2.12.2008
10.28.2007
is this a manifesto? no, just some thoughts.
I maintain a conviction that what I'm doing with my life has some purpose. Some greater purpose, that is, than the stuff of just living, just getting by. I'm learning. I'm improving things for myself and therefore, by living in the way that I want to, I'll be improving things for everyone. Eventually I hope I'll get to a point with these ways of expressing myself that it'll really make a difference. I should be writing more. I need some satisfyingly eloquent way of expressing myself, and I haven't been maintaining any of the venues I've cultivated proficiency in so far - music (the saxophone, the piano, sometimes the bassoon...), academics (?), y'know, whatever else I've been really good at in life so far. Public speaking? Hah. That digs into the whole can of worms and what-ifs that Unitarian Universalism fills at this point in my life. Not in the mood for that right now.
As great American novelist-philosopher Robert M. Pirsig says, there is a keen metaphor for the workings of the hyper-rational mind, that of an analytic knife. The knife defines our view of the world in analytic forms, and it doesn't always cut very keenly. For those who learn to guide their thoughts with the steadying power of rationality and logic, it's becomes easier to see the shape of their worldview - the edges of perspective formed by the ever-moving surgery of this knife. We're deep into metaphor now, but bear with me. The shape of one's worldview is one thing to consider, but also keep in mind what would happen in these metaphorical terms if one were to have a very very keen rational knife, a great logical mind, and nothing to balance it; a very small view of the world, a whole lot of black and white, with clear edges of faith everywhere and an unassailable core of reasoning to defend it all. That's surely not too unpleasant of a way to live one's life, but I can't help but feel like it misses most of the potential that we have to revel in our human flaws.
Face it - we're inherently flawed, wonderfully imperfect creatures. It's one of the deepest truths I've uncovered. Follow any philosophy deep enough and you either are blinded by confusion and close your eyes in blind faith, or you uncover your eyes and see that there's something imperfect, mortal, limited, somehow fundamentally dissonant about being human. There's room for improvement. There's a gap between what we are and what we want to be. There's something worth struggling for. This struggle is, I guess, a somewhat bizarrely stark representation of something I try to understand about the nature of faith. How can people accept so willingly and wholeheartedly, so many very different answers to the question; why we are here?
Mmm, heady stuff. Back to Pirsig's knife. I've been working for some time now on honing mine, that is, intentionally 'flexing' mental muscles, as it were, and thinking hard about something. I hope everybody does that, by the way. I think it'd be very sad if people didn't stop every now and then and take a while to tackle some mental exercise the way that you'd tackle any other project, from baking cookies to fixing a car or doing the crossword or researching a band or reading scientific papers or walking the dog. All of these sorts of projects require mental effort, sure, and varying degrees of it, but just as it's healthy to do some purely physical exercise every day, I just want to remind everybody to do some purely mental exercise too. And spend the rest of your time balancing the two. Seek balance. [Yes, I totally feel like an advice columnist or something now, all giving prescriptive advice and being preachy and this-is-how-things-are. Sorry.]
So the question I'm tackling for myself these last couple weeks or so is this: Why am I so fascinated right now by learning about my parents' pasts and what am I getting out of consciously and subconsciously emulating the successes and failures of my parents?
The answer, I think, came to me tonight. Well, an answer. Maybe it's not the best one. Maybe it won't make sense tomorrow. But I think that it all adds up... I'm forging an identity. I'm making this complex, tangled web of experience and perspective that we call a sense of self, and I'm paying particular attention right now to the ways in which I reflect and refract the discrete identities of my parents in the way I am, myself. And this is all very normal. Everybody does this, or at least has the opportunity to do this, all the time. Figure out who you are, ask yourself why you do the things you do, and let the picture of yourself that you paint in your mind with the answers to these questions be both an encouragement and a warning when considering all that you do next.
[Editorial note: I can tell that this writing seems, as a style, to be excessively normative, and I'm unhappy with it's rigidity as such, and the lack of respect for general relativism that it suggests. However, if the reader will be so kind as to 'push' out one level of analytic dimension, in the sense of dimensional 'push' and 'pop' that Hofstadler describes, these opinions of mine will seem much more appropriately humble. They are simply a mark of how I think at this point in time, and not at all something that I write at this time with the thought that it could or should hold true for all time. This disclaimer, by the by, if applied to all philosophical writing, could ameliorate a good deal of frustration with how stuffy those goddamn philosophers are. I think.]
So here I am, son of my father, son of my mother, etc. with the exception of my father's brother Chad, who insists on calling me Uncle and whom I obligingly refer to as Nephew - he says he feels old enough anyway without being called 'uncle', and I guess I believe him. I'm not going to try to sum up who I think I am, because that's not the point. I don't think I'm that interesting, or rather, I don't think I want to spend my life now talking about my life before now - I'm too busy trying to live it, so I'll have more to talk about later. And this is the struggle. For me, and maybe for a lot of other people. How much of my life do I spend as a means to an end, and how much of it do I spend vicariously? Really, it's a constant flux, an irregular dance of the bars on a graph, the skittering of needles on the polygraph, the static in the recording; this switching between modes is what creates such dissonance for us. The modes are, for purposes of this idea, the experiential and the analytical (my labels), roughly analogous to Pirsig's romantic and classical views of the world, in turn analogous to Kant's dichotomy between the immediacy of experiential reasoning and the a priori knowledge of the mind.
We switch back and forth between modes, jumping the chasm of this dichotomy, all the time. How wide the chasm is and how difficult a transition it is for us from one side to the other also depends on the lay of the land - that is, what we're doing with ourselves at the moment, what influences we're under, etc. The way in which we cut up our perception of the world and the edges of what we take to be meaningful are under our own control to define - such is the work of the knife I keep coming back to. If we can precisely and intentionally, thinking, quite simply, becomes easier.
I'd better make sure I'm making sense here and not lost in too broad a generalization or too specific of a metaphor. Perhaps examples of what I mean by experiential and analytical. Living primarily in the experiential mode, I might spend a whole day running, jumping, and climbing trees, (as Eddie Izzard once described). I'd be DOING things all day, you know, waving at strangers, practicing random acts of kindness, talking, dancing, reveling in the senses and being relational in the interpersonal sense, making social connections. In a primarily analytical day, I could have just as wonderful of a time sitting at home, reading - the paper, a magazine, bits of a book or three, wikipedia, allmusic, blogs, facebook - and writing, doing puzzles, working on origami models. I'd be comfortably alone in my own mind, reveling in the flow of information and the richness and complexity of intrapersonal relations, making intellectual connections. It's a world of a priori, conceptual analysis and thought, all captured in a very small and uninteresting physical world composed only of some papers and screen, and I suspect that some people can only see that sort of living as somebody sitting on their ass instead of getting out in the world and doing something 'important'. I think that's unnecessarily judgmental and close-minded, only because it ignores the challenge of finding a way to comfortably balance both by claiming that one is better than the other. There's some definite value in seeing flaws in either mode alone, because neither one is very valuable without the other.
Depending on the level of detail you apply this analysis to, the switching back and forth can be seen as an almost constant process, so keeping the analysis broad is most useful - the patterns you can see are much more interesting on a larger scale than from moment-to-moment. Labeling everything as motivated by either experiential or analytical inspiration is exhausting after a while, and is itself a highly analytic process.
Essentially, the point of this concept is to encourage others to seek self-awareness in a similar way, or whatever way works better. As I see it, honing one's analytical knife to as biting a sharpness as possible makes it possible to think more clearly all the time, spending less time 'in the air' while jumping the gap between modes of thinking and more time with both feet on the ground, enjoying the best of both sides. That's the idea, right? Make the most of this life. Find a way to get somewhere with your struggle.
I think I'm leaving this awfully unpolished, but it's starting to feel late. Thanks for reading, please leave a note if you read the whole thing and give me some perspective on whether this sort of writing is more 'hmm, interesting' or 'wtf'.
As great American novelist-philosopher Robert M. Pirsig says, there is a keen metaphor for the workings of the hyper-rational mind, that of an analytic knife. The knife defines our view of the world in analytic forms, and it doesn't always cut very keenly. For those who learn to guide their thoughts with the steadying power of rationality and logic, it's becomes easier to see the shape of their worldview - the edges of perspective formed by the ever-moving surgery of this knife. We're deep into metaphor now, but bear with me. The shape of one's worldview is one thing to consider, but also keep in mind what would happen in these metaphorical terms if one were to have a very very keen rational knife, a great logical mind, and nothing to balance it; a very small view of the world, a whole lot of black and white, with clear edges of faith everywhere and an unassailable core of reasoning to defend it all. That's surely not too unpleasant of a way to live one's life, but I can't help but feel like it misses most of the potential that we have to revel in our human flaws.
Face it - we're inherently flawed, wonderfully imperfect creatures. It's one of the deepest truths I've uncovered. Follow any philosophy deep enough and you either are blinded by confusion and close your eyes in blind faith, or you uncover your eyes and see that there's something imperfect, mortal, limited, somehow fundamentally dissonant about being human. There's room for improvement. There's a gap between what we are and what we want to be. There's something worth struggling for. This struggle is, I guess, a somewhat bizarrely stark representation of something I try to understand about the nature of faith. How can people accept so willingly and wholeheartedly, so many very different answers to the question; why we are here?
Mmm, heady stuff. Back to Pirsig's knife. I've been working for some time now on honing mine, that is, intentionally 'flexing' mental muscles, as it were, and thinking hard about something. I hope everybody does that, by the way. I think it'd be very sad if people didn't stop every now and then and take a while to tackle some mental exercise the way that you'd tackle any other project, from baking cookies to fixing a car or doing the crossword or researching a band or reading scientific papers or walking the dog. All of these sorts of projects require mental effort, sure, and varying degrees of it, but just as it's healthy to do some purely physical exercise every day, I just want to remind everybody to do some purely mental exercise too. And spend the rest of your time balancing the two. Seek balance. [Yes, I totally feel like an advice columnist or something now, all giving prescriptive advice and being preachy and this-is-how-things-are. Sorry.]
So the question I'm tackling for myself these last couple weeks or so is this: Why am I so fascinated right now by learning about my parents' pasts and what am I getting out of consciously and subconsciously emulating the successes and failures of my parents?
The answer, I think, came to me tonight. Well, an answer. Maybe it's not the best one. Maybe it won't make sense tomorrow. But I think that it all adds up... I'm forging an identity. I'm making this complex, tangled web of experience and perspective that we call a sense of self, and I'm paying particular attention right now to the ways in which I reflect and refract the discrete identities of my parents in the way I am, myself. And this is all very normal. Everybody does this, or at least has the opportunity to do this, all the time. Figure out who you are, ask yourself why you do the things you do, and let the picture of yourself that you paint in your mind with the answers to these questions be both an encouragement and a warning when considering all that you do next.
[Editorial note: I can tell that this writing seems, as a style, to be excessively normative, and I'm unhappy with it's rigidity as such, and the lack of respect for general relativism that it suggests. However, if the reader will be so kind as to 'push' out one level of analytic dimension, in the sense of dimensional 'push' and 'pop' that Hofstadler describes, these opinions of mine will seem much more appropriately humble. They are simply a mark of how I think at this point in time, and not at all something that I write at this time with the thought that it could or should hold true for all time. This disclaimer, by the by, if applied to all philosophical writing, could ameliorate a good deal of frustration with how stuffy those goddamn philosophers are. I think.]
So here I am, son of my father, son of my mother, etc. with the exception of my father's brother Chad, who insists on calling me Uncle and whom I obligingly refer to as Nephew - he says he feels old enough anyway without being called 'uncle', and I guess I believe him. I'm not going to try to sum up who I think I am, because that's not the point. I don't think I'm that interesting, or rather, I don't think I want to spend my life now talking about my life before now - I'm too busy trying to live it, so I'll have more to talk about later. And this is the struggle. For me, and maybe for a lot of other people. How much of my life do I spend as a means to an end, and how much of it do I spend vicariously? Really, it's a constant flux, an irregular dance of the bars on a graph, the skittering of needles on the polygraph, the static in the recording; this switching between modes is what creates such dissonance for us. The modes are, for purposes of this idea, the experiential and the analytical (my labels), roughly analogous to Pirsig's romantic and classical views of the world, in turn analogous to Kant's dichotomy between the immediacy of experiential reasoning and the a priori knowledge of the mind.
We switch back and forth between modes, jumping the chasm of this dichotomy, all the time. How wide the chasm is and how difficult a transition it is for us from one side to the other also depends on the lay of the land - that is, what we're doing with ourselves at the moment, what influences we're under, etc. The way in which we cut up our perception of the world and the edges of what we take to be meaningful are under our own control to define - such is the work of the knife I keep coming back to. If we can precisely and intentionally, thinking, quite simply, becomes easier.
I'd better make sure I'm making sense here and not lost in too broad a generalization or too specific of a metaphor. Perhaps examples of what I mean by experiential and analytical. Living primarily in the experiential mode, I might spend a whole day running, jumping, and climbing trees, (as Eddie Izzard once described). I'd be DOING things all day, you know, waving at strangers, practicing random acts of kindness, talking, dancing, reveling in the senses and being relational in the interpersonal sense, making social connections. In a primarily analytical day, I could have just as wonderful of a time sitting at home, reading - the paper, a magazine, bits of a book or three, wikipedia, allmusic, blogs, facebook - and writing, doing puzzles, working on origami models. I'd be comfortably alone in my own mind, reveling in the flow of information and the richness and complexity of intrapersonal relations, making intellectual connections. It's a world of a priori, conceptual analysis and thought, all captured in a very small and uninteresting physical world composed only of some papers and screen, and I suspect that some people can only see that sort of living as somebody sitting on their ass instead of getting out in the world and doing something 'important'. I think that's unnecessarily judgmental and close-minded, only because it ignores the challenge of finding a way to comfortably balance both by claiming that one is better than the other. There's some definite value in seeing flaws in either mode alone, because neither one is very valuable without the other.
Depending on the level of detail you apply this analysis to, the switching back and forth can be seen as an almost constant process, so keeping the analysis broad is most useful - the patterns you can see are much more interesting on a larger scale than from moment-to-moment. Labeling everything as motivated by either experiential or analytical inspiration is exhausting after a while, and is itself a highly analytic process.
Essentially, the point of this concept is to encourage others to seek self-awareness in a similar way, or whatever way works better. As I see it, honing one's analytical knife to as biting a sharpness as possible makes it possible to think more clearly all the time, spending less time 'in the air' while jumping the gap between modes of thinking and more time with both feet on the ground, enjoying the best of both sides. That's the idea, right? Make the most of this life. Find a way to get somewhere with your struggle.
I think I'm leaving this awfully unpolished, but it's starting to feel late. Thanks for reading, please leave a note if you read the whole thing and give me some perspective on whether this sort of writing is more 'hmm, interesting' or 'wtf'.
6.08.2007
well, here I am
Man, it's been a long time. There's so much I could write about, blah blah blah, but truth be told it's just not worth the time to go back and create a novel out of the last few weeks. It would take another week or so, and I could be out doing stuff instead of writing about stuff that already happened. So here's a quick way of being kinda interesting and providing some idea of the grand adventure that my life currently is without taking up too much of it in the telling - a list. Here's some of what I've done and seen and experienced in the last while, in no particular order.
Well, so it goes. More to follow!
- saw a man on the sidewalk flip off and scream obscenities at a passing ambulance.
- met a guy who was looking for his pet mountain lion and gazed in due wonderment at the very deep scratches all over his arms and legs. yes, they were from his 'mountain lion,' and he was fresh out of the hospital, drinking 22s of Alaskan Amber, and looking for his cat. he seemed really genuinely concerned that nobody was helping him find the beast.
- applied for a job at the Alberta Cooperative Grocery two blocks from my house.
- found graffiti on the outside of the fence around the back of my new house.
- found cat shit/vomit on my rug in the bathroom - not my cat's doing, either.
- hiked through the International Rose Garden with Abra.
- memorable moment - after hours of making fun of the crazy names people give their roses, I was totally noticed acting like a stoner by some guy with dreads and a camera. I was standing there with Abra and we were talking about the roses, and I said something like, "ah, yes, 'The Poet.' Fresh, vividly colored, yet maintaining that literary depth which earned him his name." (yes, I'm talking about a rose bush) And the guy was walking by and overheard me and just grinned at Abra and I and was like "hey guys, how's it going" and oh man, I was embarassed. I think I blushed.
- got lost at Washington Park with Abra, wandering along unmarked trails and crossing the intra-park railway several times.
- at one point we emerged from the underbrush just as a train was starting to go by, and I just stood there in my torn jeans and flip-flops, Abra on the hill about ten feet behind me, picking her way down the trail in ballet flats (yeah, we have great hiking footwear). the train was full of tourists and families 'seeing the park' from the safety of a wee train. I just stood there, smoking my cigarette, avoiding direct eye contact, feeling totally on display and trying to be cool. The exhibit was titled "hipsters taken out of their natural habitat" and it was awesome.
- it occurs to me now in trying to describe that that maybe you had to be there. but it was amazingly funny at the time. I looked back at Abra once the train had passed and she was just doubled over laughing, and imagining what it must have looked like from the train - I mean, there was no reason for us to be out there, we were following tiny little dirt paths, and there was nobody else around. Anyway. Maybe you had to be there.
- at one point we emerged from the underbrush just as a train was starting to go by, and I just stood there in my torn jeans and flip-flops, Abra on the hill about ten feet behind me, picking her way down the trail in ballet flats (yeah, we have great hiking footwear). the train was full of tourists and families 'seeing the park' from the safety of a wee train. I just stood there, smoking my cigarette, avoiding direct eye contact, feeling totally on display and trying to be cool. The exhibit was titled "hipsters taken out of their natural habitat" and it was awesome.
- I've been carded maybe eight times so far, either buying beer or at the bar, and only one person has ever seen a uniformed services ID card before. They've all asked and been reassured when I confirm that no, I was never actually in the service myself.
- walking with Abra & Megan back to my house from the Co-op, overheard the following: A guy gets out of his car and calls up to a few people outside on the porch of a house three down from mine, and he says "hi there! I don't mean to be rude, but I just got back into town from Washington DC and I grew up in that house (points across the street at a house) and, well, I just have one question... what happened to the neighborhood?" (everybody, on the porch and in my group, laughs) He looks over at us with a flicker of concern that he's pissed us off or something and Megan says "yeah, I KNOW!" (more laughter from everyone). I should explain - I'm in a neighborhood where people seem to act very stereotypically proud of their race. That is, black people live around here, and they seem to actively enforce certain stereotypes of what being black is supposed to mean. Like talking loudly and at all hours in very ebonics-tinged vernacular, and acting suspicious or demeaning towards the white people. The white people, in turn, reinforce other crappy stereotypes by acting aloof and holier-and-richer-than-thou, and it's a bunch of hogwash. So I'm guessing that 'the neighborhood' being referred to was one where it was pretty much racially homogenous and there weren't all these honkies hanging around. Anyway...
- while driving, I was stopped at a light, and a guy comes up to my passenger window and asks if I can give him a dollar for four quarters, and I'm stuck behind a bus and the light just turned red, so I figure okay, I can help somebody out here. well, he tried to scam me eight different ways and then asked if I smoked pot right as the light was changing, and said 'hey man, come back here!' and well, I just waved out the sunroof and said 'later man' and drove off.
Well, so it goes. More to follow!
4.20.2007
perspective
In response and with all credit due to Evan, here is a graphic representation of what occupies my computer's hard drive. Thanks to the makers of GrandPerspective for making such a nifty app.
My music is, well, y'know, that big blue bit. 49.58GB out of a total 62.22GB currently in use. 79.7%. Wow. This is what I'm doing with my life... I mean, this is my life. As of right now, 8762 songs. They could play unrepeating for very nearly an entire February. Y'know, a short February. The 28 day one. Still a month, dude.
The little bugger towards the bottom left side is the iTunes music library and album art cache/stash. One of the two big blocks at the upper right (in golden tones) is a movie (which I highly recommend), but the other one is apparently a 1GB "sleepimage" in /private/var/vm/ that I don't know if I'm supposed to have. It occurs to me that it might be a leftover from that one time when I kinda-half-accidentally tested out the 'deep sleep' feature of the newer intel macs... it was scary.
My music is, well, y'know, that big blue bit. 49.58GB out of a total 62.22GB currently in use. 79.7%. Wow. This is what I'm doing with my life... I mean, this is my life. As of right now, 8762 songs. They could play unrepeating for very nearly an entire February. Y'know, a short February. The 28 day one. Still a month, dude.
The little bugger towards the bottom left side is the iTunes music library and album art cache/stash. One of the two big blocks at the upper right (in golden tones) is a movie (which I highly recommend), but the other one is apparently a 1GB "sleepimage" in /private/var/vm/ that I don't know if I'm supposed to have. It occurs to me that it might be a leftover from that one time when I kinda-half-accidentally tested out the 'deep sleep' feature of the newer intel macs... it was scary.
3.28.2007
OMG coupons...
Oh coupons, what have you done? What have you done? When I was younger coupons were a joyous thing, an innocent thing. But this, this is just frightening.
The terror. Oh, the terror of ancient secrets and nasal cleansing pots. And the hilarity. Really, that's pretty much it. Hilarity.
The terror. Oh, the terror of ancient secrets and nasal cleansing pots. And the hilarity. Really, that's pretty much it. Hilarity.
3.26.2007
music count redux
Okay, this is actually comprehensible without a twenty minute conversation about the analytic self-evaluative thought process used to design the last graph. Still, I don't really think anyone cares, but I like making pretty graphs.
3.25.2007
the ski-off at deadman's peak cove
...and their name is Rachel.
"Save that as a draft, you son-of-a-bitch!"
"Save that as a draft, you son-of-a-bitch!"
3.23.2007
rating one's music
This is just a thing, a minor thing. Evan and I were talking about the rating of things, and I got to thinking about how many songs are rated what within my music library, and what the distribution of ratings looks like (and what that therefore may say about my musical taste and such). Well, I quicked counted up how many songs were rated how many stars, including the number that are without a rating, and then started trying to figure out a good way to graphically represent the data. This is what I've come up with so far, and though there's something cooler in my mind, I don't know if I'll take the time to produce it. Does anybody else think this sort of thing is interesting? Empirical sociological analysis based on evidence of organizational habits, behavioral patterns, and subjective musical taste? Anyone?
3.12.2007
detroit day one and a half
The tragic beauty of this urban decay is impossible to describe in mere words. I’ve felt the need to have a camera, imbedded behind my eyes, to capture the scenes which catch my breath. I want to share this place and its people, the gorgeous buildings and the filthy ruined streets, and in a world of easy poetry I would have the freeze-frames from this experience to explain with. Yet this is far from such a world, as all poets and writers surely would agree, and the thousands of images I wish to capture in every hour remain stuck exclusively in my memory.
Small scenes seem profound amidst such desolation; a couple embraces joyously outside the barred windows of Value World, a young girl tenderly pats the shoulder of an old woman while they wait at a crosswalk. Glimpsed only in passing, these seem like even more preciously rare kindnesses than usual, since so many people are seen isolated behind the windows of their car. I was cut off, too, by the expansive glass of my dad’s Previa -reference image-, as we drove around this afternoon - an important part, I’m sure, of why I feel like this has been so far such a visual experience.
Small scenes seem profound amidst such desolation; a couple embraces joyously outside the barred windows of Value World, a young girl tenderly pats the shoulder of an old woman while they wait at a crosswalk. Glimpsed only in passing, these seem like even more preciously rare kindnesses than usual, since so many people are seen isolated behind the windows of their car. I was cut off, too, by the expansive glass of my dad’s Previa -reference image-, as we drove around this afternoon - an important part, I’m sure, of why I feel like this has been so far such a visual experience.
pretty pictures!
Okay, so I've finally figured out how to integrate this lovely javascript photo viewing code into Blogger. It's called Lightbox. I had to spend a couple hours giving myself a crash course in CSS, and set up a whole 'nother website just to host some files and images for it, but I think it was all totally worth it. All my images will be much prettier now.
When the LightBox launches, you can press N and P for next and previous images, and X to close. Snazzy.
Here is the test.
When the LightBox launches, you can press N and P for next and previous images, and X to close. Snazzy.
Here is the test.
trip to
I wrote all the following during the trip to Detroit. More to come soon about the place itself.
Interesting things happen all the time.
The other day a conversation began over a song that I was playing in the cafe. The song is a very well done revision of Bob Dylan’s famous “Like A Rolling Stone” and the group is named Articolo 31. It appeared on the soundtrack for Masked And Anonymous, the 2003 movie starring Bob Dylan (surrounded by a fantastic cast) as a world-weary musician in an oh-so-slightly fictitious third world country. The soundtrack includes some previously unreleased Dylan material, a couple re-recordings, and over a dozen very interesting covers of his music done by bands from all over the world. The Magakoro Brothers perform “My Back Pages,” fully translated and sung in Japanese - though they added an almost forty second long introductory vocal sample of an unidentified evangelical preacher. Hmm. Well, aside from that and Dylan’s performance of “Cold Iron Bound,” which highlights the dramatic climax of the movie, this little Articolo 31 ditty was pretty much my favorite tune from the soundtrack. “Come Una Pietra Scalciata (Like A Rolling Stone).” It’s largely unrecognizable as Dylan, save for the giveaway vocal sampling used for the titular chorus. Virtually all the words are delivered rapidly by a male rapper in a language similar but certainly not identical to Spanish. I was able to make that distinction on my own, but I was also too lazy to look up what nationality the musicians were, so I guessed at Portuguese and left it unconfirmed. Well, the other day at the cafe, a regular customer who I’ve spoken with about politics on a couple occasions came up to me and asked about the music.
It turns out that this guy teaches Italian, in Italy, to American students, using modern cultural material - particularly music, including that of Articolo 31. He recognized their voices and, of course, the Dylan sample, and was just thrilled. I got his email address and sent him the one song that night and burned a copy of the whole soundtrack and gave it to him a couple days later. I’ve contributed to the cultural and linguistic education of students in Italy who I’ll probably never know. This is one of my favorite parts of working at the cafe.
Ah, I’m struck now by that wonderful catharsis that comes from finally authoring something that’s been bouncing around in my consciousness for days. Ah. Now I can’t think of what else to write.
Dr. David Thorpe made an excellent point some time ago about why exactly Natasha Beddingfield’s music sucks - she writes songs about not being able to write songs. Listen closely to Unwritten and try to identify the few aspects of musicianship hidden underneath all the glossy pop production. They’re not very impressive.
On this long and dark flight across the country I reread Albert Camus’ “The Stranger”. It is not the American translation which my high school literature class was made to read, but the lovely British translation done by Stuart Gilbert. I love the extra depth of surreal existentialism lent by British turns of phrase and wording from the middle twentieth century. Even though I’m crushed in the very back in the plane, I feel like sharing my three favorite passages from the book. Seriously, though, I’m typing on my upper thighs and can’t really read what’s on the screen at all. The old man in front of me leaned way back, the guy to my left is watching a movie on his laptop and using the armrest, and the guy on my right is sleeping - but he’s one of those guys who sprawls while sleeping, so not only is the armrest unavailable for my use, but his foot has been runover no less than four times by the stewardess’ carts. Ha. Oh, and the obnoxious teenagers lining the row behind aren’t so bad now that I can’t hear them - say yes to good headphones, say no to being a twat. Good thing I’m not trying to be an inspirational speaker since that’s the sort of tagline that comes to my mind, huh? Oh hell, there’s probably a market for it. Nevermind. British audiophiles, here I am. Let’s go.
Damn. What a last sentence there, huh? One sentence. Thirty-five words. Seven commas. Damn.
Vile psychological warfare, I say, to make the condemned desire a successful execution. Indeed. And finally, from the very very end, the showdown between our protagonist and the priest:
I want to write but can’t fit my elbows any deeper into my ribcage. This is definitely the most unpleasant flight I’ve ever been on. I feel like stew. Like an ingredient in stew. And so are the people around me. God, I’m in a big flying pot of man-stew. Gross.
Interesting things happen all the time.
The other day a conversation began over a song that I was playing in the cafe. The song is a very well done revision of Bob Dylan’s famous “Like A Rolling Stone” and the group is named Articolo 31. It appeared on the soundtrack for Masked And Anonymous, the 2003 movie starring Bob Dylan (surrounded by a fantastic cast) as a world-weary musician in an oh-so-slightly fictitious third world country. The soundtrack includes some previously unreleased Dylan material, a couple re-recordings, and over a dozen very interesting covers of his music done by bands from all over the world. The Magakoro Brothers perform “My Back Pages,” fully translated and sung in Japanese - though they added an almost forty second long introductory vocal sample of an unidentified evangelical preacher. Hmm. Well, aside from that and Dylan’s performance of “Cold Iron Bound,” which highlights the dramatic climax of the movie, this little Articolo 31 ditty was pretty much my favorite tune from the soundtrack. “Come Una Pietra Scalciata (Like A Rolling Stone).” It’s largely unrecognizable as Dylan, save for the giveaway vocal sampling used for the titular chorus. Virtually all the words are delivered rapidly by a male rapper in a language similar but certainly not identical to Spanish. I was able to make that distinction on my own, but I was also too lazy to look up what nationality the musicians were, so I guessed at Portuguese and left it unconfirmed. Well, the other day at the cafe, a regular customer who I’ve spoken with about politics on a couple occasions came up to me and asked about the music.
It turns out that this guy teaches Italian, in Italy, to American students, using modern cultural material - particularly music, including that of Articolo 31. He recognized their voices and, of course, the Dylan sample, and was just thrilled. I got his email address and sent him the one song that night and burned a copy of the whole soundtrack and gave it to him a couple days later. I’ve contributed to the cultural and linguistic education of students in Italy who I’ll probably never know. This is one of my favorite parts of working at the cafe.
Ah, I’m struck now by that wonderful catharsis that comes from finally authoring something that’s been bouncing around in my consciousness for days. Ah. Now I can’t think of what else to write.
Dr. David Thorpe made an excellent point some time ago about why exactly Natasha Beddingfield’s music sucks - she writes songs about not being able to write songs. Listen closely to Unwritten and try to identify the few aspects of musicianship hidden underneath all the glossy pop production. They’re not very impressive.
On this long and dark flight across the country I reread Albert Camus’ “The Stranger”. It is not the American translation which my high school literature class was made to read, but the lovely British translation done by Stuart Gilbert. I love the extra depth of surreal existentialism lent by British turns of phrase and wording from the middle twentieth century. Even though I’m crushed in the very back in the plane, I feel like sharing my three favorite passages from the book. Seriously, though, I’m typing on my upper thighs and can’t really read what’s on the screen at all. The old man in front of me leaned way back, the guy to my left is watching a movie on his laptop and using the armrest, and the guy on my right is sleeping - but he’s one of those guys who sprawls while sleeping, so not only is the armrest unavailable for my use, but his foot has been runover no less than four times by the stewardess’ carts. Ha. Oh, and the obnoxious teenagers lining the row behind aren’t so bad now that I can’t hear them - say yes to good headphones, say no to being a twat. Good thing I’m not trying to be an inspirational speaker since that’s the sort of tagline that comes to my mind, huh? Oh hell, there’s probably a market for it. Nevermind. British audiophiles, here I am. Let’s go.
The papers often speak of a “debt owed to society” –a debt which, according to them, must be paid by the offender. But talk of that sort doesn’t touch the imagination. No, the one thing that counted for me was the possibility of making a dash for it and defeating their bloodthirsty rite; of a mad stampede to freedom that would anyhow give me a moment’s hope, the gambler’s last throw. But, all things considered, even this luxury was forbidden me; I was caught in the rattrap irrevocably.
Try as I might, I couldn’t stomach this brutal certitude. For really, when one came to think of it, there was a disproportion between the judgment on which it was based and the unalterable sequence of events starting from the moment when that judgment was delivered. The fact that the verdict was read out at 8 P.M. rather than at five, the fact that it might have been quite different, that it was given by men who change their underclothes, and was credited to so vague an entity as the “French people” –for that matter, why not to the Chinese or the German people? –all these facts seeded to deprive the court’s decision of much of its gravity. Yet I could but recognize that, from the moment the verdict was given, its effects became as cogent, as tangible, as, for example, this wall against which I was lying, pressing my back to it.
Damn. What a last sentence there, huh? One sentence. Thirty-five words. Seven commas. Damn.
Another equally ridiculous fantasy of mine was to frame new laws, altering the penalties. What was wanted, to my mind, was to give the criminal a chance, if only a dog’s chance; say, one chance in a thousand. There might be some drug, or combination of drugs, which would kill the patient (I thought of him as “the patient”) nine hundred and ninety times in a thousand. [sic] That he should know this was, of course, essential. For after taking much thought, calmly, I came to the conclusion that what was wrong about the guillotine was that the condemned man had no chance at all, absolutely none. In fact, the patient’s death had been ordained irrevocably. It was a foregone conclusion. If by some fluke the knife didn’t do its job, they started again. So it came to this, that–against the grain, no doubt–the condemned man had to hope the apparatus was in good working order! This, I thought, was a flaw in the system; and, on the face of it, my view was sound enough. On the other hand, I had to admit it proved the efficiency of the system, It came to this; the man under sentence was obliged to collaborate mentally, it was in his interest that all should go off without a hitch.
Vile psychological warfare, I say, to make the condemned desire a successful execution. Indeed. And finally, from the very very end, the showdown between our protagonist and the priest:
“No! No! I refuse to believe it. I’m sure you’ve often wished there was an afterlife.”
Of course I had I told him. Everybody has that wish at times. But that had no more importance than wishing to be rich, or to swim very fast, or to have a better-shaped mouth. It was in the same order of things. I was going on in the same vein, when he cut in with a question. How did I picture the life after the grave?
I fairly bawled out at him: “A life in which I can remember this life on earth. That’s all I want of it,” And in the same breath I told him I’d had enough of his company.
But, apparently, he had more to say on the subject of God. I went close up to him and made a last attempt to explain that I’d very little time left, and I wasn’t going to waste it on God.
Then he tried to change the subject by asking me why I hadn’t once addressed him as “Father,” seeing that he was a priest. That irritated me still more, and I told him that he wasn’t my father; quite the contrary, he was on the others’ side.
“No, no, my son,” he said, laying his hand on my shoulder. “I’m on your side, though you don’t realize it–because your heart is hardened. But I shall pray for you.”
Then, I don’t know how it was, but something seemed to break inside me, and I started yelling at the top of my voice. I hurled insults at him, I told him not to waste his rotten prayers on me; it was better to burn than to disappear. I’d taken him by the neckband of his cassock, and, in a sort of ecstasy of joy and rage, I poured out on him all the thoughts that had been simmering in my brain. He seemed so cocksure, you see. And yet none of his certainties was worth one strand of a woman’s hair. Living as he did, like a corpse, he couldn’t even be sure of being alive. It might look as if my hands were empty. Actually, I was sure of myself, sure about everything, far surer than he; sure of my present life and of the death that was coming. That, no doubt, was all I had; but at least that certainty was something I could get my teeth into–just as it had gotten its teeth into me. I’d been right, I was still right, I was always right. I’d passed my life in a certain way, and I might have passed it in a different way, if I’d felt like it. I’d acted thus, and I hadn’t acted otherwise; I hadn’t done x, whereas I had done y or z. And what did that mean? That, all the time, I’d been waiting for this present moment, for that dawn, tomorrow’s or another day’s, which was to justify me. Nothing, nothing had the least importance, and I knew quite well why. He, too, knew why. From the dark horizon of my future a sort of slow, persistent breeze had been blowing toward me, all my life long, from the years that were to come. And on its way that breeze had leveled out all the ideas that people tried to foist on me in the equally unreal years I then was living through. What difference could they make to me, the deaths of others, or a mother’s love, or his God; or the way a man decides to live, the fate he thinks he chooses, since one and the same fate was bound to “choose” not only me but thousands of millions of privileged people who, like him, called themselves my brothers. Surely, surely he must see that? Every man alive was privileged; there was only one class of men, the privileged class. All alike would be condemned to die one day; his turn, too, would come like the others’. And what difference could it make if, after being charged with murder, he were executed because he didn’t weep at his mother’s funeral, since it all came to the same thing in the end?
I want to write but can’t fit my elbows any deeper into my ribcage. This is definitely the most unpleasant flight I’ve ever been on. I feel like stew. Like an ingredient in stew. And so are the people around me. God, I’m in a big flying pot of man-stew. Gross.
1.26.2007
road trip
Well, this post has become thoroughly belated. Nonetheless, I'll skim through it and flesh out a few details, since it was a fantastic trip.
Saturday (January 20) I set off on a grand adventure. My car, the lovely Supra, was finally fixed and ready to be picked up after wallowing (well, wintering) on Bainbridge Island. So I began to develop a plan for getting it back - my dad no longer lives in that area, but I knew there were a couple friends who I could stay with, and.... blah blah blah... here's what actually happened:
Saturday morning Megan drove me up to Spokane to catch a flight to SeaTac. Evan tagged along and we had a good little drive. Until it started snowing. A lot. And then Megan accidentally took an exit instead of staying on the highway. And at the top of the exit ramp, like a big metal yeti, was a snowplow. Well, I don't claim to know what was going on in the heads of all the drivers involved, but what I observed was us going pretty damn fast on a snowy icy slope and the plow shifting into reverse and heading straight back towards us. Yes, in reverse, along an onramp. Like, yeah, it was that... stupid. So we ended up plowing into the plow at a good clip - maybe 20 MPH - but Megan's little Honda just bounced off the rear tires of the beast and there was no apparent damage. We were all a little shook up, though, and I ended up driving the rest of the way to the airport.
This is evidence that Megan and I were both at the Spokane airport, and it was indeed snowy.
I just don't get airport security. They never give me trouble, and I really feel like they probably should. Aren't I a suspicious enough character to merit some special attention? Uh, apparently not. My mom gets all sorts of shit from them. But me? Nope. Maybe it's my insistence on being polite to everyone who works at an airport, but really, I expect them to judge based simply on the way that I look. Once I was held back a little and they had a fuss about my earrings, but the guy in charge loudly stated for the benefit of everyone in a thirty foot radius that I was more of a danger to myself than anyone else. I wear these three woven-ring bracelets on my left wrist that don't come off without pliers (I've had them on for years) and they don't set off the metal detector. What? I mean, they're made out of a couple ounces of stainless steel, brass, and copper each. But I can't take more than a couple ounces of eyedrops with me to keep my contacts from fusing to my eyes. Ridiculous. Well, this particular trip was typically uneventful, but I was freaked out at security when a guy who looked like the evil cousin of Mr. Rat from the film adaptation of Wind In The Willows bellowed at me a query about the liquids possibly in my bag. I denied everything and then felt a little bad when I remembered afterwards that I had eyedrops, lip balm, and hand cream with me. I'm going to terrorize myself with moisture, I admit it!
I don't think that I'd ever flown Southwest before. They're goofy. The flight attendants and cabin crew were just... goofy. They referred to each other as 'darlin' over the PA, and when we touched down and were taxiing to the gate in Seattle the captain sang us a very silly little ditty about flying Southwest because they want our money and if you marry one of the crew you get to fly free. Seriously. Those are practically verbatim quotes from it. I wish I'd have written it all down. He had a good voice. The two women next to me ignored me completely, but I heard them talking about their plans - go to Vegas for a day, get trashed, bitch about their husbands, and go home. Which came first, the sitcoms about miserable people, or the miserable people? They seemed like they might be doing it just because it's the sort of thing other people would do.
During the hour I spent waiting at the SeaTac bus terminal, I watched some inebriated and ostensibly homeless people try to start fights with other transit patrons. I kept to myself, tried to act unapproachable, and continued reading Zen And The Art Of Motorcycle Maintenance. What a fabulous book. I continued reading it on the bus, and I noticed that I always maintain vivid memories of the vehicles that I read books on in connection with memories of the books. Especially buses. I remember clearly the faces of the people around me and my memory connects them to exact pages of the book, paragraphs or sentences even. Cool.
The ferry to Bainbridge was very familiar, and I spent half the trip reading and half of it on the phone with people.
I met up with my old friend Naomi at a snazzy little bakery called Blackbird on the island, just a few blocks down from the ferry. We got some food and some coffee and chatted for about an hour about life. It was good to see her again, and good to get some individual human interaction after being in crowd-mode all day.
Instead of finding a ride or taking a taxi to the auto shop, I had decided to walk there from the ferry. It's about four miles across the island, and it was just starting to get dark when I left the bakery. The roads were mostly little winding two lane affairs with no sidewalks and a 40 MPH speed limit. I hiked along in the dark, with my luggage in one hand and my bag across my back, and dodged speeding SUVs and ditches. It took longer than I thought to get to the shop - about an hour - despite my attempts at a brisk pace.
It was SO good to get my car back. I had missed it so. Wonder of wonders, it ran beautifully and I went straight back the way I came and got in line for the next ferry. I've realized in the weeks since then what actually happened to my car in months of 2000% humidity and cold... everything that could possibly corrode, did. So I've spent quite a bit of time scrubbing gunk off of things. But it works, and that's the important part.
I got to downtown Seattle a little after 7:30 and made my way to Chance's place. It was, of course, great to see him (and his girlfriend Sara) again, and we spent a couple hours sitting around, chatting about life and sharing music. Always good to hang out with Chance. Why don't you ever come to Moscow, man? Oh, that's right, you already live somewhere cool. Nevermind.
About nine I took off for Leanne's place and met up with her. We drove down to Renton to her boyfriend's pad, I met the boyfriend, and we gathered together a posse and walked to a nearby friend-of-a-friend-of-a-friend's place, where a birthday party was taking place. Leanne was the ONLY person there I knew, which could have been really awkward, but I ended up just relaxing and having a pretty good time. Many inebriants were consumed, which certainly glossed over some of my shyness, and I crashed on Jeremy's (the boyfriend's) couch that night.
Sunday morning I followed Leanne back to her place and we caught up on stuff for a while. I woke myself up properly at Starbucks and began the drive down to Portland. I don't know why I thought it was a five hour drive, but it seemed to fly by and it was a delightful surprise to be there only three hours after leaving the Seattle area. The sky was gray, and driving over the bridges into Portland's northwest industrial area I felt like I was seeing the city for the first time. Every light gleamed suggestively and every splash of color stood out as an advertisement. It was very much like meeting up with an old friend who you haven't seen in years - everything different from your memory stands out, even as your memory is being added to and quickly, simultaneously, the differences become the new vision of what so-and-so is 'supposed' to look like. So, like that, with a city. Hmm.
I met up with my uncle Chad and his partner Chris before anything else, clumsily navigating my way to their little apartment, befuddled by memories of driving the wrong ways last time I was there. Eventually, I found them, and had a very good time hanging out and talking with both for a while. It's always kinda weird to be there, but this was definitely the least weirdness I'd ever experienced because, for the first time, I was visiting them alone and on my own terms. I'd never seen them without one or the other of my parents around, and to have all that baggage removed from the immediate conversation was a thrilling liberation. I talked about philosophy and ancient Greeks with Chris and discussed school/life choices with Chad. It was great to see them, and I really look forward to being able to do so more often and get to know them better.
This is the point in the travelogue where I catch myself saying too much and remember that I was going to summarize, skim through, and otherwise be succinct with it. See, I'm not doing so well.
After leaving Chad & Chris' place, I found Meredith. What a wonderful person. Really. It was a dreamy couple of days, where I couldn't shake the feeling that I was about to wake up, but consciousness persists and I remember it quite fondly. We became pretty good friends, I think, and in a peculiarly accelerated way. It wasn't really at all like meeting somebody in person is supposed to be, or at least normally is. It was more like we just hadn't seen each other in a few months or years, and we just got along. I hope that everyone who experiments with making friends online before meeting them in person gets as lucky as that at some point in their life.
Meredith also pretty much taught me how to fall in love with Portland. So I pretty much did. I'm really looking forward to being there again, and I'm ready for the next step of evaluating it as a place to live. You know, the actual practical consideration time, where I start to find out that housing is going to be like three times more expensive than it is here, and I'll freak out about it but also start finding jobs to apply for and such.
I left for Boise on Tuesday afternoon, and had an uneventful but very long drive.
In Boise I met up with Jesse, who I often refer to as my oldest and bestest friend. I hadn't seen him in a couple of years, and we've both changed a hell of a lot in that time. He now lives with a bunch of guys in some pretty cool apartments near BSU. One of the roommates is our mutual friend, Austin, who I've actually known since I was three years old but haven't kept in very close touch with. It turns out that he's an extraordinarily gifted artist, and overall I would describe him as one of the most serene people I know at this time. Jesse seems to be doing pretty well, except that he smokes like a chimney factory. I really hope I find a way to see him more often - seems like we're back in similar enough tracks with our lives that we could be close friends again.
Wednesday I drove back up to Moscow, and clearly everything since then has left me pretty much unscathed, since I'm here now finally writing about what happened more than a month ago. Before closing this chapter, I just have to say that the drive from Boise to Moscow has now been revealed to me as not exclusively a horrible horrible deathtrap. That particular Wednesday it was clear and sunny, cold but not icy, and it was one of the best few hours of driving I've ever had. The car handled perfectly, I had fun, I was safe (enough), and the music was, of course, good.
Thanks for reading!
Saturday (January 20) I set off on a grand adventure. My car, the lovely Supra, was finally fixed and ready to be picked up after wallowing (well, wintering) on Bainbridge Island. So I began to develop a plan for getting it back - my dad no longer lives in that area, but I knew there were a couple friends who I could stay with, and.... blah blah blah... here's what actually happened:
Saturday morning Megan drove me up to Spokane to catch a flight to SeaTac. Evan tagged along and we had a good little drive. Until it started snowing. A lot. And then Megan accidentally took an exit instead of staying on the highway. And at the top of the exit ramp, like a big metal yeti, was a snowplow. Well, I don't claim to know what was going on in the heads of all the drivers involved, but what I observed was us going pretty damn fast on a snowy icy slope and the plow shifting into reverse and heading straight back towards us. Yes, in reverse, along an onramp. Like, yeah, it was that... stupid. So we ended up plowing into the plow at a good clip - maybe 20 MPH - but Megan's little Honda just bounced off the rear tires of the beast and there was no apparent damage. We were all a little shook up, though, and I ended up driving the rest of the way to the airport.
This is evidence that Megan and I were both at the Spokane airport, and it was indeed snowy.
I just don't get airport security. They never give me trouble, and I really feel like they probably should. Aren't I a suspicious enough character to merit some special attention? Uh, apparently not. My mom gets all sorts of shit from them. But me? Nope. Maybe it's my insistence on being polite to everyone who works at an airport, but really, I expect them to judge based simply on the way that I look. Once I was held back a little and they had a fuss about my earrings, but the guy in charge loudly stated for the benefit of everyone in a thirty foot radius that I was more of a danger to myself than anyone else. I wear these three woven-ring bracelets on my left wrist that don't come off without pliers (I've had them on for years) and they don't set off the metal detector. What? I mean, they're made out of a couple ounces of stainless steel, brass, and copper each. But I can't take more than a couple ounces of eyedrops with me to keep my contacts from fusing to my eyes. Ridiculous. Well, this particular trip was typically uneventful, but I was freaked out at security when a guy who looked like the evil cousin of Mr. Rat from the film adaptation of Wind In The Willows bellowed at me a query about the liquids possibly in my bag. I denied everything and then felt a little bad when I remembered afterwards that I had eyedrops, lip balm, and hand cream with me. I'm going to terrorize myself with moisture, I admit it!
I don't think that I'd ever flown Southwest before. They're goofy. The flight attendants and cabin crew were just... goofy. They referred to each other as 'darlin' over the PA, and when we touched down and were taxiing to the gate in Seattle the captain sang us a very silly little ditty about flying Southwest because they want our money and if you marry one of the crew you get to fly free. Seriously. Those are practically verbatim quotes from it. I wish I'd have written it all down. He had a good voice. The two women next to me ignored me completely, but I heard them talking about their plans - go to Vegas for a day, get trashed, bitch about their husbands, and go home. Which came first, the sitcoms about miserable people, or the miserable people? They seemed like they might be doing it just because it's the sort of thing other people would do.
During the hour I spent waiting at the SeaTac bus terminal, I watched some inebriated and ostensibly homeless people try to start fights with other transit patrons. I kept to myself, tried to act unapproachable, and continued reading Zen And The Art Of Motorcycle Maintenance. What a fabulous book. I continued reading it on the bus, and I noticed that I always maintain vivid memories of the vehicles that I read books on in connection with memories of the books. Especially buses. I remember clearly the faces of the people around me and my memory connects them to exact pages of the book, paragraphs or sentences even. Cool.
The ferry to Bainbridge was very familiar, and I spent half the trip reading and half of it on the phone with people.
I met up with my old friend Naomi at a snazzy little bakery called Blackbird on the island, just a few blocks down from the ferry. We got some food and some coffee and chatted for about an hour about life. It was good to see her again, and good to get some individual human interaction after being in crowd-mode all day.
Instead of finding a ride or taking a taxi to the auto shop, I had decided to walk there from the ferry. It's about four miles across the island, and it was just starting to get dark when I left the bakery. The roads were mostly little winding two lane affairs with no sidewalks and a 40 MPH speed limit. I hiked along in the dark, with my luggage in one hand and my bag across my back, and dodged speeding SUVs and ditches. It took longer than I thought to get to the shop - about an hour - despite my attempts at a brisk pace.
It was SO good to get my car back. I had missed it so. Wonder of wonders, it ran beautifully and I went straight back the way I came and got in line for the next ferry. I've realized in the weeks since then what actually happened to my car in months of 2000% humidity and cold... everything that could possibly corrode, did. So I've spent quite a bit of time scrubbing gunk off of things. But it works, and that's the important part.
I got to downtown Seattle a little after 7:30 and made my way to Chance's place. It was, of course, great to see him (and his girlfriend Sara) again, and we spent a couple hours sitting around, chatting about life and sharing music. Always good to hang out with Chance. Why don't you ever come to Moscow, man? Oh, that's right, you already live somewhere cool. Nevermind.
About nine I took off for Leanne's place and met up with her. We drove down to Renton to her boyfriend's pad, I met the boyfriend, and we gathered together a posse and walked to a nearby friend-of-a-friend-of-a-friend's place, where a birthday party was taking place. Leanne was the ONLY person there I knew, which could have been really awkward, but I ended up just relaxing and having a pretty good time. Many inebriants were consumed, which certainly glossed over some of my shyness, and I crashed on Jeremy's (the boyfriend's) couch that night.
Sunday morning I followed Leanne back to her place and we caught up on stuff for a while. I woke myself up properly at Starbucks and began the drive down to Portland. I don't know why I thought it was a five hour drive, but it seemed to fly by and it was a delightful surprise to be there only three hours after leaving the Seattle area. The sky was gray, and driving over the bridges into Portland's northwest industrial area I felt like I was seeing the city for the first time. Every light gleamed suggestively and every splash of color stood out as an advertisement. It was very much like meeting up with an old friend who you haven't seen in years - everything different from your memory stands out, even as your memory is being added to and quickly, simultaneously, the differences become the new vision of what so-and-so is 'supposed' to look like. So, like that, with a city. Hmm.
I met up with my uncle Chad and his partner Chris before anything else, clumsily navigating my way to their little apartment, befuddled by memories of driving the wrong ways last time I was there. Eventually, I found them, and had a very good time hanging out and talking with both for a while. It's always kinda weird to be there, but this was definitely the least weirdness I'd ever experienced because, for the first time, I was visiting them alone and on my own terms. I'd never seen them without one or the other of my parents around, and to have all that baggage removed from the immediate conversation was a thrilling liberation. I talked about philosophy and ancient Greeks with Chris and discussed school/life choices with Chad. It was great to see them, and I really look forward to being able to do so more often and get to know them better.
This is the point in the travelogue where I catch myself saying too much and remember that I was going to summarize, skim through, and otherwise be succinct with it. See, I'm not doing so well.
After leaving Chad & Chris' place, I found Meredith. What a wonderful person. Really. It was a dreamy couple of days, where I couldn't shake the feeling that I was about to wake up, but consciousness persists and I remember it quite fondly. We became pretty good friends, I think, and in a peculiarly accelerated way. It wasn't really at all like meeting somebody in person is supposed to be, or at least normally is. It was more like we just hadn't seen each other in a few months or years, and we just got along. I hope that everyone who experiments with making friends online before meeting them in person gets as lucky as that at some point in their life.
Meredith also pretty much taught me how to fall in love with Portland. So I pretty much did. I'm really looking forward to being there again, and I'm ready for the next step of evaluating it as a place to live. You know, the actual practical consideration time, where I start to find out that housing is going to be like three times more expensive than it is here, and I'll freak out about it but also start finding jobs to apply for and such.
I left for Boise on Tuesday afternoon, and had an uneventful but very long drive.
In Boise I met up with Jesse, who I often refer to as my oldest and bestest friend. I hadn't seen him in a couple of years, and we've both changed a hell of a lot in that time. He now lives with a bunch of guys in some pretty cool apartments near BSU. One of the roommates is our mutual friend, Austin, who I've actually known since I was three years old but haven't kept in very close touch with. It turns out that he's an extraordinarily gifted artist, and overall I would describe him as one of the most serene people I know at this time. Jesse seems to be doing pretty well, except that he smokes like a chimney factory. I really hope I find a way to see him more often - seems like we're back in similar enough tracks with our lives that we could be close friends again.
Wednesday I drove back up to Moscow, and clearly everything since then has left me pretty much unscathed, since I'm here now finally writing about what happened more than a month ago. Before closing this chapter, I just have to say that the drive from Boise to Moscow has now been revealed to me as not exclusively a horrible horrible deathtrap. That particular Wednesday it was clear and sunny, cold but not icy, and it was one of the best few hours of driving I've ever had. The car handled perfectly, I had fun, I was safe (enough), and the music was, of course, good.
Thanks for reading!
1.11.2007
a birthday, my birthday, it was
I am worth $2,583,270 on HumanForSale.com
I don't even know what to say about that.
So Tuesday was my 21st birthday. I've been writing about it for the last hour or so, and Safari decided to freeze a couple minutes ago. So. I lost the first 56.2% of the post I'd written... (making up percentages is cheap fun). So here I'm going to copy down the latter 43.8%, which I captured with a desperate screenshot, and shed a metaphorical tear for the prose that was lost to the ether. I think some of it was pretty good.
That I'm now of legal drinking age means, to me, that the sense of entitlement that I've cultivated within the safe confines of my own home over the last couple years is now free to expand out to the rest of the world. That's what I meant of facebook by 'being a real person'. I'm legally entitled to the rights and freedoms of a full-fledged adult. Well, almost. Can't rent cars 'til I'm 25.
The whole deal has been kinda anticlimactic like that. Yay, it's my birthday, oh, I didn't organize a party. Yay, my friends want to party anyway, oh, there are three of them and they're not all old enough to take me barhopping. Yay, I have good friends and good liquor and good games and a warm house, oh... my closest friends really don't get along with each other any more and I spent a hell of a lot of money on this liquor that my friends are drinking and nobody's even offering to chip in, and the games are a lot better with ten people than with four, and I really don't want to be living here now because of the crazy landlady and the growing discomfort between my roommate and I.
Bitch bitch bitch. That's what I'm doing. I feel like I'm treading too close to self-indugent whining here, so I'll move on, but I promise the intention was to share my state of mind - not to bitch about it. I just have a nasty headache. Ah, right....
I gave myself a present for my birthday. Besides the liquor, I mean. I decided to quit smoking cigarettes.
Yeah, dad, grandma, you two can take some credit for the immaculate guilt-tripping. As two ex-smokers who sincerely asked me to quit for my own sake, I can't fault you for hypocrisy nearly as much as I'd need to to ignore your advice. You speak with an appeal to knowledge you've gained from your personal experience, which I respect. And that approach, for me, inspires introspection which, as those who know me well will confirm, is my favorite and most well worn path towards change. So I got all introspective and decided a couple weeks ago that I am not smoking for the same reasons that I used to and after much evaluation, I said to myself, I said "Self, it's time for a change."
I've been fooling around with yet another social networking service/site: OK Cupid. In just a couple weeks of building a profile, I've enjoyed more quality interaction with other users than months and months of facebookery and myspacing have produced. Yeah, okay, it's basically a dating site, but it's based on a pretty interesting approach whereby your ostensibly honest answers to a multitude of questions result in a rigorous algorithmic analysis of your personality and you get to review the thousands of other users through an enjoyably simplified representation of your calculated interpersonal compatibility.
That's all for now. Please please please leave me a comment if you read this. I'm still trying to gauge my audience here. Do I have one?
I don't even know what to say about that.
So Tuesday was my 21st birthday. I've been writing about it for the last hour or so, and Safari decided to freeze a couple minutes ago. So. I lost the first 56.2% of the post I'd written... (making up percentages is cheap fun). So here I'm going to copy down the latter 43.8%, which I captured with a desperate screenshot, and shed a metaphorical tear for the prose that was lost to the ether. I think some of it was pretty good.
That I'm now of legal drinking age means, to me, that the sense of entitlement that I've cultivated within the safe confines of my own home over the last couple years is now free to expand out to the rest of the world. That's what I meant of facebook by 'being a real person'. I'm legally entitled to the rights and freedoms of a full-fledged adult. Well, almost. Can't rent cars 'til I'm 25.
The whole deal has been kinda anticlimactic like that. Yay, it's my birthday, oh, I didn't organize a party. Yay, my friends want to party anyway, oh, there are three of them and they're not all old enough to take me barhopping. Yay, I have good friends and good liquor and good games and a warm house, oh... my closest friends really don't get along with each other any more and I spent a hell of a lot of money on this liquor that my friends are drinking and nobody's even offering to chip in, and the games are a lot better with ten people than with four, and I really don't want to be living here now because of the crazy landlady and the growing discomfort between my roommate and I.
Bitch bitch bitch. That's what I'm doing. I feel like I'm treading too close to self-indugent whining here, so I'll move on, but I promise the intention was to share my state of mind - not to bitch about it. I just have a nasty headache. Ah, right....
I gave myself a present for my birthday. Besides the liquor, I mean. I decided to quit smoking cigarettes.
Yeah, dad, grandma, you two can take some credit for the immaculate guilt-tripping. As two ex-smokers who sincerely asked me to quit for my own sake, I can't fault you for hypocrisy nearly as much as I'd need to to ignore your advice. You speak with an appeal to knowledge you've gained from your personal experience, which I respect. And that approach, for me, inspires introspection which, as those who know me well will confirm, is my favorite and most well worn path towards change. So I got all introspective and decided a couple weeks ago that I am not smoking for the same reasons that I used to and after much evaluation, I said to myself, I said "Self, it's time for a change."
I've been fooling around with yet another social networking service/site: OK Cupid. In just a couple weeks of building a profile, I've enjoyed more quality interaction with other users than months and months of facebookery and myspacing have produced. Yeah, okay, it's basically a dating site, but it's based on a pretty interesting approach whereby your ostensibly honest answers to a multitude of questions result in a rigorous algorithmic analysis of your personality and you get to review the thousands of other users through an enjoyably simplified representation of your calculated interpersonal compatibility.
That's all for now. Please please please leave me a comment if you read this. I'm still trying to gauge my audience here. Do I have one?
12.27.2006
the montana adventure continues and concludes
So I'm writing this as we drive into the storm outside Helena, headed back home at last to Moscow for me and Pasco for Mom & Pete. It's been a great trip. Any longer and we'd all start to get grouchy from lack of sleep and smiling too much, but we filled up all the time we had quite nicely. I've been so wiped out after the last couple days I haven't had the focus to sit down and write, so I'll take this opportunity to try and reconstruct everything interesting. I'm aiming for some sort of chronological order beyond this point, but I know I won't be able to write it all in that order, so the caveat is essentially that my post structure may well be a little screwy. Yeah, big deal. Who is even reading this, anyway? I keep telling people to read it but I'm not getting any comments, so I don't have a clue what they think of it. Please comment.
Here we are hanging out at my grandma's house on Christmas Eve. Mom and Pete are being kinda ridiculous, which comes easily to them. Mom's on the big walking machine thing, Pete's pushing and pulling at the hand doohickey, which is propelling his chair back and forth. Mom's clearly cracking up while reading a bizarre article in the local indie rag about - I kid you not - tips on avoiding constipation during the holiday feeding frenzy. Grandma and I are both laughing at the scene, while all her cats run for cover. Yeah, cats... Notice the feline paraphenalia described by even this little snapshot: The wall hanging is clearly of cats in the snow. Right. The armchair back there is covered in cat toys and a fur-covered blanket. The entire back patio is fenced in and packed with kitty entertainment - a rumpus room, if you will. On the floor are a half dozen little trays in which wheatgrass grows, and the kitties are encouraged to come nibble in it when they want a snack. Basically, almost all her decorations either have to do with cats or Hinduism. Mostly cats.
Yeah. She'sobsessed very focused.
After we left Grandma's house, gifted with another couple of bags stuffed with random food, we drove out to Jeff & Terri's place. They live on a comfortably-sized chunk of land just across the road from the house I first lived in. My grandpa designed and built that place, and it's pretty neat to have seen it. Jeff has a cool bunch of toys and a cool set of jobs/responsibilities/projects. He took me on a wonderful walking tour of the area that day. We walked about a half-perimeter of the land while he told me about the great flood of March '03, which put most of their land underwater. It messed up a lot of things - I guess there were about 15" of snow on the ground and a Chinook whatsis blew in, raising the temperature to 70° and causing a massive flood as the snow all melted in one day. It's an exciting story, with bridges and backhoes and all sorts of flotsam and jetsam and such, but I shouldn't try to retell it in too much detail since I wasn't actually there. Jeff has an outdoor ice-skating rink, among other curiosities, and one thing I recall with particular clarity is his description of how the water came in and lifted the entire ice sheet up and out, and how it broke up and scattered 10" thick icebergs over 100 yards away.
Anyway, after we walked around to all the buildings and I heard their various histories, I asked him about Packards, since I was trying to get straight another fragmented memory of mine involving me, as a young child, standing upright in on the backseat of a massive sea-foam green Packard. The beast was parked in front of my old house in 26th street, in Boise, but I haven't been able to remember for what length of time it was there - if we owned a Packard or just had one drop by. Well, Jeff is a huge fan of Packards. HUGE fan. He has three, but that doesn't tell you too much.
In true Montana fashion (me:"So he has a junkyard and all these parts cars..." clara:"How Montana!" — thanks for the stereotype) he keeps no less than 13 cars parked a short ways from the garage, which currently holds the prize Packard and the little old Volkswagen pickup he's doing some work on. A half dozen Ford trucks are parked in arcs between that yard and the garage, and there are a couple more rows of vehicles scattered around, not counting the long lines of farm equipment. It's all very impressively orderly. I got biographies of every single vehicle, from the Capri with almost 300,000 miles on it to the '56 Ford wagon held together with decals that's now used to smoke out gophers (he replaced the muffler when it rusted through with a flexible hose that now hangs casually over the driver's mirror. There's the truck that my grandpa moved their family across the country in, from Ohio to Montana at speeds up to but not in excess of 45 MPH. All the vehicles that don't or can't be driven around are used as storage depots, too. Neat piles of hubcaps in one, bike parts in another, intake manifolds strewn across the back seat of a third, and so on. Everything has a story. It's pretty magical.
A harsher critic than I, unsoftened by familial affection, might describe such a scene as pathetic - so many vehicles, just sitting around. It's a form of excess, sure, but I find it charming. Jeff doesn't have a lot of money, and the care with which he treats every piece of machinery he owns is really admirable. I think it's a far more pathetic thing to watch someone buy a single really expensive car and then treat it like shit. This is entirely different. And hey, y'know, it IS Montana we're talking about here - there IS space for a single guy to have three dozen cars and not get in anyone's way. That's a pretty strange thought for me, the city boy, to consider.
So, Packards. What beasts. Jeff's prize one is in the garage, like I said, serving as a shelf. The nose peeks out, chromed and glorious, from under a blue tarp. I didn't get a look at the inside, but I'm told it's all done up in kelly green leather. Wow. My mom tells me that that particular vehicle used to be the processional car for funerals... um, okay. Jeff and Diana and Mom & Barbie all took a road trip to get it from Ohio when they were teenagers, and apparently had a great deal of fun trying to not seem like runaways. Jeff gave me a great overview of what makes Packards so cool. In their day, they were premium flagships of technology and power. The Mercedes (almost the Maybach, I suppose) of the American fifties. First to feature air conditioning (in '49, I think - wow!). Had very advanced automatic transmissions for the time - only three gears, but some sort of mechanism (I forget the proper name) that basically, as I understand it, locks the engine into pretty much a direct 1:1 drive above a certain speed, so it doesn't get such bad mileage as you might expect and can go pretty fast. I mean, we're talking about 6000 lb cars with massive V8 engines. The wheelbase is probably twice as long as an Elise. So, yeah, not my ideal at all, but they're pretty interesting. Jeff told me about the unique suspension that they put in one model, about '57: The axles were connected by a bar running front-to-back that didn't actually connect to the body at all. So it was like driving on a cloud (he says convincingly). There was a laterally mounted bar at the rear, as well, which would stiffen the rear suspension if a sensor detected a load in the trunk, thereby preventing extreme forward dippage while braking. I explain it more awkwardly than Jeff did - suffice to say the cars were really surprisingly technologically advanced.
Here's a picture of the (get this!) push-button automatic shifter. And yes, I think those are skis being stored in it. Ah, anyway... it was fun.
Christmas day came quickly and honestly, rather unexpectedly. It's easy to lose track of time for me when I'm following other people's schedules and living in a strange place.
Pete and I hatched a plan to entice my grandma to come to Christmas dinner with the rest of the family, at Barb's house. It seemed like it was working (miraculously) for a while, I mean, she actually said she'd consider it. We went out to Diana & Gary's place Monday morning and I cooked a special vegan dish that Grandma could eat under the pretense of it being for little ol' gluten-sensitive me. It was fun, and I felt good about how it turned out. Brown rice with finely cubed red bell pepper under a ginger peanut sauce, adorned with slivers of pepper radiating from the center of the dish. The peanut sauce turned out much better than the one I made for Thanksgiving, which unfortunately separated too much into oil and butter - I got it too hot for too long that time, but it was pretty perfect on this go. Thanks, dad, for teaching me how to make a good sauce. Ah, anyway, Grandma flaked out on us the day of, claiming that she was all worn out from receiving phone calls from friends who she only talks to once a year and wouldn't go out to Barb's at all. Sad, but expected. At least we tried, and we were congradulated on the effort by many. So I got to share the rice dish with a number of people at dinner and it was unanimously complimented, which I felt pretty darn good about. Here's the view from Diana's porch that morning and some impromptu poses struck for the camera.
Christmas dinner at Barb's was surprisingly relaxed and I had a pretty good time. It was a tricky decision for me which crowd to hang with; I'm totally fine being with adults, more than fine, I prefer joining their conversation, but my cousins started treating me like a person and invited me to join them in playing board games. I lingered amongst the older crowd for a while and helped make the noodles for lasagna, but joined the game of Monopoly and later played two rounds of Cranium. It wasn't just Sam and Colin but also their old friend (daughter of a friend of Barb & Don) named Coralee (I don't know if that's the right spelling). She's 17, a senior in high school, really beautiful, and just obviously far more comfortable in that environment than I was. She's working on college applications and such, so I could be all, 'hey I know college'. I enjoyed talking to her for the most part, but I only have so much to say about that stage of college stuff and it's not particularly interesting. She awkwardly told me in a friendly way that I look like some creepy stalker guy she knows. Yeah, so that just... I mean, everybody laughed about it, because they didn't seem to think I was creepy, but I felt that awkward pretty much the whole time.
Spending time with the younger crowd left me missing the sophistication, lewdness, and friendly antagonism of my usual crowd. Hanging with the older crowd left me missing the relaxed tone and inquisitive "hey check out this cool idea/question/concept" banter of, well, my usual crowd. I'm so ready to get back to Moscow, where drinking wine, having fun, and sharing provocative discussion all happen at the same table.
Tuesday morning we got up far earlier than health and good sense would recommend and made our way out to Jeff & Terri's place again. After a couple cups of coffee with them, we piled into 'Buster', the Suburban, drove to Diana's (just a few minutes away) and picked her up to join us for a grand tour of the valley. It really was a grand tour. Between Jeff and Diana, there's little I can imagine that they don't know about the area (that's worth knowing). I mean, we look at a field, and Jeff can tell us who owns and when they bought it from who and how deep they dug to hit water and Diana fills in how much it cost them, who's going to build what there, and so on. For every field, they pretty much know at least that much about it. I now refer to Photo #1, below.
This may look, to the uneducated observer, like a dirt road. Actually, it's two parallel dirt roads, poorly photographed. *cough* Additionally, guess what? There's a story behind it. Two doctors own neighboring property, see, and they can't agree on how to share the dirt road leading into it from the, uh, slightly larger dirt road. So they each pave their own road. And its been that way for decades, right? Wow. Who knew? Yeah, Jeff & Diana, that's who.
There's Jeff, just drivin' casual. And here's most of Diana, with a nice view of a mountain and an awkward view of a chunk of my head. She was sitting behind me and I took all these photos without saying I was taking photos, covertly, y'know, so as not to make anybody nervous. So I'm trying to excuse my poor photography but I really can't. So nevermind.
The conversation was consistently excellent, usually with everyone participating in the same topic and asking questions and stuff. The commentary was riveting. For example, "Livestock always looks pathetic in the winter." A couple times side-conversations broke out — Jeff and I talked about vacuum pressure in engines and mileage and, well, car stuff for a while. That too was excellent, so really, it was just a pretty awesome deal.
MISCELLANY TIME:
Facts have emerged which modify my story slightly, lessening the pleasantly dramatic spin I've enjoyed putting on thistrip voyage of self-discovery. Okay, it hasn't been a full twenty years since I was in Montana. My Mom took me to her father's birthday party outside Helena when I was three. My first time on an airplane. And, apparently, my first (and for many years, last) interaction with this side of the family. I'm told I spoke verbosely and with a very heavy English accent at the time, which of course just charmed the hell out of everybody. Well, it probably weirded a couple of them out. Hell, maybe it's weirding you out, dear readers, if you aren't familiar with my anglophile past. Two words: Mary Poppins. That is all. My childhood need not be relived now. Anyway, for posterity, I admit that I do remember the Salt Lake City airport terminal from that trip at the age of three, but I have no memories of meeting my family on that trip. So I haven't been intentionally deceptive, just insufficiently informed.
I think I've made a mistake by trying to use the word 'meta' in conversation. The last couple sessions of Theory of Knowledge had me thinking in terms of stuff and meta-stuff, and it makes oodles of intuitive sense to me, and I was all happy trying to make conversation out of it. But I think that I'd be really annoyed if I were on the receiving end of the sort of comments I made. It's really hard (if not impossible) to talk about meta-levels without being a smug bastard about it. In class, that was also the case, but it was a roomful of smug bastards, so it was okay. Outside the academic circle-jerk, it's just annoying to have someone proclaiming dichotomies in terms of meta-levels. Too damn pretentious. So, my apologies to anyone who noticed me doing that.
I've been enjoying the Poorleno blog 'mixtapes' lately. I forget what random Googling brought up this guy's site, but of course anyone using the name of my all-time favorite Röyksopp song had better be doing something interesting with it. True enough, there's a good deal of good music on those collections. They're worth a listen. Personally, I can't stand not being able to see exactly what is playing, so the one-long-track format is annoying. I only know one to four songs already from each mix, so there's a lot I'm trying to learn. There are some really excellent choices and some really bizarre ones - 50 Cent and... I forget, Air Supply? What? Enjoy the french electronica, I say. Lots of Rinôçérôse, who I knew previously only from the Hôtel Costes compilations.
Direct Links for your Clicking Pleasure: 1 2 3 4 5 6
Okay, I'm done for the day. Please leave me comments! And questions, should you find yourself having them, are also welcome. Thanks for reading.
Here we are hanging out at my grandma's house on Christmas Eve. Mom and Pete are being kinda ridiculous, which comes easily to them. Mom's on the big walking machine thing, Pete's pushing and pulling at the hand doohickey, which is propelling his chair back and forth. Mom's clearly cracking up while reading a bizarre article in the local indie rag about - I kid you not - tips on avoiding constipation during the holiday feeding frenzy. Grandma and I are both laughing at the scene, while all her cats run for cover. Yeah, cats... Notice the feline paraphenalia described by even this little snapshot: The wall hanging is clearly of cats in the snow. Right. The armchair back there is covered in cat toys and a fur-covered blanket. The entire back patio is fenced in and packed with kitty entertainment - a rumpus room, if you will. On the floor are a half dozen little trays in which wheatgrass grows, and the kitties are encouraged to come nibble in it when they want a snack. Basically, almost all her decorations either have to do with cats or Hinduism. Mostly cats.
Yeah. She's
After we left Grandma's house, gifted with another couple of bags stuffed with random food, we drove out to Jeff & Terri's place. They live on a comfortably-sized chunk of land just across the road from the house I first lived in. My grandpa designed and built that place, and it's pretty neat to have seen it. Jeff has a cool bunch of toys and a cool set of jobs/responsibilities/projects. He took me on a wonderful walking tour of the area that day. We walked about a half-perimeter of the land while he told me about the great flood of March '03, which put most of their land underwater. It messed up a lot of things - I guess there were about 15" of snow on the ground and a Chinook whatsis blew in, raising the temperature to 70° and causing a massive flood as the snow all melted in one day. It's an exciting story, with bridges and backhoes and all sorts of flotsam and jetsam and such, but I shouldn't try to retell it in too much detail since I wasn't actually there. Jeff has an outdoor ice-skating rink, among other curiosities, and one thing I recall with particular clarity is his description of how the water came in and lifted the entire ice sheet up and out, and how it broke up and scattered 10" thick icebergs over 100 yards away.
Anyway, after we walked around to all the buildings and I heard their various histories, I asked him about Packards, since I was trying to get straight another fragmented memory of mine involving me, as a young child, standing upright in on the backseat of a massive sea-foam green Packard. The beast was parked in front of my old house in 26th street, in Boise, but I haven't been able to remember for what length of time it was there - if we owned a Packard or just had one drop by. Well, Jeff is a huge fan of Packards. HUGE fan. He has three, but that doesn't tell you too much.
In true Montana fashion (me:"So he has a junkyard and all these parts cars..." clara:"How Montana!" — thanks for the stereotype) he keeps no less than 13 cars parked a short ways from the garage, which currently holds the prize Packard and the little old Volkswagen pickup he's doing some work on. A half dozen Ford trucks are parked in arcs between that yard and the garage, and there are a couple more rows of vehicles scattered around, not counting the long lines of farm equipment. It's all very impressively orderly. I got biographies of every single vehicle, from the Capri with almost 300,000 miles on it to the '56 Ford wagon held together with decals that's now used to smoke out gophers (he replaced the muffler when it rusted through with a flexible hose that now hangs casually over the driver's mirror. There's the truck that my grandpa moved their family across the country in, from Ohio to Montana at speeds up to but not in excess of 45 MPH. All the vehicles that don't or can't be driven around are used as storage depots, too. Neat piles of hubcaps in one, bike parts in another, intake manifolds strewn across the back seat of a third, and so on. Everything has a story. It's pretty magical.
A harsher critic than I, unsoftened by familial affection, might describe such a scene as pathetic - so many vehicles, just sitting around. It's a form of excess, sure, but I find it charming. Jeff doesn't have a lot of money, and the care with which he treats every piece of machinery he owns is really admirable. I think it's a far more pathetic thing to watch someone buy a single really expensive car and then treat it like shit. This is entirely different. And hey, y'know, it IS Montana we're talking about here - there IS space for a single guy to have three dozen cars and not get in anyone's way. That's a pretty strange thought for me, the city boy, to consider.
So, Packards. What beasts. Jeff's prize one is in the garage, like I said, serving as a shelf. The nose peeks out, chromed and glorious, from under a blue tarp. I didn't get a look at the inside, but I'm told it's all done up in kelly green leather. Wow. My mom tells me that that particular vehicle used to be the processional car for funerals... um, okay. Jeff and Diana and Mom & Barbie all took a road trip to get it from Ohio when they were teenagers, and apparently had a great deal of fun trying to not seem like runaways. Jeff gave me a great overview of what makes Packards so cool. In their day, they were premium flagships of technology and power. The Mercedes (almost the Maybach, I suppose) of the American fifties. First to feature air conditioning (in '49, I think - wow!). Had very advanced automatic transmissions for the time - only three gears, but some sort of mechanism (I forget the proper name) that basically, as I understand it, locks the engine into pretty much a direct 1:1 drive above a certain speed, so it doesn't get such bad mileage as you might expect and can go pretty fast. I mean, we're talking about 6000 lb cars with massive V8 engines. The wheelbase is probably twice as long as an Elise. So, yeah, not my ideal at all, but they're pretty interesting. Jeff told me about the unique suspension that they put in one model, about '57: The axles were connected by a bar running front-to-back that didn't actually connect to the body at all. So it was like driving on a cloud (he says convincingly). There was a laterally mounted bar at the rear, as well, which would stiffen the rear suspension if a sensor detected a load in the trunk, thereby preventing extreme forward dippage while braking. I explain it more awkwardly than Jeff did - suffice to say the cars were really surprisingly technologically advanced.
Here's a picture of the (get this!) push-button automatic shifter. And yes, I think those are skis being stored in it. Ah, anyway... it was fun.Christmas day came quickly and honestly, rather unexpectedly. It's easy to lose track of time for me when I'm following other people's schedules and living in a strange place.
Pete and I hatched a plan to entice my grandma to come to Christmas dinner with the rest of the family, at Barb's house. It seemed like it was working (miraculously) for a while, I mean, she actually said she'd consider it. We went out to Diana & Gary's place Monday morning and I cooked a special vegan dish that Grandma could eat under the pretense of it being for little ol' gluten-sensitive me. It was fun, and I felt good about how it turned out. Brown rice with finely cubed red bell pepper under a ginger peanut sauce, adorned with slivers of pepper radiating from the center of the dish. The peanut sauce turned out much better than the one I made for Thanksgiving, which unfortunately separated too much into oil and butter - I got it too hot for too long that time, but it was pretty perfect on this go. Thanks, dad, for teaching me how to make a good sauce. Ah, anyway, Grandma flaked out on us the day of, claiming that she was all worn out from receiving phone calls from friends who she only talks to once a year and wouldn't go out to Barb's at all. Sad, but expected. At least we tried, and we were congradulated on the effort by many. So I got to share the rice dish with a number of people at dinner and it was unanimously complimented, which I felt pretty darn good about. Here's the view from Diana's porch that morning and some impromptu poses struck for the camera.
Christmas dinner at Barb's was surprisingly relaxed and I had a pretty good time. It was a tricky decision for me which crowd to hang with; I'm totally fine being with adults, more than fine, I prefer joining their conversation, but my cousins started treating me like a person and invited me to join them in playing board games. I lingered amongst the older crowd for a while and helped make the noodles for lasagna, but joined the game of Monopoly and later played two rounds of Cranium. It wasn't just Sam and Colin but also their old friend (daughter of a friend of Barb & Don) named Coralee (I don't know if that's the right spelling). She's 17, a senior in high school, really beautiful, and just obviously far more comfortable in that environment than I was. She's working on college applications and such, so I could be all, 'hey I know college'. I enjoyed talking to her for the most part, but I only have so much to say about that stage of college stuff and it's not particularly interesting. She awkwardly told me in a friendly way that I look like some creepy stalker guy she knows. Yeah, so that just... I mean, everybody laughed about it, because they didn't seem to think I was creepy, but I felt that awkward pretty much the whole time.
Spending time with the younger crowd left me missing the sophistication, lewdness, and friendly antagonism of my usual crowd. Hanging with the older crowd left me missing the relaxed tone and inquisitive "hey check out this cool idea/question/concept" banter of, well, my usual crowd. I'm so ready to get back to Moscow, where drinking wine, having fun, and sharing provocative discussion all happen at the same table.
Tuesday morning we got up far earlier than health and good sense would recommend and made our way out to Jeff & Terri's place again. After a couple cups of coffee with them, we piled into 'Buster', the Suburban, drove to Diana's (just a few minutes away) and picked her up to join us for a grand tour of the valley. It really was a grand tour. Between Jeff and Diana, there's little I can imagine that they don't know about the area (that's worth knowing). I mean, we look at a field, and Jeff can tell us who owns and when they bought it from who and how deep they dug to hit water and Diana fills in how much it cost them, who's going to build what there, and so on. For every field, they pretty much know at least that much about it. I now refer to Photo #1, below.
This may look, to the uneducated observer, like a dirt road. Actually, it's two parallel dirt roads, poorly photographed. *cough* Additionally, guess what? There's a story behind it. Two doctors own neighboring property, see, and they can't agree on how to share the dirt road leading into it from the, uh, slightly larger dirt road. So they each pave their own road. And its been that way for decades, right? Wow. Who knew? Yeah, Jeff & Diana, that's who.
There's Jeff, just drivin' casual. And here's most of Diana, with a nice view of a mountain and an awkward view of a chunk of my head. She was sitting behind me and I took all these photos without saying I was taking photos, covertly, y'know, so as not to make anybody nervous. So I'm trying to excuse my poor photography but I really can't. So nevermind.
The conversation was consistently excellent, usually with everyone participating in the same topic and asking questions and stuff. The commentary was riveting. For example, "Livestock always looks pathetic in the winter." A couple times side-conversations broke out — Jeff and I talked about vacuum pressure in engines and mileage and, well, car stuff for a while. That too was excellent, so really, it was just a pretty awesome deal.
MISCELLANY TIME:
Facts have emerged which modify my story slightly, lessening the pleasantly dramatic spin I've enjoyed putting on this
I think I've made a mistake by trying to use the word 'meta' in conversation. The last couple sessions of Theory of Knowledge had me thinking in terms of stuff and meta-stuff, and it makes oodles of intuitive sense to me, and I was all happy trying to make conversation out of it. But I think that I'd be really annoyed if I were on the receiving end of the sort of comments I made. It's really hard (if not impossible) to talk about meta-levels without being a smug bastard about it. In class, that was also the case, but it was a roomful of smug bastards, so it was okay. Outside the academic circle-jerk, it's just annoying to have someone proclaiming dichotomies in terms of meta-levels. Too damn pretentious. So, my apologies to anyone who noticed me doing that.
I've been enjoying the Poorleno blog 'mixtapes' lately. I forget what random Googling brought up this guy's site, but of course anyone using the name of my all-time favorite Röyksopp song had better be doing something interesting with it. True enough, there's a good deal of good music on those collections. They're worth a listen. Personally, I can't stand not being able to see exactly what is playing, so the one-long-track format is annoying. I only know one to four songs already from each mix, so there's a lot I'm trying to learn. There are some really excellent choices and some really bizarre ones - 50 Cent and... I forget, Air Supply? What? Enjoy the french electronica, I say. Lots of Rinôçérôse, who I knew previously only from the Hôtel Costes compilations.
Direct Links for your Clicking Pleasure: 1 2 3 4 5 6
Okay, I'm done for the day. Please leave me comments! And questions, should you find yourself having them, are also welcome. Thanks for reading.
12.24.2006
good words
First off, I'd like to share a bit of Damien Rice. These are selected lyrics from the song "Dogs" from his new album "9". Listen to the song. Really. It's good.
I'm very much in the mood to fall in love.
On another note, here's a pretty amazing excerpt from the book I'm reading.
"The Mysterious Flame Of Queen Loana" by Umberto Eco
pp.346-352
One day we went walking through the hills. I had thought Gragnola was going to tell me about the beauties of nature, as he had done in the past, but on that day he pointed out only dead things, dried cow dung with flies buzzing around it, a vine infected with downy mildew, a row of processionary caterpillars that were going to kill a tree, some potato plants with eyes larger than the tubers, which were now inedible, an animal carcass in a ditch, so putrefied that you could no longer tell whether it was a marten or a hare. And he smoked one Milit after another, excellent for TB, he would say, they disinfect your lungs.
"You see kid, the world is dominated by evil things. Indeed, by Evil with a capital E. And I'm not just talking about the evil of man killing his fellow man for a few coins, or the evil of the SS hanging our comrades. I'm talking about Evil itself, the thing that rotted my lungs, that makes a crop go bad, or that lets a hailstorm reduce a man who owns a small vineyard and nothing else to misery. Have you ever asked yourself why Evil exists in the world, and especially death, when people like living so much, and one fine day death comes and carries them off, rich and poor alike, even babies? Have you ever heard anyone talk about the death of the universe? I read and I know: the universe, I mean the whole thing, the stars, the sun, the Milky Way, it's like an electric battery that runs and runs, but all the while it's running down, and one day it will run out. End of the universe. The Evil of evils is that the universe itself has been condemned to death. Since birth, you might say. So what kind of world is that, where Evil exists? Wouldn't a world without Evil be better?"
"Well, yeah," I philosophized.
"Of course, you could say that the world was born by mistake, the world is a sickness afflicting the universe, which even before we came along wasn't feeling so great, and one fine day the open sore that is our solar system appears, and us with it. But the stars, the Milky Way, and the sun don't know they're bound to die, so it doesn't bother them. We, on the other hand, who have been born out of the sickness of the universe, we have the bad luck to be bright boys and to understand that we're bound to die. So not only are we victims of Evil, but we know it. Cheery stuff."
"But it's athiests who say that the world wasn't made by anyone, and you say you're not an athiest..."
"I'm not because I can't bring myself to believe that all these things we see around us—the way trees and fruits grow, and the solar system, and our brains—came about by chance. They're too well made. And therefore there must have been a creating mind. God."
"So then?"
"So then, how do you reconcile God with Evil?"
"Off the top of my head, I'm not sure, let me think about it..."
"Ah yes, let me think about it, he says, as if the greatest minds haven't been thinking about it for century upon century..."
"And what did they end up with?"
"Diddly-squat. Evil, they said, was brought into the world by the rebel angels. Oh really? God sees and foresees all, and he didn't know the rebel angels were going to rebel? Why did he create them if he knew they were going to rebel? That's like somebody making car tires that he knows will blow out after two kilometers. He'd be a prick. But no, he went ahead and created them, and afterward he was happy as a clam, look how clever I am, I can even make angels... Then he waited for them to rebel (no doubt drooling in anticipation of their first false step) and then hurled them down into hell. If that's the case, he's a monster. Other philosophers had a different idea: Evil doesn't exist outside of God, it's inside him, like a sickness, he spends eternity trying to free himself of it. Poor guy, maybe that's how it is. But since I know I'm tubercular, I would never bring children into the world, because TB is passed from father to son. And yet God, knowing he's got the sickness he's got, is going to make you a world that at best will be dominated by Evil? That's sheer wickedness. And further, one of us might have a child without meaning to, might get a little reckless one night and not use a rubber, but God made the world because that's exactly what he wanted to do."
"What if it just slipped out of him, like sometimes pee does?"
"You might think you're being funny, but that's exactly what other sharp minds have thought. The world slipped out of God like piss slips out of us. The world is the result of his incontinence, like a man with an enlarged prostate."
"What's a prostate?"
"It doesn't matter, pretend I gave a different example. What matters is that the world slipped out of Him, that God just wasn't able to hold it in, and that all this is the result of the Evil he carries inside him—that's the only way to excuse God. We're in shit up to our eyes, but he's no better off himself. Then, however, all the pretty things they tell you at the Oratorio start falling like overripe fruit, things about God as the Good, as the perfect being who created the heavens and the earth. He created the heavens and the earth precisely because he was profoundly imperfect. That's why he made the stars like batteries that can't be recharged."
"But hang on, maybe God did create a world where those of us in it are destined to die, but say he did it as a test, to make us earn paradise, and therefore eternal happiness."
"Or burn in hell."
"The ones who yield to the devil's temptations."
"You talk like theologians, who are all in bad faith. Like you, they say that Evil exists, but that God has given us the greatest gift in the world, which is our free will. We are free to do what God tells us to do or what the devil tempts us to do, and if we end up in hell it's just because we haven't been created as slaves but as free men, and it just so happens we've used our freedom badly, which is our own doing."
"Exactly."
"Exactly? But who told you that freedom is a gift? In other words, be careful not to confuse things. Our comrades in the mountains are fighting for freedom, but it's freedom from other men who wanted to turn them into so many little machines. Freedom is a beautiful thing between one man and another; you don't have the right to make me do and think what you want me to. And besides, our comrades were free to decide whether to go up into the mountains or to hide out somewhere. But the freedom that God granted me, what kind of freedom is that? The freedom to go to paradise or hell, with no middle ground. You're born and you're forced to play a hand of briscola, and if you lose you suffer for all eternity. And what if I didn't want to play this game? Fat Head, who among all his evil deeds actually did a few good things too, banned gambling houses, because those are places where people are tempted and end up ruining their lives. And don't tell me people are free to go there or not. Better not to lead them into temptation. But here God has created us free and incredibly weak, exposed to temptation. You call that a gift? It's as if I were to throw you down that escarpment and tell you, Don't worry, you're free to grab onto some shrub and haul yourself back up, or you can let yourself roll down until you've been reduced to the kind of minced meat they eat in Alba. You might ask: But why did you throw me down when I was doing just fine up there? And I would answer: To see how strong you were. A fine lark. You didn't want to prove how strong you were, you were just happy not to fall."
"Now you're confusing me. What is it you believe, then?"
"It's simple, it just never occured to anyone before: God is evil. Why do priests say God is good? Because he created us. But that's precisely why he's evil. God doesn't have evil the way we have a headache. God is Evil. Maybe, seeing as he's eternal, he wasn't evil billions of years ago. Maybe he became that way, like kids in the summer who get bored and start tearing the wings off flies, to pass the time. Notice how if you think that God is evil, the whole question of Evil becomes crystal clear."
"They're all bad, then, even Jesus?"
"Ah, no! Jesus is the only evidence that at least us men are capable of being good. To tell the truth, I'm not sure Jesus was God's son, because it doesn't make sense to me that a good guy like that could be born from such an evil father. I'm not even sure that Jesus really existed. Maybe we invented him ourselves, and that in itself would be a miracle, that our minds could come up with such a beautiful idea. Or maybe he did exist, was the best of men, and said he was the son of God with the best of intentions, to convince us that God was good. But if you read the Gospels closely, you'll realize that in the end even Jesus realized that God was bad: he gets scared in the olive grove and asks, Let this cup pass from me, and zilch, God doesn't listen; on the cross he shouts Father why hast thou forsaken me, and zilch, God turns his back. But Jesus showed us what a man can do to offset God's wickedness. If God is evil, then at least we have to try to be good, forgive each other, refrain from doing each other harm, heal the sick, and turn the other cheek. We've got to help each other, seeing as God doesn't help us. Do you see how great Jesus' idea was? Imagine how much it must have irritated God. Forget the devil, Jesus was the only true enemy of God, and he's the only friend us poor wretches have."
"You must be some kind of heretic, like the ones they burned..."
"I'm the only one who understands the truth, but unless I want to get burned I can't go around speaking it, so you're the only one I've told. Swear you won't tell anyone."
"I swear," I said, tracing a cross over my lips with my finger.
Gragnola’s speeches left me sad. Not because I was sure they were evil but because I feared they were good. He lived in a world made sad by an evil God, and the only times I saw him smile with any tenderness were when he was talking to me about Socrates or Jesus. Both of whom, I would remind myself, were killed, so I did not see what there was to smile about.
she lives with an orange tree
the girl that does yoga
she picks the dead ones from the ground
when we come over
and she gives, i get without giving anything to me
like a morning sun, good good morning sun
he lives in a little house
on the side of a little hill
picks the litter from the ground
litter little brother spills
he gives, i get without giving anything to me
and the dogs they run
in the good good morning sun
oh, and she's always dressed in white
she's like an angel, man
she burns my eyes
oh and she turns, she pulls a smile
we drive her round and she drives us wild
oh and she moves like a little girl
i become a child, man
she moves my world and she gets splashed with paint
and turns away and leaves me standing
she lives with an orange tree
the girl that does yoga
got a wolf to keep her warm
when he comes over
the girl that does yoga
I'm very much in the mood to fall in love.
On another note, here's a pretty amazing excerpt from the book I'm reading.
"The Mysterious Flame Of Queen Loana" by Umberto Eco
pp.346-352
One day we went walking through the hills. I had thought Gragnola was going to tell me about the beauties of nature, as he had done in the past, but on that day he pointed out only dead things, dried cow dung with flies buzzing around it, a vine infected with downy mildew, a row of processionary caterpillars that were going to kill a tree, some potato plants with eyes larger than the tubers, which were now inedible, an animal carcass in a ditch, so putrefied that you could no longer tell whether it was a marten or a hare. And he smoked one Milit after another, excellent for TB, he would say, they disinfect your lungs.
"You see kid, the world is dominated by evil things. Indeed, by Evil with a capital E. And I'm not just talking about the evil of man killing his fellow man for a few coins, or the evil of the SS hanging our comrades. I'm talking about Evil itself, the thing that rotted my lungs, that makes a crop go bad, or that lets a hailstorm reduce a man who owns a small vineyard and nothing else to misery. Have you ever asked yourself why Evil exists in the world, and especially death, when people like living so much, and one fine day death comes and carries them off, rich and poor alike, even babies? Have you ever heard anyone talk about the death of the universe? I read and I know: the universe, I mean the whole thing, the stars, the sun, the Milky Way, it's like an electric battery that runs and runs, but all the while it's running down, and one day it will run out. End of the universe. The Evil of evils is that the universe itself has been condemned to death. Since birth, you might say. So what kind of world is that, where Evil exists? Wouldn't a world without Evil be better?"
"Well, yeah," I philosophized.
"Of course, you could say that the world was born by mistake, the world is a sickness afflicting the universe, which even before we came along wasn't feeling so great, and one fine day the open sore that is our solar system appears, and us with it. But the stars, the Milky Way, and the sun don't know they're bound to die, so it doesn't bother them. We, on the other hand, who have been born out of the sickness of the universe, we have the bad luck to be bright boys and to understand that we're bound to die. So not only are we victims of Evil, but we know it. Cheery stuff."
"But it's athiests who say that the world wasn't made by anyone, and you say you're not an athiest..."
"I'm not because I can't bring myself to believe that all these things we see around us—the way trees and fruits grow, and the solar system, and our brains—came about by chance. They're too well made. And therefore there must have been a creating mind. God."
"So then?"
"So then, how do you reconcile God with Evil?"
"Off the top of my head, I'm not sure, let me think about it..."
"Ah yes, let me think about it, he says, as if the greatest minds haven't been thinking about it for century upon century..."
"And what did they end up with?"
"Diddly-squat. Evil, they said, was brought into the world by the rebel angels. Oh really? God sees and foresees all, and he didn't know the rebel angels were going to rebel? Why did he create them if he knew they were going to rebel? That's like somebody making car tires that he knows will blow out after two kilometers. He'd be a prick. But no, he went ahead and created them, and afterward he was happy as a clam, look how clever I am, I can even make angels... Then he waited for them to rebel (no doubt drooling in anticipation of their first false step) and then hurled them down into hell. If that's the case, he's a monster. Other philosophers had a different idea: Evil doesn't exist outside of God, it's inside him, like a sickness, he spends eternity trying to free himself of it. Poor guy, maybe that's how it is. But since I know I'm tubercular, I would never bring children into the world, because TB is passed from father to son. And yet God, knowing he's got the sickness he's got, is going to make you a world that at best will be dominated by Evil? That's sheer wickedness. And further, one of us might have a child without meaning to, might get a little reckless one night and not use a rubber, but God made the world because that's exactly what he wanted to do."
"What if it just slipped out of him, like sometimes pee does?"
"You might think you're being funny, but that's exactly what other sharp minds have thought. The world slipped out of God like piss slips out of us. The world is the result of his incontinence, like a man with an enlarged prostate."
"What's a prostate?"
"It doesn't matter, pretend I gave a different example. What matters is that the world slipped out of Him, that God just wasn't able to hold it in, and that all this is the result of the Evil he carries inside him—that's the only way to excuse God. We're in shit up to our eyes, but he's no better off himself. Then, however, all the pretty things they tell you at the Oratorio start falling like overripe fruit, things about God as the Good, as the perfect being who created the heavens and the earth. He created the heavens and the earth precisely because he was profoundly imperfect. That's why he made the stars like batteries that can't be recharged."
"But hang on, maybe God did create a world where those of us in it are destined to die, but say he did it as a test, to make us earn paradise, and therefore eternal happiness."
"Or burn in hell."
"The ones who yield to the devil's temptations."
"You talk like theologians, who are all in bad faith. Like you, they say that Evil exists, but that God has given us the greatest gift in the world, which is our free will. We are free to do what God tells us to do or what the devil tempts us to do, and if we end up in hell it's just because we haven't been created as slaves but as free men, and it just so happens we've used our freedom badly, which is our own doing."
"Exactly."
"Exactly? But who told you that freedom is a gift? In other words, be careful not to confuse things. Our comrades in the mountains are fighting for freedom, but it's freedom from other men who wanted to turn them into so many little machines. Freedom is a beautiful thing between one man and another; you don't have the right to make me do and think what you want me to. And besides, our comrades were free to decide whether to go up into the mountains or to hide out somewhere. But the freedom that God granted me, what kind of freedom is that? The freedom to go to paradise or hell, with no middle ground. You're born and you're forced to play a hand of briscola, and if you lose you suffer for all eternity. And what if I didn't want to play this game? Fat Head, who among all his evil deeds actually did a few good things too, banned gambling houses, because those are places where people are tempted and end up ruining their lives. And don't tell me people are free to go there or not. Better not to lead them into temptation. But here God has created us free and incredibly weak, exposed to temptation. You call that a gift? It's as if I were to throw you down that escarpment and tell you, Don't worry, you're free to grab onto some shrub and haul yourself back up, or you can let yourself roll down until you've been reduced to the kind of minced meat they eat in Alba. You might ask: But why did you throw me down when I was doing just fine up there? And I would answer: To see how strong you were. A fine lark. You didn't want to prove how strong you were, you were just happy not to fall."
"Now you're confusing me. What is it you believe, then?"
"It's simple, it just never occured to anyone before: God is evil. Why do priests say God is good? Because he created us. But that's precisely why he's evil. God doesn't have evil the way we have a headache. God is Evil. Maybe, seeing as he's eternal, he wasn't evil billions of years ago. Maybe he became that way, like kids in the summer who get bored and start tearing the wings off flies, to pass the time. Notice how if you think that God is evil, the whole question of Evil becomes crystal clear."
"They're all bad, then, even Jesus?"
"Ah, no! Jesus is the only evidence that at least us men are capable of being good. To tell the truth, I'm not sure Jesus was God's son, because it doesn't make sense to me that a good guy like that could be born from such an evil father. I'm not even sure that Jesus really existed. Maybe we invented him ourselves, and that in itself would be a miracle, that our minds could come up with such a beautiful idea. Or maybe he did exist, was the best of men, and said he was the son of God with the best of intentions, to convince us that God was good. But if you read the Gospels closely, you'll realize that in the end even Jesus realized that God was bad: he gets scared in the olive grove and asks, Let this cup pass from me, and zilch, God doesn't listen; on the cross he shouts Father why hast thou forsaken me, and zilch, God turns his back. But Jesus showed us what a man can do to offset God's wickedness. If God is evil, then at least we have to try to be good, forgive each other, refrain from doing each other harm, heal the sick, and turn the other cheek. We've got to help each other, seeing as God doesn't help us. Do you see how great Jesus' idea was? Imagine how much it must have irritated God. Forget the devil, Jesus was the only true enemy of God, and he's the only friend us poor wretches have."
"You must be some kind of heretic, like the ones they burned..."
"I'm the only one who understands the truth, but unless I want to get burned I can't go around speaking it, so you're the only one I've told. Swear you won't tell anyone."
"I swear," I said, tracing a cross over my lips with my finger.
Gragnola’s speeches left me sad. Not because I was sure they were evil but because I feared they were good. He lived in a world made sad by an evil God, and the only times I saw him smile with any tenderness were when he was talking to me about Socrates or Jesus. Both of whom, I would remind myself, were killed, so I did not see what there was to smile about.
12.23.2006
end of full day one
So today started out with the adventure of switching hotels. Like I said, the pool was handicap-inaccessible at the Shilo Inn and my room smelled like cheap hooker and the manager last night was a real jerk about everything. So we moved across the street (quite literally) to the Days Inn, which has been exponentially better. Pete described it, I think, as an improvement of at least two orders of magnitude. So if you're even more of a mathematical nerd than he or I, you can probably calculate an integer approximation of hotel quality here in downtown Helena. Wow. I can't really believe that I just went there with that.
I was planning all day to give a detailed breakdown of what each of my relatives are like (so far). I just got off the phone with my dad, though; a conversation wherein I detailed pretty much everything I was going to write about. And right before that my mom interrogated me about my reaction to all these family members. So I'm kinda burnt out. Here's a brief recap, though, just so I don't feel like I'm letting myself get off easy:
Aunt Diana - Mom's sister
The one person on my mom's side of the family who I feel like I've spent any decent amount of time around in my life thus far. I just adore her - she's a neuropathologist, which is pretty cool, and despite the obvious risks of such a profession, she maintains a good sense of humor and is one of those rare people who gets really excited about cool things and just exudes bubbly energy. She's also a total dork, as evidenced by this quote:
[someone tells a story about their cat doing something ridiculous]
Diana: "Well, cats have a pretty small cortex, so he probably won't remember it for long."
Ah. Excellent.
Uncle Jeff - Mom's brother
The second-most-familiar member of this group for me, I've actually seen Jeff in the last ten years. He's such a cool guy, appearing very laid back and... just cool. Really good at what he does, y'know? One of those people who is very skilled and not at all pompous about it. I feel comfortable around him quite readily, but I feel like as I start to relax he starts to tense up. My mom has suggested that he's generally a very 'closed' person, but when he was my age he 'maximized' the opportunities of, I don't know, being young, and he doesn't always feel good about the choices he made at that time in his life. I was surprised to feel pretty strong disapproval from him about my decision to drop out of school.
Aunt Barb(ie) - Mom's sister
I've been pleasantly surprised to find that I get along really well with her. She and my mom don't get along very well, and I haven't really ever been given reason to think that I'd be able to get along with her either. But she's great. Very good at conversation, y'know? I guess being a good 'people person' is part of why she's a very successful attorney. Yeah, that's right, my aunt is the Assistant Attorney General for the State of Montana. I'm gonna try to brag about that to all my law-school friends.
Don - Barb's husband
He's just a kick in the pants. In the good way. I mean, a laugh and a half. Wait, those don't sound good. [Insert positive cliche about joviality here] Great sense of humor, almost manic curiosity about stuff in the world, and the sort of perpetual joker whose jokes probably don't get old until you have to live with him. We talked about physics and bikes over a couple glasses of Cabernet Sauvignon this afternoon.
Colin - my cousin
Barb & Don's younger kid. So he's 12, and I've never met him before. Jesus. A cool kid, very bright, and he's either young or open-minded enough to be nice to me, though I'm a total stranger.
Sam - my cousin
Barb & Don's older kid. He's 15, and apparently immersed in a phase of teenagedom which involves being a total dick to everybody. Hasn't given me the fucking time of day, and goddamnit, I'm supposed to be the cool older cousin. Not working out like I expected/hoped. I don't know how to even approach him - he's not someone who I would have been friends with at the age of 15. Too much money and family and goddamn fortune in his life, 'cause he takes it all for granted. I feel like I need to impress him, but I also feel like I care way too much and if I don't calm down I'll end up just acting like I care too much. Relax.
Terri - Jeff's wife
I don't remember ever meeting her before, but she's really sweet and likeable. I look forward to talking with her more. She's a baker and gets up in the middle of the night to go bake every morning. I can respect that, in the same way I respect many things I'd never be able to do myself.
Gary - Diana's husband/partner
I don't know if they're married, so suddenly my simple little labeling system has fallen apart. He too is very likeable. He's got the shock of white hair and leather jacket that might indicate an unlikeable comboy-type. His face is sharp, though, in an... intelligent way, with very deep-set eyes, and he's cool. Another very hard worker who's probably really good at what he does.
Jane - Mom's mom
I just love my grandma. She's so cool - all that stubborn individualism that my mom has, she got from her mom. What a character - as I've already told many people, she's a rabid animal rights activist, vegan, and cat person. Yeah, she has cats. Boy, does she have cats. Wow. Now I also have found out that she's of the opinion that Buddhists and Hindus "know where it's at." She hopes to "come back in the next life as a Hindu." Awesome. Today was her 80th birthday, and she took us shopping at the cool Co-op-y natural foods store here in Helena. It's cleverly named "Real Foods" (okay, not so clever) and they're pretty rad. I mean, they use fucking Intel iMacs at the register. No, as the register. Oh man, that's really really rad in my book.
So that's my grandma on the left, my mom's arm on the right, and one of the checkers at Real Foods in the middle. His name's Chris and, like every employee at the store, he knows my grandma on a first name basis. The iMac is kinda hidden, but trust me, it's an iMac. And they have 10 of them. Fuckin' rad.
Okay, so much for brief recap. Shit. I love writing.
The music that's been getting me through the last couple days:
Song - "I Summon You" by Spoon
Album for waking up - "Gimme Fiction" by Spoon
Album for falling asleep - "...Until We Felt Red" by Kaki King (apparently pronounced Khaki) (okay, I've gotta say, her music is awesome, AND she's hot. and only 25. her site's pretty awesome, too.) (okay, i kinda have a music-nerd crush on her.)
Favorite new self-care product:
Mountain Ocean Skin Trip Coconut Soap
See, this is me, happily clean after using said soap!
Okay, that's also me, alone in my own hotel room still wide awake hours after Mom & Pete went to bed. I think I'm gonna go walk to Albertsons. I'm jazzed. Please leave me a comment if you've read this far. Thanks.
I was planning all day to give a detailed breakdown of what each of my relatives are like (so far). I just got off the phone with my dad, though; a conversation wherein I detailed pretty much everything I was going to write about. And right before that my mom interrogated me about my reaction to all these family members. So I'm kinda burnt out. Here's a brief recap, though, just so I don't feel like I'm letting myself get off easy:
Aunt Diana - Mom's sister
The one person on my mom's side of the family who I feel like I've spent any decent amount of time around in my life thus far. I just adore her - she's a neuropathologist, which is pretty cool, and despite the obvious risks of such a profession, she maintains a good sense of humor and is one of those rare people who gets really excited about cool things and just exudes bubbly energy. She's also a total dork, as evidenced by this quote:
[someone tells a story about their cat doing something ridiculous]
Diana: "Well, cats have a pretty small cortex, so he probably won't remember it for long."
Ah. Excellent.
Uncle Jeff - Mom's brother
The second-most-familiar member of this group for me, I've actually seen Jeff in the last ten years. He's such a cool guy, appearing very laid back and... just cool. Really good at what he does, y'know? One of those people who is very skilled and not at all pompous about it. I feel comfortable around him quite readily, but I feel like as I start to relax he starts to tense up. My mom has suggested that he's generally a very 'closed' person, but when he was my age he 'maximized' the opportunities of, I don't know, being young, and he doesn't always feel good about the choices he made at that time in his life. I was surprised to feel pretty strong disapproval from him about my decision to drop out of school.
Aunt Barb(ie) - Mom's sister
I've been pleasantly surprised to find that I get along really well with her. She and my mom don't get along very well, and I haven't really ever been given reason to think that I'd be able to get along with her either. But she's great. Very good at conversation, y'know? I guess being a good 'people person' is part of why she's a very successful attorney. Yeah, that's right, my aunt is the Assistant Attorney General for the State of Montana. I'm gonna try to brag about that to all my law-school friends.
Don - Barb's husband
He's just a kick in the pants. In the good way. I mean, a laugh and a half. Wait, those don't sound good. [Insert positive cliche about joviality here] Great sense of humor, almost manic curiosity about stuff in the world, and the sort of perpetual joker whose jokes probably don't get old until you have to live with him. We talked about physics and bikes over a couple glasses of Cabernet Sauvignon this afternoon.
Colin - my cousin
Barb & Don's younger kid. So he's 12, and I've never met him before. Jesus. A cool kid, very bright, and he's either young or open-minded enough to be nice to me, though I'm a total stranger.
Sam - my cousin
Barb & Don's older kid. He's 15, and apparently immersed in a phase of teenagedom which involves being a total dick to everybody. Hasn't given me the fucking time of day, and goddamnit, I'm supposed to be the cool older cousin. Not working out like I expected/hoped. I don't know how to even approach him - he's not someone who I would have been friends with at the age of 15. Too much money and family and goddamn fortune in his life, 'cause he takes it all for granted. I feel like I need to impress him, but I also feel like I care way too much and if I don't calm down I'll end up just acting like I care too much. Relax.
Terri - Jeff's wife
I don't remember ever meeting her before, but she's really sweet and likeable. I look forward to talking with her more. She's a baker and gets up in the middle of the night to go bake every morning. I can respect that, in the same way I respect many things I'd never be able to do myself.
Gary - Diana's husband/partner
I don't know if they're married, so suddenly my simple little labeling system has fallen apart. He too is very likeable. He's got the shock of white hair and leather jacket that might indicate an unlikeable comboy-type. His face is sharp, though, in an... intelligent way, with very deep-set eyes, and he's cool. Another very hard worker who's probably really good at what he does.
Jane - Mom's mom
I just love my grandma. She's so cool - all that stubborn individualism that my mom has, she got from her mom. What a character - as I've already told many people, she's a rabid animal rights activist, vegan, and cat person. Yeah, she has cats. Boy, does she have cats. Wow. Now I also have found out that she's of the opinion that Buddhists and Hindus "know where it's at." She hopes to "come back in the next life as a Hindu." Awesome. Today was her 80th birthday, and she took us shopping at the cool Co-op-y natural foods store here in Helena. It's cleverly named "Real Foods" (okay, not so clever) and they're pretty rad. I mean, they use fucking Intel iMacs at the register. No, as the register. Oh man, that's really really rad in my book.
So that's my grandma on the left, my mom's arm on the right, and one of the checkers at Real Foods in the middle. His name's Chris and, like every employee at the store, he knows my grandma on a first name basis. The iMac is kinda hidden, but trust me, it's an iMac. And they have 10 of them. Fuckin' rad.
Okay, so much for brief recap. Shit. I love writing.
The music that's been getting me through the last couple days:
Song - "I Summon You" by Spoon
Album for waking up - "Gimme Fiction" by Spoon
Album for falling asleep - "...Until We Felt Red" by Kaki King (apparently pronounced Khaki) (okay, I've gotta say, her music is awesome, AND she's hot. and only 25. her site's pretty awesome, too.) (okay, i kinda have a music-nerd crush on her.)
Favorite new self-care product:
Mountain Ocean Skin Trip Coconut Soap
See, this is me, happily clean after using said soap!
Okay, that's also me, alone in my own hotel room still wide awake hours after Mom & Pete went to bed. I think I'm gonna go walk to Albertsons. I'm jazzed. Please leave me a comment if you've read this far. Thanks.
stupid OKCupid and their clever tests
Loser- INTP 46% Extraversion, 60% Intuition, 60% Thinking, 46% Judging |
Talked to another human being lately? I'm serious. You value knowledge above ALL else. You love new ideas, and become very excited over abstractions and theories. The fact that nobody else cares still hasn't become apparent to you...
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|
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My test tracked 4 variables How you compared to other people your age and gender:
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| Link: The Brutally Honest Personality Test written by UltimateMaster on OkCupid Free Online Dating, home of the The Dating Persona Test |
12.22.2006
montana!
Well, here I am in Helena. Mere miles away from where I was born, for the first time in over 20 years. Wow.
The Shilo Inn has open wireless, wonderfully. Their supposedly handicap-accessible pool, however, is down a flight of about ten stairs, though. Bitches. My room is right next to the pool, so I can feel chlorinated all the time. Or something. It's not too bad.
Mom's on the phone calling all her family and letting them know we've arrived.
The drive over was much nicer than it could have been - cold, but the roads were all clear once we got past Coeur d'Alene. Idaho's weather is significantly worse right now, I expect, but I'm sure we'll get plenty of cold and snow and stuff in the next five days.
I really liked Missoula. We stopped there for lunch and I just became instantly fond of the place. Maybe it was just the right stretch of road to expose me to - stylish and inexpensive little cafes with free wireless and people using MacBooks. In Montana? I know, I know... stereotypes just can't be trusted.
I burned a few CDs for us to listen to on the drive, at Mom's request, and it was an interesting experience.
Gimme Fiction - Spoon
I Am Sam - Music From The Motion Picture
The Sunlandic Twins - Of Montreal
Blocked Numbers - Crystal Skulls
Chutes Too Narrow - The Shins
Every Waking Moment - Citizen Cope
9 - Damien Rice
The policy in Pete's truck is apparently to keep the volume very, very low... almost too low to hear anything, definitely too low to hear the full range of instrumentation at highway speed. Hmm. So there were no complaints about the music, but we also couldn't hear about half of it. The only album I heard a distinct compliment for was Every Waking Moment. I introduced my mom to Citizen Cope a year or so ago, so she recognized it. The I Am Sam soundtrack was also clearly appreciated, since they could sing along to it. Beatles covers, y'know. I would have brought The Crane Wife by The Decemberists, since I love it, but ran out of CD-Rs last night. Now that I know how music is listened to in this vehicle, I regret bringing 9... it's symphonic grandeur is almost totally lost at low volumes. The repetition just sounds annoying when you can't hear the subtle permutations going on. Oh well. Also should have brought some Gordon Goodwin and Fiona Apple. Maybe Iron & Wine. I grabbed 604 by Ladytron (I'm very fond of that album and happened to have it lying around on audio CD, so, y'know) but I'm afraid to listen to it in this company.
Anyway, gotta go figure out if anything is gonna happen tonight. I'll try to keep posting. This is fun. I'm on vacation. Wow.
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