But I live there…

I don’t usually make New Year’s resolutions.  Having the axis of the earth tilted at the exact same angle relative to the sun as it was 365 days (and one second!) ago, is a poor reason for me to get off my figurative ass and change something about myself.  But even if it was sufficient reason, why not just pick the anniversary of some other angle?  Any one is as good as the next.  Or better yet, drop the correlation of self-improvement with our home planet’s location in space.  But anyway, there is one thing I want to try to change.  I want to migrate from here….  (I am pointing at my head) to … here.  (now I am sort of patting my belly).

Here is why:  I always have thought that to understand something, I have to be able to describe it.  Such as with words.  Lots and lots of words, if needed, or at least with obsessively thorough and detailed mental pictures, each of which is apparently worth a thousand of those sons of bitches, ceteris paribus.  What this leads to, if you’re me, is a tendency to not just be able to grok some shit on the quantum, accept it and then move on with mental grace and emotional serenity; but instead to succomb to the paralysis of analysis.  This can lead to getting so bogged down in thinking about something or someone or some event or some memory, that the object of such thought can move on and do whatever the fuck it wants while I am still mentally chewing over some fossilized remembered remnant of the thing or person or event.

I have a feeling that this doesn’t make sense yet, so now I am going to describe it some more.  (Haha, that is called irony).  One way to do that is to remember how one of my religion professors in college described religion as an act of metaphor.  There are two parts to a metaphor, the vehicle and the tenor.  The vehicle is the mechanism by which meaning is expressed, and the tenor is the meaning itself, or I guess you could say the thing that is being meant.  Most religions are rooted in references to things or beings well beyond the grasp of human comprehension, making their God by definition something that cannot be defined, but only believed in.  That leaves religion, when considered by me anyway, bogged down in symbolism, chock full of stuff that stands for what is holy, but is not holy in itself.  I am not really educated in this kind of thing, but I do see people regard objects–man-made ones, at that! And food and drink, in some cases–and hold them in reverence and awe, as if “stuff” in a room, right in front of you, were actually something divine.  Let me veer off the rails here to say that this is a very simplistic recap of a series of conversations I had with a deacon (and a couple of shorter conversations with a priest, who by the way is as deeply spiritual and honest a person as I have ever had the privilege of talking to) during the course of RCIA instruction a few years ago.  Yes, I joined the Catholic church, right before I got remarried, and also a little bit before I learned about that church’s arcane thoughts on annulments and whatnot (“Wait…on your say-so, 10 years of my life and 16 years of someone else’s, along with our respective former spouses’ lives, did not actually happen??  Except mine is different because I came to this party really late, but those years just kind of got squirted out of the universe like a watermelon seed or some shit?  OK, so then what the fuck are all these kids doing here, and where did I get that scar??”)  I actually did give it an honest try, and have many times since then, but I can’t fully grok the notion that a wafer and a cup of wine are anything more than symbolic representations.  Once my literal mind gets beyond the shuddering thoughts of cannibalism (and the inner smart-aleck stops thinking shit like “Yum! Krist Krispies, again!”) I still can’t help thinking (see?) that actual human flesh should be chewy and that real blood would not taste so…grapy.

I didn’t mean for this to be about religion.  As you can see I am quite retarded on the subject.  Agnostic in the precise sense as defined by Thomas Huxley, but once or twice in my life an actual believer (not at this moment), would about sum it up.

Try again: many of my life experiences turn into what I would call chewing gum for the mind.  No nutritional value whatsoever, but man does that fucker ever keep busy with memories and conjecture and attempts to define and understand what I have experienced:  replaying, speculating, scripting possible do-overs and alternative responses or behaviors or actions for events that took place way off in the distant past; analyzing the shit out of what I should or shouldn’t have said or did, agonizing over what-ifs and how it could/should have gone differently or better.  Unchecked, this kind of shit could lead to a life that is a tooth-grinding, paralytic waking nightmare.  Good thing for me that this is only a tendency, and not a full time hobby.  Although sometimes at night I wake up with my jaws clenched.

One good thing that has come out of this sort of obsessive tendency is a lifelong love and respect for language; English in particular but also for all the cool shit English has inherited and mostly stolen from other languages.  My prevailing need is to describe shit in order to understand it, to make some order out of it, and what better means to describe shit than via language, hmm?.  I know, there are other ways.  Anyone who is an artist or musician or writer or dancer or athlete, or for that matter anyone who has ever found themselves deeply moved by what artists and musicians and writers and dancers and athletes have produced; knows this on some level.

Anyway, the thing I want to do is not have that analytic tendency so much, the one that gets my mind so bogged down in the artifice of life that it overlooks the beauty in just experiencing it. Analysis paralysis…it interferes with the present, and that is really all we have. It is like this:  if you have one foot in yesterday, and one foot in tomorrow, you are in a perfect position to take a giant dump on today.

If I were not such a retard I could have just summed this all up with some pithy little ditty, like the bumper sticker that says “Be here now”.  I usually fail at that simple instruction, instead concocting some thousand word mental essay going deep in to what that could really possibly mean.  In fairness to me, most of the time that bumper sticker is surrounded by several dozen other ones of equal or greater (by which I mean lesser) pith and depth.  And bumper sticker-plastered cars like that usually just end up pissing me off.  Pithing me off, too.  Take your god damn ontological salience and get the fuck out of my way, I think at them, really loud, in my head.

I do not usually make New Year’s resolutions, but this time I am going to think about it.

All systems…suck!

Apparently some cubicle monkey in Redmond with a head full of locusts decided I shouldn’t post anything about my vacation, or some shit.  I haven’t posted for a while.  I wrote a bunch of stuff down about my recent vacation, and had about 900 digital photos (some from my camera, some from Jillian’s camera, and some from my stepdaughter’s camera) to sift through, to make a nice little travelogue documenting our trip.  Then I did something that apparently one should never do:  I changed the password on my laptop. I know, right?  WTF would one want to do that for?  Having been the owner of an old computer on which some secure data was compromised, that is WTF I do that for.  Well, in my ignorance of the latest Microsoft technology, I did not realize that  my (technically, my employer’s, but with a lot of my own info on it)  Windows XP laptop has a feature in its EFS, or Encryption File System, that can cause everything in My Documents and on the Desktop–I want to pause here to emphasize that I mean EVERY.SINGLE.FILE.AND.FOLDER in My Documents and on the Desktop, including subfolders and their content no matter how far down you go–to not inherit the new permissions, or access, or level of security, or whatever-the-hell-it-is-called.  So I was effectively locked out of my computer.  Not my computer, just all the shit on it that I want to get to, which is kind of the same thing.  That douche bag in Redmond whose responsibility it was to assign people to test this shit before rolling it into a GA release schedule, apparently fell down on the fucking job.  Again.

 
Now, I do have a snazzy new Lenovo laptop, from which I am typing this.  It has Windows Vista–I will pause here to emphasize that yes, I know…Windows Fucking Vista–and I have not yet completed transferring all my crap from my old pc to my new one.  I haven’t even found it all, yet.  Part of me knows deep down that for all the shit I think is so special, moving from XP to Vista is like switching deck chairs on the Titanic, only moving to the chair that is closest to the fucking iceberg.

I know that if anyone is reading this using a Safari browser, they are probably thinking in their head “serves you right, dumbass, that is why I use a Mac”, and may even be going so far as to prepare a statistical synopsis detailing how their system has never crashed and is far superior in every way, from the sleek ergonomic design, to the feature-rich OS, to the easy-to-use UI, to the excellent system stability.  Blah blah effing blah.  I don’t really have a dog in the Macs vs PCs fight, except the little bit of context that I have been using various flavors of Windows for over 20 years.  So it’s kind of like if you’re having a really shitty life and someone points out that hey, your life is kinda shitty, you might feel a little defensive and say “yes, my life is like a god damn mudslide, but it is my by-god god damn mudslide, every nuance, nook, cranny and minor tectonic shift with which I am intimately familiar”.  Or maybe it is the technological equivalent of whatever snapped inside Patty Hearst’s head vis-a-vis the Symbionese Liberation army.

I suppose I should also mention that on a small desk in my kitchen sits one of those sleek-looking Macs, in which all the guts are integrated in the monitor, and to which are attached a very minimalist but ergonomically designed mouse and keyboard.  Many of the other residents in my house are very adept at using this Mac, and swear by it.  The desk it sits on is tiny, and on occasion I will fold myself up and cram my legs under the desk and risk the clotty buildup of thrombosis in my leg veins, and try to use the Mac.  Let me just say at the outset that I know there are probably different schemes and UI themes you can apply to a Mac, but the one my family has chosen has all the icons placed along the bottom of the screen.  As you hover the mouse over an icon, it kind of SWELLS UP! real quick, and then JUMPS! up and down a couple of times, like it is saying PICK ME! PICK ME!.   I am afraid to turn the sound up on this machine, because first of all I don’t know how to, but second of all, I half expect the icon to make either the “SQUOICK!” sound like in the old Q-Bert video game, or worse, to make a bouncy “doy-oy-oy-oinggggg!” noise; and if my computer did that to me every time I was about to pick an icon, I would have to punch it right in the fuckin’ screen, ’cause a tiny bit of that would go a long way real quick.  As soon as I get past all the pogo-sticking icon action, I find myself stymied by the nomenclature.  I can’t find Windows Explorer, or a DOS prompt, or the Control Panel, or the Registry, or the boot.ini, or MSConfig, or ANYTHING I AM EVER LOOKING FOR!!!

I truly admire the ease and comfort with which my family members have become expert users of this computer, and when I publicly deride it as nothing more than a Fisher-Price Activity Center for grownups, I secretly feel like one of those monkeys throwing a bone at the obelisk in the prologue to “2001: A Space Odyssey”, or like some kind of fucking Luddite.

Anyway.  I tried a bunch of things and stuff, and finally got some guy with the right tools to get  everything decrypted.  And then I made sure I got EFS dis-the-fuck-abled on that PC.  So I should be able to resume posting as soon as I close all those god damn windows and reboot the fucker several times.

For the record: I supported OS/2 workstations back when Windows NT 3.5.1 was just another wet dream for Bill Gates’  bean counters.  I really think that back in the day, OS/2 was the best performing and most stable multi-threaded, multi-tasking, 32-bit OS you could get.  OS/2 servers had to be rebooted a whole bunch less often that Microsoft servers, too.  However, IBM’s marketing department could not have sold a bucket of water to Richard Prior that time he got caught on fire from freebasing, so no one ever knew how good OS/2 was.

Also for the record:  my favorite OS to support, ever, was this command line based Frankenstein monster called CTOS, that was produced and supported by Unisys, originated by Sperry or Burroughs or some other extinct company.  What an arcanely convoluted and retarded (but really fun!  No, seriously!) piece of shit that was.  Mastering its nuances made you feel SO SMART!!   In contrast, Macs just make me feel like a thromboembolism is a-fixin’ to blow.  Jeesh.

Anyway:  more later.  Finally.

I get butterflies…

One of the managers at work sandbagged me 20 minutes before the last department meeting, and asked if I would give an update on Operation Feed for our department.  These meetings are held in the auditorium where I work, with a remote feed from a conference room in our Des Moines subsidiary.  Yeah, our department takes up two states, such is the span and breadth of its awesomeness.  The meeting would be a bigger deal than it usually is, but at least half the department usually develops an urgent need to work from home that day.  I think the reason for this is that the meeting notice always includes the word “mandatory” in the subject line, and we are nothing if not a bunch of rebellious fucks.

I have been one of the department reps for Operation Feed since the previous one of these meetings, when one of the managers–call him Brownie–asked for volunteers.  I have always had mixed feelings about Operation Feed as manifested in a large corporate environment, which I will go into down the page.  Note for the record, that I am not against feeding people who are hungry.  I am going out on a limb to assert that people should, in fact, eat.  I know that is a controversial stand, but damn it, lines have to be drawn somewhere. 

So Brownie starts off by saying “Well, Patti’s not here today, and Jamie can’t do it, so…”  I got it Brownie; I’m third banana on this totem pecking pole order, or whatever.  I know I mixed that up a little.  (The truth is probably that because I sit farther away from Brownie than those two do, he just got to me last; but I don’t want that to inconveniently impede the narrative).   Patti’s the other volunteer representative, and would of course be the natural choice to ask, to get up on short notice and speak extemporaneously.  Poised and articulate, smart, likable, and very experienced at public speaking.  She also has a tendency to be a hilarious goofball.  She was off work that day, doing some awesome stuff with her family.  Jamie (who helps collect money for the jeans day fundraising portion of the operation) has a very laid back nature, from which he issues an assertive denial–by simply saying “no, man”– to Brownie’s request, and that is that.  Very cool.  Not a whole lot of people can just “no, man” a standard request in that fashion, let alone have that be that afterwards, with such certainty.

So I have sort of a thing about public speaking, especially the kind that is requested 20 minutes before it is to occur.  I can do it, and have done it, and it usually goes well, but on the inside beforehand I always feel kind of like a dog on the freeway, during the special rush hour for cat lovers.  So for the first part of the meeting I am sinking low into my seat in the auditorium, thinking shit like “damn it I hope I don’t get up there and start blurting out inappropriate shit” and then that of course triggers some long-forgotten, heinous memory from the dark years to come bubbling up out of the La Brea tar pits of my memory, to which I am all like “god damn it, especially not that”…  I know, I am a drama queen on the inside.  But on the outside I am just a quiet attendee sinking into his chair.  And then I hear “…update on Operation Feed”, and I am up on the stage.

And for at least 45-50 seconds [In reality, approximately 2-3 seconds, 4 max. -ed.]  I just completely lose my ability to speak. I turn around to look at the Powerpoint slide projected behind me, and then back around to the auditorium, and there is still nothing, and I have a brief moment of panic [No one even fucking noticed this.  It was seriously not that--Jeez, what an exaggerating puss. -ed.].

First I faux-bitch out Brownie for not having my powerpoint slide included in the deck, followed by a sarcastic “oh, that’s right.  There isn’t one.  We only found out about this 45 minutes ago”.  And then I start some autopiloted rambling monologue about how Operation feed has sort of militaristic overtones, with its “Operation” in the title and in-house volunteers holding the rank of “Captain” and “Lieutenant”, and that I was under the distinct impression that we would have at least been issued uniforms and a service weapon by now, which I emphasize with an open-armed “what the fuck?” gesture to Brownie, off to the side of the stage.    I feel like I am entering the manic phase of a bipolar disorder as I describe our role as “keeping the food pantry stocked” and then immediately lament the fact that I can’t go around at gunpoint ordering people to buy their snacks there, but that they should anyway.  To my relief, I look over and the guy whose meeting it is, the boss of all the managers, is just cracking up.  As are many of the other attendees. Ok, the demented raving of op feed lunatic guy is winning their hearts and minds.  I mention the signup sheet where people can request specific food items, and openly confess my lack of familiarity with some of the items people have already written on the request list (such as “beer on a stick.  No, really.  I have never even heard of this…”), then move on to the request for ”gonja” [sic]).  I said something about first of all, get a doctor to prescribe it for medical usage and we’ll see what we can do; and “second, it is spelled g-a-n-j-a… so remember, folks: spellchecker is your friend!”  Like the whole moral of my story was to spell your illicit substances correctly so we can better serve your snacking needs.  I am such a dork, but at least they were laughing.

Plate on a stick

Sometimes I feel like those jugglers they used to have on the Ed Sullivan show or the Smothers Brothers Comedy Hour, who would have a bunch of pointy dowel rods sticking up in the air, on which they would spin plates.  You know the guys…by the time they get the 10th or 15th plate started spinning the first one starts wobbling so they race back to it, jiggle the stick to apply centrifugal force and stabilize it, then race back to start number 11 or 16, then race back to correct any other wobblers, and so forth and so on, all to the accompaniment of that Aram Khachaturian’s Sabre Dance, which is now a tune wedgie stuck in my head, especially that god damn trombone part (the descending bwaahwaah! part right after all the dah-yitditditditditditdit parts, by the way), thank you very much Armenia or whomever gave him that idea.  I used to play a trombone, so I know.  Anyway, sometimes I feel like those guys, even after I think it through and realize that I really only have a small number of figurative plates, and (to beat the everloving snot out of the analogy) they’re made of plastic anyway so they won’t break if they fall off, and even if they do, so what, is Ed’s ghost going to appear and hassle me because it’s not such a rilly big shew after all??

So I was on that trip with my kids between Friday and Tuesday, and I kept thinking I should be keeping up with work-related email or personal email or this thing right here, or figuring out the AC and other home repairs, or what-have-you, but I kept ending up relaxing or cracking wise or doing stuff with my kids, instead.  That didn’t keep all that other crap out of my head.  Mostly, though, the plastic plates all landed on a Nerf floor and didn’t break, again figuratively.  Fucking trombones.

In medias res

There doesn’t have to be a narrative arc to these things; I finally figured that out.  I’m new at this.  Jumping right in:

I have some inspirational crap on my cube wall and desk at work.  I didn’t festoon the everloving shit out of the place–no pith or depth, no exhortations or testimonials, and fer chrissakes no posters of cats eternally being encouraged to “hang in there”, although I think that picture would be more effective if there were some menacing dude with a hockey mask and a blood-and-fur-matted chainsaw in the background–it is just couple of tattered pictures that have been in my possession since college, one other picture, and a figurine among all the other crap on my walls and desk.

Albert and Abe usually end up, in my mind anyway, doing some kind of exasperated face-palm gesture in reaction to whatever fresh outrage I have perpetrated against the virtues they represent.  Sometimes I even think they look at each other and whisper under their breath, things like “what a lying sack” (Abe) or “What a dumbass” (Albert)  Buddha mostly doesn’t let things bother him, but I think even he rolls his eyes and shakes his head (while muttering some real sarcastic zen koan, the answer to which I would never “get” in a million years) once in a while.  And the other guy usually speaks right to my heart, which usually doesn’t listen.

Albert and Abe are postcard-sized portraits, and the Buddha is a small bronze statue who basks serenely in the pale blue glow of my computer monitor.  The other guy is a picture I found on the internet.  These iconic figures are there to remind me of various things:  to try to be smart, and honest, and peaceful, when dealing with whatever comes up at work.  Note that I did not assert that I AM any of those things…if I were, I would not need the pictures and statues to remind me.  Truth be told, I am more like the other guy.

So, Albert:

 
And Abe:

 
And the other guy, whose advice I never take, even when I should:

 

Hey, look at me, with no madd formatting skillz and sucking at this shit right out of the gate!  Yay!

Anyway, what I will strive for in this endeavor is what I hope I have gotten by keeping that Abe and that Albert around for so many years:  some measure of honesty, and of intelligence, in what I offer.  And hopefully some of what Buddha and the nice cuppa guy in the other picture represent.  And prolly some other stuff, too; I just don’t know what, yet.  My voice is not the product of an orderly mind.  I have strewn snippets of prose and fiction and commentary and fragments of phrases, by the hundreds: across hard drives, jump drives, My Documents folders on dead computers in the basement under the boxes of old video game consoles, and in composition binders, spiral notebooks and miscellaneous scraps of paper.  Some of that stuff may well end up here over time. 

In the mean time, please bear with me as I adapt my voice and adopt a cadence suitable to this medium.

Like I said, I’m new at this…