, I'll be stopping in at the library (from which I am typing this) from time to time over the next week and a bit to check my email, but it won't be with any of my usual frequency. If you need to get ahold of me use -gasp!- my phone, which will be good until August 1st. Unless the Verizon's Phone Disconnection department also "works ahead" sometimes. Grumble, grumble, grumble...

See you in Ithaca!

Which is More of the Same. But Builds Dramatically

2008-07-11T05:42:00.000-07:00

07/11/2008 7:14 AM – 8:28 AM

I really have little interest in doing this today. Perhaps an effect of not having done it in a little while. But I don’t really feel like doing anything today. I don’t want to read either the Asimov novel that I started or the comic books I’ve brought home from the library. I didn’t wake up in an afraid mood. I just sort of woke up.

I’m thinking about the move lately. That makes sense. Two weeks as of today is my last day at work. Doh – I still have to write my letter of resignation. Later. I’m curious to see what effect the move will have on my mood. Hopefully a good one. Is it enough to move from the city to the town to lift the lingering doubts about existence or is it something that I’ll have to be working on for the rest of my life? Going to Mary’s wedding last week made me think about marriage again. Not that it’s ever far from my mind. Why is love, which is so wonderful, so short on endurance? Why can’t it change everything as I imagined it would when I was younger? Why do we slide back into normalcy? I know the answer that psychology gives – habituation, but why in the metaphysical?

I find the idea of the evolution of human psychology fascinating and terrifying. I’m drawn to it. My nearly overpowering and obsessive sense of curiosity demands that I at least make an attempt to know and understand. But eventually, we run into that wall of unknowability in every field. From an evolutionary perspective, romantic love makes sense, its time-span nearly identical to the amount of time from meeting an attractive mate to the time when the mother can raise a child alone without both of them starving. I hate the idea that this is all we are – moving mud, of no greater significance than inert mud, just mixed more complexly. The deeper you get into science; you see how powerful it is. It can find the reason for everything, but if you push it back, you find that there is no reason for anything. We’re the outcome of trillions upon trillions of rolls of the quantum dice. Our existence is neither inevitable nor impossible. In this story, we are not even god’s bastard children, cast adrift in the cosmos – we’re warmish rocks on the surface of some uninteresting planet endlessly circling an ever-dimming minor star.

To rape or to love makes no difference and no poet of science, no matter how gifted, can light a candle of meaning or mystery in a demon-banished world. We’re meaningless. Our actions are meaningless. Our hopes and dreams are meaningless. The cruelty of self-awareness is meaningless, arising from the void only to fall inevitably back into it without the slightest stirring of the cosmic waters. Vanity of vanities, everything that we value is meaningless, the mere outcomes of a semi-complex, random programming. What we call love is of no more importance than the dust stirred up by a tiny pebble striking the night-enshrouded ground on a moon of Pluto. And where now is my God?

He’s where he was when I lay twitching on the sanctuary floor, having learned to twitch from the Pentecostals who learned it from the Voodoo priestesses who learned it from the epileptics, all of us sure that this was proof of the divine indwelling. There is no proof. There cannot be. We cannot see a hand that holds us, consisting as it does of the substance of our eyes. There is only hope. Hope that love has meaning beyond the mere occasional odd propensity towards the replication of a chemical chain.

I can no longer claim with C. S. Lewis that I was dragged kicking and screaming into the Kingdom. I was stiffer-necked. My heels dug in. My fingers found purchase. The caravan moved on.

And so, alone beneath the darkening sky, I light my candle in the desert waste and say my prayers in the deafening roar of the divine silence.

Let my love mean something. Please, dear God, let my love mean something.

From Time to Time

2008-06-29T08:41:00.000-07:00

06/29/2008 11:14 AM – 11:34 AM

I don’t know that I have any particular thing that I’m writing about. That’s the nice thing about a long, tiring run – it wipes the slate clean for a little while. I did 5.4 miles this morning in 58 minutes. I’m approaching my “mid-week” goal time. 1 hour, three times a week. 1 and a half hours, once a week.

Eventually, I’ll add lifting to the weekly schedule. Sometime, not smoking. Maybe, maybe someday, I’ll add a healthy diet. But that is not the here today. Today is this Sunday. I’ll have to figure out what to do today. Maybe figure out more moving stuff. Maybe I’ll write. Maybe I’ll read, drink beer and take a nap. It isn’t time yet to decide. And the weight of my body is pleasant and the breeze through my widow is pleasant. It is good to be here, even if it isn’t a house in the woods. This is itself and it will change eventually.

Even my hands are tired. My fingers have little tightnesses to them that are not unpleasant. Tomorrow, I’ll go to work. In about a month, I’ll move. Somewhere, across the trees and fields and cities and roads, there is a sea. I’ll sit by it someday. Somewhere, beneath a tall tree in the middle of a forest, there is a patch of damp, mossy earth. Someday, I’ll sit on it. There is a red mesa in a dry and dusty desert. Someday, I’ll climb it. There is a pool in a river, dark and deep and still, hidden by the hills. Someday, I’ll swim in it. There is a heat, thick with water and void of breeze. Someday, I will lie still within it, feeling my breath pass hot through my lips and nose. There is this, the heavy and slow and good of being. Just being. And there is wisdom in stopping for it, from time to time.

From the (Admittedly Small) City, Towards the (Admittedly Imaginary) Country

2008-06-24T04:46:00.000-07:00

06/24/2008 6:43 AM – 7:28 AM

Take a few days off and this gets rusty. I spent the morning reading a book about moving to the country. Oh, that is one of my favorite fantasies: the garden (big garden), the chickens, the turkeys, the goats, the big kitchen, the chopping of wood, the building of things that no one in the city in their right minds would consider building.

It’s a bit tantalizing, almost cruel to imagine myself in the country. I can’t even afford a car. Ah well, a little more hard work, a little less eating out, then a car, then some land, then a garden (big garden), then a shanty. Tin roof. Rusted. I ask myself questions that have no bearing on my now. How deep do you have to dig to build a rabbit-proof fence? Is it still viable to have a hand-dug well? Really, honestly, how much freedom do you have to do the stuff that you want to try out if you’re out in the boonies? As in, could you really build a sod house if you so desired? Not that I desire. I don’t like sharing my bed with worms this side of a coffin. But could I?

Strange dreams these, that still creep in from time to time. And so much resulting from the fact that I really don’t like being told what to do. Even now, having so many good bosses and not chafing under the lash hardly at all, and certainly not at the bosses themselves just the fact that it isn’t my recognizing a task that needs doing, but my need for money. And knowing that, once you get a little above the poverty line, the rise in happiness drops dramatically. It doesn’t fall. It doesn’t really level out. It just climbs so slightly as to require very powerful magnification equipment to recognize it. But there, in the country of my interior, there is a degree of inherently rewarding activity that makes me wonder why anyone would leave it. But that’s an easily answered question. The country of my interior and the country of reality are different places. Growing up, I never raised chickens and my garden work was trivial, if occasionally pretty. But there is something in knowing that if I hadn’t shoveled the driveway (well, I would have gotten in trouble, but aside from that), it wouldn’t have gotten shoveled (well, my brother probably would have shoveled it). But it was my driveway to shovel. The lawn to be mowed was my lawn and if, every spring, my brother and I wanted to push the lawn back into the field a few feet, we mowed the tall grass and no one really minded.

I don’t really understand the impulse to the city. I’m glad some people do. That river of capital, endlessly churning and reproducing and red-tooth-and-clawing gives me cheap used books and thrift-store clothes and perfectly good couches on curbs, but after four years in (an admittedly small) city, and I still don’t understand the seemingly a priori desire for cocktail bars and expensive gyms and clothes that can only be worn for three months. Those girls sure are purdy though. But why would you want to be looked at by so many when it’s so unlikely that you’ll be seen by even one? Does being purdy make it easier to believe that everything will turn out fine in the end? But they are purdy. No denying that.

Ah, well, back to the books. Maybe I’ll actually do some writing today.

Which Contains Many Scattered Thoughts, Including but not Limited to: God, Marrage, Actions and Rain

2008-06-18T04:18:00.000-07:00

06/18/2008 6:23 AM – 6:45 AM

To live a life of quiet contemplation. But with sex. And occasionally, travel. To live as self-sufficiently as possible without passing up the pleasures that this life has to offer. Read, write, garden. Pray. Exercise and meditate. Eat, drink, poo, pass water. Talk. Have Sex. Watch TV and movies. Build, fix, clean. Occasionally take drugs.

I’d like to study some form of martial art, one that’s difficult but possible. I’d like to learn how to draw. I’d like to publish several novels. I’d like to get married. I’d like to build a solid building, one that will last for two-hundred years. I’d like to visit the most peaceful places of the world, ones that you have to walk a long way on your own feet to get to.

I cannot avoid the dark times, it would be wrong, but it would be wrong to prolong them, wallow in them. You need to connect to failing and learn from it. I cannot, if I honestly face the facts, prove to myself that there is a God. But absence of evidence is not evidence of absence. God can neither be proved nor disproved. The only rationale that people can give when honestly confronted with God is: 1) how can God, if he is good, allow evil and 2) people that believe in God do bad things. The problem of evil is old and excellent, but there are many answers to it, some more appealing than others, all of them admittedly difficult. The problem in the second is a fallacy of applying the attributes of a whole as if they were exclusive to a particular.

So. Lesson learned. Move on. I believe in God. I have chosen to do so because I find the idea of blessed continuance more pleasant to hope for than the idea of unjudged ending. If the materialist is right, I’ll never know it. If I’m right, everyone will be pleasantly surprised (except me, of course, and then I will say, “nanny-nanny who-who”). If the exclusivist is right, well, most people are fucked and there isn’t much I can do about it. So. Move on. Why do I like rainy days better than cloudy ones? I like cloudy days, but rainy days are just that much better. When am I grown up enough to have a wife? Is it when I can finally afford to support a pregnant wife and children? Is it when I have a house with a washer and drier? Is it when I finally start to pay my bills conscientiously on time? I realize now, that a wife will not make everything better. Only a little better and my life will be very different than it is now. I will have to find a way to schedule my life around being with her instead of around following up interesting leads. Or maybe I won’t. How does that work? I will still have dark days. I will still have marvelously light ones. But I would have talkin’ and fightin’ and huggin’ and kissin’ and sexin’ and all those other –in’ actions that require more than one player.

And the Results Are in...

2008-06-16T07:54:00.000-07:00

My official time was 31:56, making my pace 10:18/mile. I came in at 689th place overall, and 43rd out of 64 for my gender/age group. So, meh... but not bad for my first race.

On My First Race

2008-06-15T12:27:00.000-07:00

The official race results haven't been posted yet, but I think that I crossed the finish line at around 31:45. That would make my pace 10:15/mile. Not as fast as I wanted, not as slow as I feared. I'm happy with it. My little conceit is that they were counting from the time of the start buzzer to your finish, not the time of your crossing the starting line to your finish. If they'd done it that way, I'd be down to about an even 31. Which is still slower than I was hoping. But I'm happy with it, considering my average pace when I'm out running is about 10:45/mile.

Here's a link to the race site: the Susan G. Komen Race for the Cure. At this posting, the "teams" page is disabled or I'd leave link to mine. My Circ boss, who's an awesome boss, is a breast-cancer survivor, and I was on her and her daughter's team. Her daughter is also a breast-cancer survivor. I found them briefly before the start of the race and said hello, but I went to stretch and get a little water and didn't see them again for the rest of the time. Whoops. Sorry. Thanks Kathy!

I must say that I felt horribly out a place until about ten minutes into the actual running. As the rest of the folks on my team had opted to walk the course, I was on my own, and this seemed to be an oddity at the start line. Everybody had a buddy, even the crazy people that were wearing tiny super-shiny matching runner's outfits and jumping three feet in the air, kicking their own asses with their heels to stretch those quads. I tried very hard to turn away in time whenever somebody did that, lest my incredulous grin betray me for the novice that I am. It was amazing to watch though. Jump-whack! Jump-whack! Jump-whack!

As the time ticked down to the start buzzer, which was actually a somewhat nervous sounding air-horn, I tried to find a place near the back of the line of runners but before the walkers. This was more difficult than I had imagined as the two packs were smooshed together and over-lapping where they met. As one gentleman three or four people in front of me replied to his wife when she asked if maybe they shouldn't be in the back with the other people pushing baby-strollers, "ah, why bother? It'll sort itself out." Shortly after this, I stepped out of line and edged my way in a few yards or so ahead.

I did discover a trick that helped me determine a good place to start. Before the race, anyone that wished to be timed had to go to a little tent where they were handing out small black plastic do-hickies that you attached to your sneakers by lashing them to your shoelaces with little plastic cinch-straps. Like the kind police use on "Cops" when they run out of handcuffs. But smaller. Not, however, a lot smaller. I was left with a small plastic antenna sticking up off my sneaker that reached about five inches up my shin. I discovered after the race that they had a pair of little wire cutters to trim it up for you after you'd attached it and they just used longer cinches so that it was easier to maneuver the strap around your laces before you tightened it down. I, however, not wanting to appear the novice that I am, just let them scan my race tag, imprint the timer do-hicky to my race number and hand it over, before I quickly walked away like I assumed the in-the-know, Big People racers did. After the race was over and I was handing in my do-hicky, I was pleased to see that from the evidence of numerous tall plastic antennas jutting out from the pile of returned do-hickies, I was not the only newbie dork to have run the race.

The trick that I discovered about where to start was that the more serious you were about running, the more likely you were to have a strange do-hicky attached to your shoelaces and the closer you would be to the front. The less serious you were, the less likely you were to have a do-hicky and the further back you would be. Since my goal was to come in at less than 31 minutes (not quite achieved), I figured that I would be somewhere less than the front jump-to-kick-your-own-ass 5.30211 min/milers, but more than the middle I’m-here-for-the-beer-and-sausage 15 min/milers. Somewhere, I was guessing, where there was a mingling of mostly do-hickied sneakers and a few un-do-hickied sneakers but no baby strollers. Unless they were those suped-up, aero-dynamic, three-wheeled baby-strollers. I was going to stay the hell out of those people’s way. And I did.

I found a place to start that was a little further back than I might have aspired to, but this allowed me more of what I have discovered is, thus far in my experience, the greatest joy of racing: passing people. But it’s not just passing people. It’s dodging them.

At the blast of the air-horn, actually the third, the first two being sort of anemic and tentative, I started running. In place. We had to wait for those in front of us to clear out before we could even start to move. Then we got to move and pretend we were running. Kind-of like when a really tall man is “running” along with a very small child: the arms are pumping, the knees are going higher than they would if you were just walking, but your pace is about that of, well, a very small biped. Eventually, I worked up to a shuffle-run that was even slower than my regular long Sunday pace, and that was about the time that I finally crossed the start line.

At about five minutes in and having finally reached a speed that would be normal if I was just sort of taking it easy, it dawned on me that I could have started a little further towards the front. This was when I started noticing that I wasn’t just passing people (and being passed. Frequently), I was having to calculate trajectories and moments of impact and attempting to squeeze into what they call in the space shuttle launches “small windows of opportunity.”

How it would break-down was like this: let’s say that you’ve got someone on your left that’s running at the same speed as you, a group of three in front of you that are going slightly slower and up on the right, someone that is going much slower. You can’t go to the left because you smack into the person that’s keeping your pace, you can’t stay in place because you’ll smack into one of the three in front of you, and if you go to right, you’ll smack into the slow person before you can pass the ones in front. Your options then are to either slow down to the pace of the group until they pass the slow-poke or speed up and try to pass the group before they reach the slow-poke. The answer, of course, is to speed up. It’s a race, fer goodness sake! I didn’t hardly smash into anyone.

By about the fifteen-minute mark, the course had thinned out to the point that these calculations were not a constant thing but still something that one could look forward too with a reliable frequency.

What would amaze me was that even in the last half of the race, from time to time I would pass someone that looked like they were even less physically fit than me. There was a woman, at about the twenty minute mark, who had proportions vaguely similar to that of an egg, beginning at her head and ending at her knees. A largish egg. But she was still running. At the twenty minute mark. Now to really appreciate how amazing this is, you need to realize that we had all started at the same time and as I ran, I slowly increased my pace. I did the first mile in about 11:15, the second in about 10:30, and the last in about 9:30 (negative splits, thankyouverymuch). This means that at the twenty minute mark, around the time that I passed her, she had run a little more that 1.8 miles at a pace of about 10.75 min/mile. That’s a good Monday run for me. It’s sure as hell not easy for someone that tips out that scale at what the government would term “morbidly obese.”

My delight in the latter part of the race arose not just from such empathetic encounters however. There was the matter of smug glee that I experienced on the several occasions that I passed someone that was thin and in tight shiny pants that displayed their firm and shapely buttocks. Mind you, if I had firm and shapely buttocks, I’d probably wear those shiny pants constantly. Which is probably why God doesn’t let me. But the joy that I felt on those few occasions when I left ‘em in my dust was undeniably great and I will treasure them forever.

I did have a nemesis for the race, but as I saw him only briefly towards the front while we were lining up, I must assume that he beat me soundly. He ran without a shirt and had a ring through one nipple and a tattoo around the other. He was muscular, had a dangerously low body-fat index and was thoroughly tan. He could, more than likely, beat me up without breaking a sweat. He was, in other words, exactly what I would be if I were cool. I loathed him at first sight. Luckily, it was also the last. Pssht, I could have taken him. He probably doesn’t even know what an on-line library catalogue is, much less, know how to find the comic-book price-guide with it.

Of the babes that ran, there were many. But me, being me, was awkward and uncomfortable with that much hotness surrounding. I mean, seriously, if you had some confidence, a breast-cancer benefit run would be a great place to meet women. It might be slightly in bad taste, but still, I thought I’d put it out there. It’d be, you know, for a good cause too.

By the end of the race, I was tired and in a little pain. I had a blister spring up on my pinky toe, which I don’t think I’ve ever had happen before, and, FYI, if you really must wear the free, new, sorta-stiff cotton tee-shirt that they give you when you race, make sure you band-aid your nipples first. But the last leg was not without its vicariously malicious pleasures, as when the “in-shape” member of a group turned around to run backwards as he cam-corded the less fit members of his group as they, puffy-cheeked and slack-jawed, struggled towards the end and a kid of about 14 that was sprinting towards the finish-line almost took him out with a forehead to the crotch. That was pretty awesome.

After I’d passed through the finish arch/official timing thingy, gratefully received my free bottle of water, and turned in my timing do-hicky, I walked around to cool down and then found a tree to prop myself against while I stretched my calves. I did an abbreviated version of my cool down/stretching routine, the magic un-self-consciousness of running hard having already faded by the time I got to the part where I make myself look like a horribly diseased cat.

When I’d finished trying to avoid cramps while not looking like a diseased cat, I wandered into the tent area and got myself a free fruit/yogurt/walnut dish, which was really quite good, from the McDonald’s stand and then went over to the food tent where I got a free sausage in exchange for a little corner of my running tag. It was perforated for just this purpose, though it would have been funny to see a bunch of exhausted runners trying to tear off a piece of one of those neigh-indestructible bibs in exchange for some sort of sustenance, any sustenance.

After I’d eaten my sausage and wandered around a little more, never having found either my team again or the beer tent, I decided that I wanted to go home. I was tired. I felt good. And honestly, I really, really needed a cigarette.

On Not Tame Lions

2008-06-14T04:45:00.000-07:00

06/14/2008 7:11 AM – 7:34 AM

And my own personal “God-In-the-Gaps” theory rests in three points in time and came about as a matter of taste: something can’t come from nothing, life can’t come from non-life and consciousness can’t come from non-consciousness. Those gaps will probably be filled. Probably soon. Where then is my God?

He’s where He was when I can’t find any rational or emotion reason to believe in Him, which is the same place he is when His nearness and grace are undeniable no matter how much I wish to doubt. My feeling does not change the nature of God anymore than my feeling changed the fact of evolution back when I was a creationist. The experiments that they’ve done with prayer show, when properly conducted with blinds and control groups, no statistical difference in the results between praying and non-praying. Where then is my God?

He’s where he was when my prayers were answered, the same place he was when my prayers weren’t answered. My state of belief in God’s providence doesn’t change his actions. He does as He wills. He’s not a tame lion. And neither am I. Well, I don’t feel like one anyway. I have no idea if I’m right. I’m not going to convince anyone that my belief is correct. Sometimes I can’t even convince myself. But here is this hand. And here is another. And so I got up early this morning and read and smoked and drank coffee and in another two-and-a-half hours I will be in the starting line at my first race. I do not expect to win the proffered prize for my sex/age-group. I will have run in a race though. All two-hundred and thirty pounds will have made it 3.1 miles on a pair of smoker’s lungs. In public. At a cancer-benefit race. This is no proof of God. This is no proof that I am not a tame lion. But having awakened this morning after a sketchy night’s sleep, I choose to get out of bed and run. I choose to believe in God and the redemptive act of His only begotten Son and of life everlasting. I choose to believe that I am not a tame lion. Proof is not over-rated, but this is not proof. It merely makes me happy.

On the Joys of Iconoclasty

2008-06-13T05:18:00.000-07:00

06/13/2008 7:30 AM – 7:55 AM

Joy is an eager anticipation of the present. I’m not sure what I was thinking about when I thought of that last night. Things had been smoked. But, being now awake and caffeinated, I still agree with it. There are these big things about God that I’m considering in a smoky way, I’m not sure if they’ve coalesced into an actual statement.

The problem with being raised a creationist is that the statement is posed in such a way that you must either accept salvation or science. As the data accumulate, evolution seems far and away to be the lead horse. So one turns to problems of epistemology to sustain one’s belief in God. If I can doubt the whole basis of the enterprise, I can still believe in God. But then in turns into a mucky mess and nothing is knowable except that nothing is knowable. But here is this hand. And here is another.

But the situation is not either/or. It never has been. It is both/and. How, I’m not exactly sure. Perhaps the God who risks. Perhaps the God who waits. When you put the dice in the cup and shake it, you can’t know the outcome. Did God load the dice, predetermining the rolls? Did he touch them in medias res to set the outcome? Did he lean eagerly over the edge alongside us, watching to see what he should do next? But if four, six-sided dice go into the cup, four six-sided dice come out. Here is one hand. And here is another. There is room. There is quite enough room for salvation. And that is rather the whole of it. The dialogue is on-going. It was not the biography of God, as interesting as that perspective is. It was a recounting of the continuing evolution of God’s people’s understanding of him. We shouldn’t have closed the canon. Or maybe we should have, but recognize that our understanding of what it says can, must continue as we continue. God is not dead. It's just that their version of God never actually existed. The grandfathers weren’t dishonest, just wrong. Now they’re dishonest, plucking out their eyes, not because they offend them, but because they offend their grandfather’s rather bad carving of what God is. God was opposed to idols for reasons greater than vanity. For my part, I will learn to dance this dance. Here is my hand, here is my neighbor’s. When I fall from the circle, I’ll just pick it up again. With great joy, I think.

On a Happy June Morning

2008-06-11T04:27:00.000-07:00

06/11/2008 6:53 AM – 7:14 AM

And I’m happy today. It’s not a forced happy. It’s there, rising up from my being. It arrived on the wings of a confluence of events. Those events: I realized that Zen philosophy is crap and I don’t feel so bad about abandoning it (though zazen is still something that I really should do more often), I found a good book by a Christian evolutionist that’s debated Christian creationists, Ben called and we talked about the house in Ithaca and I’m excited about going, I thought of a good project to invest my time in for a few years.

I believe in God this morning. Easily. Faith should be easy. It should be something you just do without having to think about it. It should be like sitting in a chair. You don’t think about it whether it actually exists in a metaphysical sense, you don’t calculate the probability of its ability to hold you up, plotting its strength against time and weight. You just sit in the damn thing and forget about it. Unless you’re using it as an allegory. Stop using faith as an allegory. It’s just faith. A chair is just a chair. Okay, maybe there’s a few things to learn from Zen. I could die very well today. I don’t want to, however. There’s much too much else I want to do.

Science does not rule out God. Are they “non-overlapping magisteria”? I’m not sure. I don’t know if that analogy works. There is a God. He loves me. There is science. It works. That is enough. I don’t want to recapture the beauty of childhood (and I did have some effing magnificent moment in childhood). I want to abide in the beauty of this part of my life. The Spike version of 32. Unmarried. Underpaid. In debt but sort of managing it. Relatively free. Finally getting out of the city. Moving to a college town in the country. Training for a race. Mildly crushing on girls much too young for him and/or spoken for. Writing in his journal every morning. Talking about himself in third person. In fragments. This is an interesting Spike. All of them have been. Sometimes a little too whiny. Sometimes a mooch. Sometimes way, way too afraid. But here. But himself. Further up then, lad. Further up and further in.

Which Is Rebuttals and Concessions

2008-06-10T04:14:00.000-07:00

06/10/2008 6:42 AM – 7:04 AM

Flour, sugar, egg, butter, milk, baking soda – but you can’t unbake the cake. Only form, feelings, perceptions, impulses/actions, consciousness – but still the self remains. The heaps are still one, even when composed of many.

If a negation of perspective will attain peace, so be it, but then we’ve relegated the discussion to fantasy card games, which deck will win out? Up then, up the rabbit-hole down. I am not, and them I am. The mere probabilities coalesce and the me myself emerges, dripping pristine lightning-struck sea-slime. To stop the eye from staring at itself does not change the solid that it can. To stop the eye from staring at itself though, lets it forget its parting.

What dreams? What dreams? What dreams? I was right before. Options one through three: meh, all things considered, tha’d be fine. Option four, right out. So, to live, undead, the eye turns outward, blinks and builds a fire. It doesn’t have to be the best fire. Just the most complicated, most interesting, longest to make. Poof! Light it up and dance as it burns down. Sleep. Wake up. Build the fire again. Sisyphus did not know. Sisyphus did know. Sisyphus learned to like it and the gods were stymied by our accidental eye’s arising. They will have me in the end and call me to account. To them, perhaps, the choice was clear. Down here, all you metaphysics look the same. Fuck ‘em. I’ll believe in Santa Claus and the pink dragon tea-cup orbiting the moon. Presents in shiny paper, everyone’s invited, you’ll never get bored and it won’t cost you a dime. But please, please, kindly Babies, down here just don't be an asshole: pay your fines - we both know you returned those books late.

On the Dreams of a Circulation Page

2008-06-01T05:36:00.000-07:00

06/01/2008 6:35 AM – 8:18 AM

I had a dream this morning as I was waking up. It was one of those dreams that get sandwiched in-between first awakening and actually getting out of bed. What was unusual about it was that it was a dream about work. Not my place of work, but the actual work itself.

In cop shows, there is a difference between a character driven show and a case driven show, thought now they mix ‘em up quite a bit. The case driven shows, “Law and Order” tends to be this type, are often referred to as “procedurals,” as they try to follow the actual procedures that cops would in real life. My dream was a “library procedural,” rather boring, in fact, but the case was interesting and the observations that a free-roaming viewer might take from it could be informative.

Part of my job is to get people library cards. On an average day, I can process anywhere between one card application and a dozen of them. I usually deny about as many. In order to get a library card in Erie County you need two things: proof of signature and proof of residence. The easiest proof is a current New York State driver’s license or non-driver’s ID. Other than that, we can use quite a few different things, but they have to be things recognized by the library system as valid proof. If you’ve got a driver’s license with an old address and no other proof of address, you’re out of luck (if you don’t tell us it’s an old address, you can still get one, but you know, you’re a liar). We follow the rules fairly strictly. The amount of people that come in every day trying to cheat the library is mind-numbing. Soul-numbing too. And that’s what the dream was about in a way. A lady came in and wanted to get a library card. Her address: the lighthouse at the base of one of the legs of the Peace Bridge. As far as I know, there is no lighthouse at the base of the Peace Bridge, but that had to be one of the coolest addresses that would ever come across the desk. In my dream, my mind drifted to what that would be like to live there, but surprisingly, came back to the problem with processing her application. While her actual residence was in Erie County, her mail could not, for some reasons of international neutrality that I don’t think exist in non-dream life, be processed by the post-office in Erie County and was instead handled by one of the counties south of us. There was a special run that had to be taken to get her mail to her and as a result, even though she had mail stating her address as being in Erie, it was C/O of another county. I could not legally issue her a card.

Now, if that happened in real life, I would call a supervisor over who would probably, with a case that bizarre, call in the department supervisor who would tell me to go ahead and process it and issue her a card, but in the dream, there was no supervisor to go to. In addition, she was prickly. In fact, she was nearly the Platonic ideal of what someone who lived in a lighthouse under a bridge should be: she was about fifty, a little short, wore no make-up and had long graying hair that was pulled back into a braided pony-tail. She was thin and muscular and had that tough, weathered skin that speaks of a life spent out-of-doors. Outside of my job, I’d think was pretty damn cool and hot in a middle-age lady sort-of way, but she was flinty and, quite reasonably, didn’t see why she couldn’t get a library card. I however, couldn’t do it. It’s not that she didn’t have proof, but that she didn’t have the right proof.

Once again, there are very good reasons why we need to have the right proof. When you can't check out a book to a tearful kid that has a report due tomorrow but six dollars and three cents in fines, then the very next patron you get is someone who knows the system and has five different library cards from five different branches with five slightly different birthdays and five slightly different social security numbers and has managed to accumulate over a thousand dollars worth of unreturned/declared lost DVD fines on those five cards and then becomes irate and starts yelling at you for refusing to issue them a sixth card with a sixth slightly different birthday and social security number, you begin to understand the importance of those asinine rules. You really begin to appreciate them when you see this type of person once a month and similar patrons of a lesser degree (only one or two cards and only a hundred or so dollars in unreturned items), two or three times a day. And then when a six-year-old comes in with a parent to get a card and you have to refuse them because when she was four weeks old, the little girl apparently got out "Tantric Sex Magic," "Bloody X-Mas Part 4," "Gangsta Bitches," "Understanding God's Seven-Fold Call for Your Life," and "A Guide to Government Small Business Loans," and then never returned them, then you wish that there were more rules.

But the lighthouse lady had none of these flags and I still couldn’t issue her a card. It’s an extreme case and I woke up not long after she started getting really angry with me, but not before I felt that old familiar contempt creeping into my tone when I responded to her. And she was someone that would love libraries: she would love the thousands and thousands of books on thousands and thousands of different topics, and she would love the thousands of CD's with Mozart and Son House and Led Zeppelin, and Deerhoof, and she would love the hundreds of movies with Truffaut and Bergman and Hitchcock and Apatow. She would know it. She would know what was meant by it. She would understand it in her guts. I know she would have loved it.

I suppose I still love libraries too. There’s too much in them that I desire for me not to love them. I’d already spent too much time in them long before I ever started working in one for me to ever shake loose of them. And I’m a good Page: I’m friendly to those patrons that want me to be friendly, businesslike to those that are there only for business, mostly able to put on an unperturbed air in the face of the numerous crazies, bums and bullies that frequent this "Free For All." But I’m glad that it will be over soon.

I read recently that if a marriage is solid, the most common response to the question, “where do you go for peace?” was “home.” If a marriage was on shaky ground, “home” was one of the least common responses. If you had asked me where I went for peace when I was twelve, “the library” would have been in my Top 5. Now, as soon as they tell us that we can turn off our computers and go home, I grab my back-pack, put on my headphones and set out without a backward glance, happy not to be wondering if this next patron is going to be one that makes my hands shake.

Which Is a Pep Talk for Moving. Which Worked.

2008-05-30T04:33:00.000-07:00

05/30/2008 6:56 AM – 7:26 AM

Well, first note that your lungs feel a lot better when you don’t add cream to your coffee, and as the condition of your lungs has a direct impact on your physiological well-being, you might consider not adding cream to your coffee. Plus, that would be one less thing to buy. Along with cigarettes. But one thing at a time. That which presses on your mind is the fact that you went to bed afraid last night.

It wasn’t thick or tough. It wasn’t panic. It only had a few fringes of anxiety. It was just a low-key, nagging fear. The fear arose when you got the email from Ben telling you that he had bought a house. They had a close date. They had a place for you. It was now real. The fear arose in part from sadness, but it was also just fear. You’re sad because you don’t like saying good-bye, and as much as you don’t like living in a city chock full o’ crazies, bums and bullies, you are familiar with your surroundings. This being the longest place you’ve lived in since you were eighteen. You become used to your surroundings. You may not be able to predict exactly what will happen, but you accumulate a set of probabilities. Moving to a new place means you have to reprogram your gut, and that takes time, and that’s a bit scary.

You’re also sad because, to a large extent, you like your job. You may not like the crazies, bums and bullies that form a large psychological part of your job (but a small portion of the actual interaction time), but you love your bosses and your co-workers and your building. You know it, and do love it. You don’t want to say good-bye. But you do have to say good-bye. Perhaps you will stay in contact with some of them, perhaps none. The fear arises from wondering if, perhaps, you are giving up something good but imperfectly fit for, once again, running to unknown but possible pastures. These new pastures may be an even worst fit than this place you are in now and that scares you. But that is always a fear when there is change and change is inevitable. You bite down. You bite down and taste and eat. Of course you’re scared, you’d be a fool not to be, but fear is not the determining factor. To get out of the city. To be in the country. To be with friends. – These are things you wanted before the fear and the fear doesn’t change that. You’ve wanted them, literally, for years. It is an adventure, lad. And what kind of life would you be living if your balls didn’t occasionally shrink from fear? Bah. Fear is sprinkles on the Sunday. You have considered the risks against the desires and the desires triumph. Yes, you’re a little scared, but the world is large, you are yet young and you haven’t even begun to crack the shell. Now, further up, boy. Further up and further in. Towards Narnia and the North.