Friday, December 16, 2005

fiscally fucked

Yup, that's me. I decided to pull the trigger on a 171 'Gun, and now I'm pretty solidly ass-broke--just in time for Christmas. I've run the tallies, and if I can make it till next thursday without buying any more food. Or any more anything, really, I will have just shy of 20 dollars to spend on christmas presents. Thus, some financial planning is in order. Here's what I'm thinking for gifts:

GIRLFRIEND -- Booty is a bull market, and demand is high. Irritatingly, no matter how much I buy, I am NEVER the seller, and rising prices are nothing but trouble. As such, an unwarrented portion of my gift-giving capitol will be absorbed by this veritable money pit of love. Fortunately, I have a few tricks:

1. One gift already purchased--on sale--paid for and recieved. CHA-CHING $$$ Cost=FREE!
2. Her Birthday was less than a month ago, which, though a contributing factor to my current economic strain, also lighten's my Christmasy burden, thus, it's like one of the presents I gave her for her BDay was really like an early Christmas present. CHA-CHING $$$ Cost=Free! .....my logic here is right.....right?
3. Ok, so its gonna take more than I've already got. Fortunately, I've got something picked out. Brilliant. Price=$25 Not brilliant. About $20 - About $25 = About broke. except not about. Broke. More than broke, in fact.

Fuck.

Wait! My slack-ass roommante owes me money! Lots of it! Hundreds and Hundreds and hundreds! ....but he's broke too. With some arm-twisting, however, and yelling, I can get $50. More than broke + $50 = about $50(almost).

4. Um, I still need something else for the money-pit, but since I don't know what else to get, and have the emotional gift-giving sensibility of a doorknob, I'll just wait and pretend one materializes out of thin air. Moving on instead to...

MOTHER--why are women so expensive? I mean, seriously. It's outrageous. If I didn't have any women in my life I'd be rich. And lonely. But rich. And maybe I could be like Hugh Grant in about a boy--without the dates. Which would make me more like the kid in about a boy--before he meets the girl--in other words--when he is still a loser. Fuck. Ok, mom, here's what's in store:
1. Her birthday present that I already have but never gave her because i was too cheap to mail it. Cost=Free! CHA-CHING $$$
2. Book. I have to get her this book. I was gonna order it, but the online Amazzholes wouldn't have it ready to ship until bloody january. Now i have to pay more, and tax, at a store. Cost=$15 Money left = about $35
3. Kitschy local purchases for home-living. Comfort purchases that have no real value, but seem like good gifts. You know the kind. From little cute shops with bows on them. Edible delectibles and shit like that. Warm. Cost=$10. (What it's actually going to cost because I live in an overpriced urban center where kitschy warm things are, like booty, in high demand = $20) Money left = about $15
4. Every geek's dream gift--burned CD's. Cheap, easy, perfect. Lots of value, little cost. Cost=price of blank CD's. Already have blank CDs that I took from mother when last home. Cost=Free! CHA-CHING $$$

BROTHER
1. Book. Again, tried to get on Amazzhitty, but it wouldn't get here even close to in time. Cost=$10
2. Are you kidding? I see him like once a year. One gift is all he's getting. Not that he isn't a great guy--he is. He's just not as great as I am broke.

OTHER BROTHER
This one is a last minute suprise. He's not coming to the christmas get-to-gether, which, in my opinion, constitutes forfeiture of his gift. Apparently, however, it does not. Fortunately, he lives a zillion miles away, and I feel that I can reasonably get away with a gift getting to him late. Thus, pre-christmas cost=Free! CHA-CHING $$$ (until later...)

Money left = $5
- Tax, which I forgot to count = roughly 0.
+ spare change lying around the house = roughly $2.

EVERYONE ELSE
So I'm supposed to get something for everyone's stocking. Like, extended family and stuff. 8 people total. Ridiculous. How much kitsch can I really wrestle up? I've got 2 bucks. GF suggested Dollar store. 8 people times 1 dollar a piece = 8 dollars. 2 bucks - 8 bucks = draft overcharge. but, if i can find a bag of stuff at the dollar store. A bag of candy, or baloons, or candles, yes candles! for 2 dollars, then i could give 1 to everyone! yes! yes! A 2 dollar bag of candles! or candy. Cost = $2

Money left = 0

Shopping left to do = NONE!

well, except that really, i need something else for the money pit. and, i could use something for the money pit's parent's. and i could get something for the roommate, but seeing as he owes me so much money, he can wait till i get my fucking money back before i get him a damn present. Oh, and I may need to eat. Or drive. Or drive to Sun Valley, so I can use the 'Gun. Fuck. How much for candles? Fuck. Flowers? 40? Fuck fuck fuck.

Welcome to me--not poor, per say. Certainly not homeless. Certainly not opressed. Basically middle-class, white, privilidged, comfortable, suburban, and yet royally, plentifully, thoroughly, fiscally fucked.

Friday, August 26, 2005

a foot in the water

I work on floor 27. Floors 17-30 belong to my firm. Floor 4 is the lobby on the east side; the west side lobby is on floor 1, but the elevator doesn't go down that far. Normally, I take the elevator from the west lobby up to floor 27 and walk around the corner, through the kitchen/copy room and to my large corner desk in a small interior corner.

When I cam here to interview--or on my first day--I could only go to floors 19 and 29. The other lighted buttons responded to my mashing with little more than a blink on and a stubborn return to off. Now, with my fancy schmancy badge, the world is mine and the elevator is my chariot. But only so long as the world doesn't include anything between 5 and 16 or 31 and 40.

You can take the stairs, like I did today. But the stairs are locked just like the elevator buttons, and while 17-30 is my palace, everything else is my prison. So today, as I walked briskly down from 17 to 16 it might have felt something like stepping out of the world, into some sort of immensely long, dark, and foreboding tunnel. And when I finally reemerged into the beaming afternoon sunlight it might have felt as though I had safely re-entered reality--though in quite a different place than where I had left it.

It didn’t.

When I did finally reach the 4th floor door, it felt like i had just walked down 23 flights of stairs.

I feel a bit like that now. And while my legs are by now pretty sturdy, its easy to lose balance. And every now and then, when a sign, or a coke can, or any other little thing catches my eye, I remember going down the stairs and passing someone on their way up and then stepping outside and not knowing exactly where I am, but knowing that I sure as hell am not on the floor I started on.

Friday, June 10, 2005

Home

It’s been a while since I last wrote here. Some things have happened, and now, I’m back in the basement where it all started. I’m not gonna lie, its slow in the basement, and a little lonely. But, maybe I could use a touch of both those shades.

I tried to talk to my parents today. I tried to explain how interesting the stuff I was reading in Stephen Hawking’s A Brief History of Time was—relativity, the big bang, pretty generic stuff really. I was trying to explain how I had been wondering about the Shrivastava theorem; about whether—if the big bang happened in cycles, and there was enough density to the universe to stop the expansion and bring it all back to one point, and then blow up again—things would happen the same way. I hadn’t gotten that far in the book yet, and I was just throwing the idea out there that maybe there is only one way for an infinitesimally small and infinitely dense point to pack—and if there is, then maybe there is only one way for it to unpack. Maybe all of this has happened before, and will continue to happen again—forever. Just a thought.

Anyway, I’m trying to just make small talk, when my mom asks, do you ever talk to that duke kid about this? I thought you said he was pretty religious. Huh? I wasn’t talking about religion mom. I was talking about astrophysics. And to be honest, I’m frustrated by the fact that evidently you saw a tension between what I was saying about the big bang and your own conception of religious faith. It just didn’t make any sense. Why did me getting into the idea of the big bang have to have anything to do with religious faith?

Why do I have to believe that God created the universe to get something out of Christianity? Why do I have to believe that Christ was the son of God to get something out of Jesus? Why do I have to believe anything religion tells me to understand that kindness, compassion, and charity—just like strength, wisdom, and cleverness—are examples are of arĂȘte, excellence?

It’s just kind of frustrating, that’s all. I wish people would stop worrying whether things are right or wrong and just start thinking about what’s most useful. Then again, I wish I could sleep well at night, too. Maybe it’s my conscience. I really don’t think it is though—its probably the java chip ice cream cake I eat every night. Yum.

The CC is in LA. Tank is who knows where. The LTLF isn’t anymore, but she’s going to seattle, and sounds like she’s doing well for herself—better than me anyway. D is still in Hawaii, living the life, maybe he’ll come to Seattle, too, with me and the B’s and K. Ryan and Ice and Easy-E and tall tree will be there for a while too, until they go on to bigger and better things.

Sorry to keep changing subjects, but it just happens like that sometimes, you know? And an older man told me a while back about how he still kept in touch with his old friends and they saw each other several times a year and cooked and drank and golfed and shot the shit. It was kinda reassuring. And really, I think that’s worth a lot. Having good people around is important. Probably the most important. A good family is a huge part of it, but I’m not sure that’s enough. I think that was part of why the college life was so nice—so many people, there’s bound to be a couple good one’s around. I think that keeping them around is gonna be important. If not around, at least, around.

Where are we going? And when?

Saturday, May 07, 2005

God, are you listening? Are you reading this, now? ever? Will you comment? Oh, please comment. No one comments anymore and it would mean so much, and I would know that you’ve read, and then I would know that you always read, and I think that would be good.

I have some questions, I’m looking for answers.

Does it matter what I order? What are the chances that someone will fuck up my order? What should I order? Ok, fine, what will I order? How unhealthy, exactly, is that? Let’s say I order one of everything—can I afford that? I can! super! Wait…that’s gonna make me fat huh? Fuck.

I have other questions, but those are the most pressing. I’ll check back in a few days—at which point, a revelation will occur and decisions will be made. Or not.

Tuesday, May 03, 2005

An older man than me

told me a story today. He often strikes me as a sad man—constantly under the weight of the things he knows, of himself and of others. He is excited by others—by what they do, what they say, what they write, how they feel, how they make him feel—but it is as if all the while he knows that he has chosen not to do those things. For that decision, perhaps he has never quite forgiven himself.

His story was about a woman who died and the people who gathered to honor her death. I don’t remember now the details of the woman, or the words used to describe the gathering. The tears that almost fell didn’t, and have since run dry. Likewise, the intensity of drive and determination and excitement has similarly faded. But I do remember a few things:

The woman had fought for rivers; specifically, rivers in Montana, and protecting the fish in them. She had lobbied and acted and written in an attempt to preserve what she thought needed preserving, and then suddenly, she had died. When her family and friends gathered, they did so beside a river, in Montana, and as they formed a circle and talked about the things that the woman (dead but not gone) had meant to them and done for them and done for others, a great number of salmon began to surface feed in the river next to gathered crowd. And the fish, and the people, were gathered in the same spot, and were all there because of this woman that had died.

The people were there because they had known her and were now mourning her passing beside the river near her brother-in-law’s cabin; and the fish were there because she, with the help of others, had saved them and their river.

There was more to the story, and there was more to the telling of it that made it good and powerful and true, but I can’t remember the details. All I am left with now is the knowledge that for a while today—it still lingers but fades fast—I knew that there were several paths through life that I did not want to follow, and they were those paths toward which I have recently been most strongly leaning. I desperately wanted to give up money and ease and comfort and success and normalcy to be standing there beside the river, listening to the throngs of salmon feeding at the surface of the water and then, like the 40 others who came and who understood why they were there, I, too, wanted to take a long pull from the bottle of Irish whiskey before adding my stone, from my river and my place, to the humble monument we had constructed.

I don’t know if I will still want this when I wake up tomorrow morning, and more importantly I don’t know if I will want it when I make those decisions which will begin to steer my course either toward or away from that monument-making. It may take another woman and another gathering and another story to bring back what, for a moment, I knew.

I am left with knowing only that the things I feel the most are, for now, at irreconcilable odds with the things I feel the most passionately. Which is the more easily forgivable? Not sure.

Tuesday, April 26, 2005

a man down.

There’s something about playing a man down. It quickens the pulse, lifts the chin, and the tightens the veins—today we were down two. The five of us, the seven of them, and a story-book victory in the making.

When you play with a handicap, you can’t lose. It’s like test-taking without studying and dating without showering. With all the odds against, you, everyone wants you to win, and if you don’t win, “at least you had heart.”

And guts. It takes guts to play a man down doesn’t it…or does it? It doesn’t take any guts to play a game you can’t lose. No cajones needed for being the underdog. Some kids float through life, not trying but getting by, and they (dare I say we?) feel pretty good about it. Hey, they’re doing ok—for not really trying very hard, maybe they’re doing great. It takes brains to be adequate with abysmal effort. Thank god I’m not an “adequate” overachiever.

But it doesn’t take guts. Playing a man down, living without trying, trying without really trying—its really all just to get by and play it safe. No one blames you for not having something if you say you don’t really want it. But don’t you want it? Sure, it’s hard to be the favorite. Hard to expect something. Even hard to want something. But that’s where the players are. They are the one’s on the teams that are supposed to win, making the plays they are supposed to make, knowing that if they don’t, no one is going to say “ah, well, at least he had heart” because no one gives a shit how hard you try when you are on top—just so long as you win. Trying, not trying, heart, no heart, doesn’t matter when you’ve got a full team. And in the end, isn’t that what counts? Are you ever going to win anything if you don’t lose the handicap, sack up, and just win with no excuses?

Eh, maybe, who am I to know? Today we played two men down.

…and lost.

Monday, April 25, 2005

Golf shots.

There’s two kinds of shots in golf—the safe shot, and the not-so-safe shot.

There I am, lining up my third stroke of the par 5 number 8, nothing between me and the green but a surmountable distance…and a tree. I’m not going to lie, it was a big tree, but I was feeling like a big shot, and Christ, a golf ball is pretty damn small, and there is all kinds of open space up in that tree, just begging for a golf ball to weave a path through. Thus, the two choices: safe or not-so-safe.

Oh, unsolvable riddle, who am I to solve thee?

This is bigger than a tree. This is about me, and you, and everyone else, and who I want to be and who I’m going to be and what we are going to do and who you want to become. It’s about law and literature and love and life. It’s about speeding and drinking and wearing a helmet and studying for tests and taking tests without studying and doing drugs and doing laundry and wearing off-color clothes and taking clothes off. Is it the golf ball that will suffer from my poor decision, or is it me? Could it be you?

The golf ball, quite small; the tree, quite big; the golfer, quite bad. Perhaps I am indeed the golfer, carefully deciding the direction in which to drive my life. The ball is then my life, the tree those obstacles in my way: tests and loans and rejection letters and rejections.

Or is it different? Maybe I am not the golfer at all. Maybe I am the ball! And the golfer is fate, or God, or god, or my parents on the phone or the television or the man or maybe the golfer is even you. But what is the tree?

I know. The tree is you. Yes, the tree is most certainly and definitely you. The tree is you and I am both the golfer and the ball and the course would be so interminably obvious and clear if you weren’t there—but would it also be flat, lonely, dull, boring, “safe,” and awful? Maybe, but dammit, it sure would be easier to get to the green.

What is the green? Is the green where I want to go? Is it a great job and a happy family and great wife and dog and a house enough free time to ride my back and maybe play tennis or golf but not so much free time that I get bored, or is the green just where we all wind up? Perhaps the green is old age, the cup—death.

No, I don’t like that version. I’ve changed my mind. The green is now you. You are no longer the tree, you are now the green. The tree is fear and nervousness and a lack of confidence and mumbled words and forgotten facts and everything between me and you. But what am I? Am I the golfer, who has a choice? A choice of going around the tree? Taking an extra shot, but making sure I get there sooner or later, without injury and without fear of losing the ball.

Losing the ball!

Surely losing the ball is death. Surely. Yes, losing the ball is death and if I hurry to get through the tree to you I run the risk of dying a horrible and awful death at the hands of a pond or long weeds or worse yet—a spot of lonely ground that simply gets overlooked.

I don’t much like that scenario, I think that in fact, I would rather not be the golfer, driving my life through all the perils of its fearsome course, aiming for the green, but winding up in the rough.

In my world, I would like to be the ball. The ball makes no choices and cannot be blamed. Yes, it runs a risk, of being lost and never found, and at times, it can take a beating, but it does so with much endurance and rarely, if ever, does the ball break. It gets dirty, and gets lost, and sometimes hits things and sometimes goes the wrong direction, but these are no faults of its own, and it can usually recover…or at least, be dropped back into play. The truth is, I don’t want to decide. I’m afraid of going through the tree, but I’m also afraid of losing strokes and losing time. I’m ready to do either, but I need someone to hit me.

I know it doesn’t work like that. I know that I am the golfer, and no matter how many trees and bunkers and weeds foul things up, I’ll still be the one hitting the ball, though it may be harder at times than at others. At some point, I have to stop thinking about it, have to stop taking practice swings, and hit the ball. In the end, it’s about a being firm but relaxed, graceful but committed. It’s about a good back-swing and a good follow-through. It’s about sacking up, hitting the damn ball, and being prepared to follow it, wherever it happens to go.

Oh, for what it’s worth, on the course today I went for gold, hit the tree, lost sight of the ball, and wandered around aimlessly looking for it until the fellows on the other fairway whistled and pointed to the middle of the fairway—30 yards behind where I started.

Friday, April 15, 2005

Bigness



I finished Moby Dick, for the first time, moments ago, but in truth I have only just opened its cover. For the first time, now, after having read the final page, have I seen the scope of the thing that lays before me--seen how massive, how deep, and how big it is. I want to reduce it, and learn it, and know it, but one cannot reduce and learn and know life--could one possibly reduce and learn and know this? Or will the attempt, the attempt to know, be the end of both known and knower?

Perhaps. I am tired and full of energy. I finished and opened a big thing. And like a child whose toy comes with many parts and many things to look at and play with and figure out, I failt to start the process for how greatly it intimidates and awes me. Who art thou Ahab? Who art thou Ishmael? Who art though Scribbs? Who art though Moby Dick?

What a night. "What's that he said--Ahab beware of Ahab--there's something there!"

Tuesday, April 12, 2005

Where does the time go?

Sometimes you gotta run. There are times when walking just no longer cuts it. Like when you are late, or when you are angry. I am running, but I’m not sure if I’m running towards something or away from something. To be perfectly honest, I think I would like to stop, but I’m not sure if that’s an option. Anyone want to run with me? I don’t know where we’re going, but maybe we can get some fast food or something along the way.

Thursday, April 07, 2005

Losing things

I just wrote an irate post. Not just irate, livid. Not just livid, mad. Where is it? Lost. Lost in gobbledygargon of the internet, lost into a moment in time that already happened but wont happen again. Lost like hat, or even a sandwich, that falls overboard from a boat that doesn’t stop moving, and though its back there all the time, still floating and getting soggy and maybe getting eaten, you can no sooner turn around and get it than you can go back and not drop it in the first place.

I’m not livid anymore. The moment passed—like I said. For a while though, I was going to punch a man—rather, a boy, trying to act like a man because he couldn’t handle the fact that no one cares who he is or what he does or what he has to say about why he is better than you. Fist clenched but fingers relaxed, I was ready. Instead, I wrote a livid post that then disappeared.

Just like that my physical fury melted into rhetorical rage and dissipated into unreachable 1s and 0s without any emotion at all. Maybe it’s better that way. Maybe it would be better if it always happened that way.

This time, however, I’m writing in word; no more lower case “i”s for me—it does it for me (it doesn’t like semicolons and dashes and parentheses all in once sentence though). I guess all I’m trying to say is that if people want to fight the man, I wish they would just do it—rather than just settling for fighting those at hand, whom they think they can beat.

If they don’t owe you anything, then you cant say they aren’t good enough. Good enough for what? They don’t need to be good enough for you. I know that is difficult to stomach, but its true. You’re just going to have to stop berating people for not being you and not being what you want them to be and not wanting to be what you want to be. There, maybe the anger came back, just for a bit. Not all, or even a part, but a smell of its taste, or a feeling its sound.

thefacebook.com

school got added to thefacebook.com. whoopdifucking doo.

i mean, sure, im signed up already, fervently waiting for others to sign up so i can "poke" them...but whatever, who doenst love wholesome online fun.

Lots to say, not time to say it, pretend i said it and you read it and then comment about it. im out.

ps. all posts will be in e-grammar from now on

or not.

All i want to do is sail...

Wednesday, March 23, 2005

i am fine.

Friday, March 11, 2005

Spring Break

Finished the last day of classes today and what did I do? Head for cancun? tahiti? palm springs? TJ? hell, even home? nope. Two weeks staying at school, writing.

Fortunately, I will be writing brilliance. Far more brilliant than this, and even more brilliant than that last post, which i think, was quite brilliant. But, I'm writing about that all day, so no writing about that now.

I dont really have anything to say. Personal things are a bit too personal and impersonal things are for other people. Blah Blah Blah. ...

The blognazi (remember him?) thinks he's a high roller. Thinks his blog has made it big and everyone thinks its hot shit. Gives his bloody address when he's hobnobbing with the real journalists and whatnot. Outrageous. Slobnobbing some guy who decided he ought to publish some of his old blog posts in a book. Seriously, write something worth publishing, or stick to web. Why would i buy your shitty book when i could jsut read the posts online? Lame. Oh, and about getting a lot of hits and all that jazz, I say, traffic is traffic -- on the web or on the road -- bad.

That doesnt make a whole lot of sense, but then again, neither does your face.

Heminway told a story once. It was about a guy he knew, a great boxer. He asked the great boxer how he did so well in fights against another great boxer, and the guy responded, "that other guy, hes a great boxer, a real smart one. All the time that he's boxing, he's thinking. And all the time that he's thinking, I'm hitting him."

I like it Ernie. The point is, is that people have taken H's admiration for boxers and bullfighters and whatnot all wrong. I mean, sure, he used it as a metaphor for writing when he called himself the "heavyweight champion of American Literature" and he was damn right. The point is, hes not saying that writing is a male-dominated profession with no room for women. I mean christ, didnt anyone see Million Dollar Baby? No, he was saying that writing is about hitting people, and practicing and using your skills and competinging and not about thinking too much, or using too big or too expensive words. That;s why Hemingway hated the critics, and also why he thought he had beat them. All the while that they were thinking about him and his work and his life and all of his private shit, he was writing simple, truthful, powerful, authentic novels and stories and with each one, was hitting them - the critics, the scholars, the readers, and anyone who bothered to read him. Maybe thats why he hates me, too. But he's dead, so im ok.

Spring break may mean more blogging. Hopefully things will improve.

Thursday, February 10, 2005

I saw Billy Collins tonight. Saw him, heard him, whatever. He's a poet, he claims, a reasonably good one, it seems, and a remarkably popular one, im told. He tells sort of conversational, plain, transparent english and reads with a desert-dry sarcasm. Pretty funny, kinda thought provoking.

He reminded me of John Cale, in his plainsong voice. The Andy Warhol of poetry. Fantastic... John Cale reminds me that the trouble with reality is,

it's hard to tell what's real. We can't see reality, cant hear it, smell it, taste it, cant even motherfucking touch the motherfucker. I talk in riddles because if i didnt, i might tell the truth to myself and then i would get "a taste of reality" and that would probably suck. The point is, my mind plays tricks on me, i want it to stop.

Nevermind, i want to write. but not to you. its like im starting all over again. im not sure i want to. When i started this blog, it was fresh, exciting, undiscovered territory, and all the blog could think about was itself, and blogging, and everything was potential and nothing was past. I bloody want that again, but i dont have time.

I dont have the time, now isnt the time, cant make the time, time isnt there, time isnt now, no time, maybe some other time.

sure, some other time.

Tuesday, February 08, 2005

"You are more dumbly obstinate than the sea"

- Euripides, "Hippolytus". Trans. David Grene.

Am I still here? Alive?

Yes, I am. Just checking.

Because for a while there, it stopped making sense. Now I'll just go back and wait and see if it ever starts again.