Continuum

I've stopped and started four times now. Get a grip.

Relationships are a nightmare. My day-to-day interactions with peers, coworkers, and friends are all pleasant enough, but I find myself viewing these types of things as a battlefield more and more often. Conversations become sorties, words become weapons, laughs are tactical nuclear strikes. I feel like a World War II soldier whenever I write a Facebook status update: in the trenches, shivering with trepidation, waiting for someone anyone to do something anything to break the stalemate, scribbling a letter to my sweetie back stateside about how the junkslut at Subway used too many green peppers on my Fastball sub.

Suddenly, a "Like." Validation. We aren't fighting and dying on the constantly-redesigned-but-never-improved timeline for nothing. Whenever a "friend" signs off of Facebook chat, I struggle to remember her face. Profile pages line up in tidy white lines; wall posts may as well be grieving families placing a trembling hands on a head stone. "good to see you the other day lol." Somewhere, a dove flies by a setting sun.

And this is the easy stuff! I have an unhealthy reliance on virtual interactions because of the structure. In person you have to be on and that is exhausting. Electronic personas are always charming, always aloof, always calculated. I never worry about saying the wrong thing online because the medium is the message; plausible deniability behind a screen and keyboard. My meatbag body and mind and voice crackle with energy. There's no control. It all just happens, whether I want it to or not.

Which, sure. No regrets, right? But there's a haunting permanence in exasperated responses. I love everyone, and it's so much easier to type than say. A raised eyebrow, a nanosecond of frown--these things are more devastating that bombs.

It's winter, though. Cold times and cold thoughts and stolen moments of warmth are the point.

Elevator Music

This is a list of things that make me envious:

--People who wake up early enough to eat breakfast.
--People who sleep in long enough for lunch to be their first meal.
--Musicians.
--Magicians.

There's a commercial on television with Papa John. I'm going to call him Papa for the rest of this entry even though I don't recognize his authority as a father figure or an elder in a small Italian village. Regardless, he's talking about how football and his brand of edible frisbees are the "perfect... combination." The flow of sentence is impeccable until he reaches that point, at which time he has a minor stroke or something. I'm not worried about Papa at all; in fact, what I am worried about is professionalism in commercial production. Papa stutters so obnoxiously that I am considering never patronizing that establishment again, and that's the take you use for your national commercial? Standards.

Just...standards.

Tudo o que voce sempre quis saber

Too many aspects of our lives are universal. Today I went to the dentist, and left with my thirst sated, what with all that blood. Even with impeccable dental hygiene, those charlatans with pointy sticks will draw. If any dentist reads this, please take this bit of advice to heart: just... stop it with that.

So here we are: I didn't like going to the dentist. Does anyone? How unique! I want to meet this person with a bizarre probing fetish. Actually, no.

I wonder why I share these things. The history of written thought is filled with lamentations about dental visits. To free our newborn country from the shackles of tyrannical oral surgeons was the reason we fought a war. Wooden teeth are the closest real analogue to freedom we may ever see. But if I hate the dentist, and you hate the dentist, and the dentist drives home to her house but can't bring herself to turn off the engine because that means she needs to go into the house and face the things she earned from her horrible profession including her husband-with-a-chip-on-his-shoulder and their nascent dentist brood absorbing dark dental secrets through social osmosis, why talk about it?

The dentist makes me feel small. As a medical profession, it's pretty selfless when viewed detachedly--dentists, much like I imagine podiatrists, receive very little attention and respect for the positive outputs of their vocations. If I had a bunion and a podiatrist "cured" me, I'd be pretty jazzed. But the simple fact that life involves, you know, maybe getting a bunion or a cavity or whatever every now and then which requires me to see some specialist to inflict pain on my person in a therapeutic manner is science goddamn fiction.

You can't compare it to open-heart surgery or tumor cleansing or kidney modification or liver enlargement or body-part medical-jargon. If my heart doesn't come out of my chest today and the hole filled with a potato battery, I am going to die. But if I have a cavity? I'm uncomfortable. I may even get sick. But I can take care of it.

Perspective ends up concealing and congealing things. The reason I share these things is because my world view is mine. It is all I know and therefore supersedes all others. Right by default.

All you ever wanted to know is inside. Miner dig deep.

I carried it quietly

All of the framed pieces of art in my apartment hang crookedly.

For lunch, my boss and I got some greek food from this little hole-in-the-wall place taking up half of a gas station. It wasn't in the same strip mall as the gas station; it actually was half of a gas station. Although you'd expect some Mediterranean-class diarrea eating in a place this, the reality is quite different. These guys are as greek (Greek?) as you can get, speaking Aegean or whatever the hell. The terminology escapes me but these sumbitches execute the authentic.

Each time I leave that place I wonder about the physical space. It's awful. You got guys cooking or lambing or whatever on side--you scream at them you want a heee-row (or as I always get, a GYE-roo) and they give you a piece of paper. This paper is then taken to another, different counter where you give it to yet another, different Greek (greek?) dude who rings you up. This paper is stamped and you sit to drink your ginger ale and wait. It takes a long time--longer than it should--for a very soft-spoken g/Greek fellow to feebly mumble your number. If by some chance you hear it, you saunter up in all your slackness and pick up a tray of mythologies.

There's even like a sauce or something on it, I don't know. I'm no connoisseur of yogurt (yoghurt?) sauces, man. It's 2012. Greek (Greek?) restaurants need a yoghurt (yogurt?) sauce sommelier coming round, giving you some wine, recommending sauces for grape leaves and whatnot. The industry booms. Jobs:created.

There's a new Guided by Voices album and it's just nostalgia. Singing 'bout eatin' early morn donuts (doughnuts?) gets you thinkin' 'bout the way things were, the way things ought'n be. Wakin' up from your dream excited to write it down. Walkin' to school seein' people in the trees where you know they shouldn't be. Laughin' and laughin' and cryin' and laughin'. Fightin' sleep just as long as you could knowin' the dreamland is round that corner. When I was young it made sense.

Now it's sleep and black and driving to work listening to news getting informed feeling depressed because the world keeps spinning and when it stops we all fly off, a million billion miles an hour. Light-speed.

Things can be pretty horrifying sometimes. But it's those shadows in the corner of your room, hiding behind the door, what give relief in an all-too-needed physical sense. Running your hand across the surface and feelin' the impurities. The splinters are feedback.

A Start

To keep myself busy, I'm going to write this while watching Die Hard, also known as the best Christmas movie of all time.

This break has been odd. I've looked forward to the time off from work for weeks, but now that I'm reaching the end of it I'm ready for another. My contact with other human beings has been limited which is both a blessing and a curse. We're social creatures. I just wish everyone would leave me alone sometimes, too.

My resolutions for the new year are pretty basic: write every day, be a better person than I was last year, don't let depression win, and go on my great adventure. I'm not sure how to do many of them. You've got to try, though. I don't want the last interesting thing I do to be my suicide.

So here I am, dipping my toes into the pool. It's cold and unusual and fun and daunting and FUCK John McClane just shot a guy. I better get going.

Great Roosevelt's Ghost

Let's talk a bit about investments.

There are the obvious ones: spend some money to make money, have kids so they can become caretakers later in life, put meat in oven and get hot meat later. This is pretty basic stuff here. Without realizing it, we all make a bunch of tiny investments each day. The reason we never pick up on this is because of the inherent risk factor in the things we do. Getting up and going to work in order to make some scratch for beer or whatever is an easy choice; it has very little effect on your life overall. With no risk involved and the reward being so routine (you goddamned alcoholic), the math becomes involuntary. Every decision made during the day, even the banal ones like when you choose to use the bathroom, are made in order to maximize some sort of future return. And you never see it.

But what about the high-risk decisions you make?

These can be a matter of scale, like when you place a big-money bet in a dead pool and Bob Barker refuses to die (he's always going over the actual regulation time limit). A chance was taken, and nothing was gained from it. Investments like this tend to be real assholes, because the calculations involved in them are not routine. We're risk-averse by nature; the tendency is to play it safe and avoid all the ways in which we can be killed, maimed, or otherwise fucked. People who go nuts and do shit like sky diving or become rodeo clowns or teach elementary school are actively bucking the trend. The high risk is inherent, and the reward is variable, but the thrill is constant. Adrenaline becomes nature's consolation prize for being a geography teacher.

What I've been doing lately is making a series of high-risk, long-term bets. It's terrifying. My plans for the future make so much sense to me, but I'm getting a lot of glazed eyes and slack mouths from observers. It's tough not to let this shake my confidence. The only thing to do is double down on this stuff. Losing a big bet hurts, but folding on a bluff is a killer.

Appropriate gambling postscript,
adam

Inverse Valediction

This new Blogger format is terrible! Look at all the white space. Not only am I rusty after having not written anything serious in months, but the blank canvas stretches for days! You sit down to bang out a few words and Blogger wants to remind you about how small your penis is. Pretty decently sized, but you don't have to be all in my face about it.

All this feels wrong. Every sentence gets deleted and rewritten and shitty. My work voice has overtaken my creative voice absolutely; I mean, I just used a goddamn semicolon in a blog post. This isn't the New Yorker! Or Highlights! This was Exit Theory. It all used to flow so naturally. Honestly, it feels good to get all this out and admit how awful I am now. Blank slates are always good, right? Blankness, or the inherent blankicity of things, seems to be a common theme I've touched on twice in two paragraphs. Let's make it a blog post!

I get wrapped up easily in appearances. For years I've tried to impress people by doing what I think they would want me to do to impress them. Read that sentence again, and hit yourself with a hammer. This is how I thought, and it's how a crazy person thinks. These rules which seemed so important are actually very dumb, and were always this way. It's a lot like trying to recapture the "good times," as nebulous and treacherous as those can be--things today are smaller, and more insignificant, and how didn't you see that before, you dummy?

One could spend time focusing on the past, and mistakes, and shames. And indeed I do, and often, as I find myself startled awake just before dozing off, remembering how I accidentally shook a man's hook instead of his left hand. And that's just a "for instance," but really, that's the kind of thing that shoots into my brain right at the moment of slumber. I suppose it's better than a gun? It's certainly no less startling. But again, these are the types of things a person--a bearded, lazy, out-of-practice, back-in-the-game idiot--needs to embrace.

Regrets just get to be so much baggage. So, I'm going to say goodbye to my old way of doing things. I'm going to bite into the neck of life and shake the shit out of it until I feel confetti or whatever courses through life's veins dripping from my chin. Bring it on, huge Blogger work space. Time to see whose proverbial penis is the biggest!