Aggression

It’s not that I’m mad all the time.  It isn’t even that I’m sort of mad.  I’ve just been a powder keg.  I don’t know what’s going on. People disagreeing with me on minor details will raise my kill flag.  I’m generally thought of as having a stormy emotional nature because I don’t smile (see aside), but normally that thought is wrong.  Not so lately.  I want to break bones.

I have also noticed a sharp decline in motivation.  I’ll spend an extra hour in bed when I should be writing a paper.  Or I’ll stare at the computer in the lab for a half hour and decide that no maps will be made that day.  I was straight A’s about three weeks ago.  By being a worthless piece of shit, I have managed to drop at least two letter grades in everything (except the one class I don’t have to think about to get a good grade.

Aside: Enough with the fucking smiling.

Really, how much do I have to smile for you to think I’m friendly.  When I’m staring at a computer screen, I will not grin at it like some sort of fucking fool.  When I walk from location A to location B, do not expect me to be amused by the transit.  Did you not say anything funny? Then no, I probably will not smile.  And you know what? I’m not really frowning.  That is my thinking face.  I realize that you were brought up in some rainbows and puffy clouds environment where your every emotion was a precious and personal thing, but fuck off.  I don’t care how you feel.  You should show me the same courtesy.  Short of an immediate family member dying, you do not have the ability to tell when anything is wrong.

Yes, you noticed my heavy brow not permanently arched up like I’m goddamn waiting for someone to come talk to me and make the world a better place.  In fact, it routinely rests low over my eyes.  That is what it does.  It’s fucking bone structure.  That does not mean to ignore it.  One degree more of scowl and your life is in danger.  That’s right.  The millimetric difference in facial feature position is the only harbinger you will have that life is going to end, and soon.

Keep telling me to smile motherfucker.  I will murder you.

End Aside

So, I don’t know how to shake my lack of motivation.  About mile 1.5 yesterday (on a treadmill, which I hate), I completely lost my desire to keep running.  Fuck health.  Fuck badassness.  I just wanted to go home and watch TV.

What the fuck is wrong with me?

Vanity, Vanity, etc.

I love sprinting.  Not because I’m particularly fast, mind you.  I just love the feeling of potency.  The bottom hems of my gym shorts being stretched by my quadriceps on that first surge.  My lower back working with my hamstrings and my glutes (ass muscles) to shove my legs back and then spring them forward to catch the ground moving by under me.  They way I can put my heavy shoulders into it and gain a little speed, at the danger of drawing myself too far forward and breaking stride or falling. I like how my breathing goes from a slow steady — inhale for two steps, exhale two steps — to a steam locomotive sounding burst and suction every step as I get near my limit.  I like how I can feel the skin of my hand stretch tight with blood pooling there from the forces or inertia.

I don’t think I impress anyone but myself, normally.  I’m kind of a big guy.  Not in the tall sense, I’m about dead average in that dimension, but I’m around 195.  Watching me sprint is probably like watching pickup trucks drag race.

A few years ago, I experimented with online personals because I lived in a backlot section of the world where I had no chance to meet anyone.  I was always thrown off by the “build” question.  I’m not average.  I’m not “a few extra pounds.” Well, technically, I am a few extra pounds, as my height wieght proportion does work out to me being overweight, but not in the way the word is traditionally used.  I was shy of using the term “athletic,” or worse, “toned.”

See, the problem with those descriptors, “ahletic” in particular is that, A: this man is an athlete, and B: this man is also an athlete.  That was Tom Nalen, by the way, a man capable of a 4.6 40 (running forty yards from a dead stop in 4.6 seconds).  So, what the hell does that descripton even mean?  By the strictest definition of the word, race car drivers are athletes.  I’m not sure how I feel about that.

So, what would I put? I’m built more like a linebacker than a swimmer.  If I remember correctly, I just put average.  It’s been a while, so I’m not all the way certain.

Interestingly (or not), I went out for a while (because of that ad) with a lawyer from LA who played soccer for one of those amatuer/semi-pro leauges.  She called herself average.  She had a six-pack and those awesome ripply thighs when she moved around naked.  Hardly average.  In fact, one could call her athletic and toned, as she was both toned and an athlete.  She was about the color of hot chocolate, with green eyes and hair down to her butt. She had a law degree and volunteered to teach kids to read.

Not average in the least.  Unfortunately, I had misjudged how long after a divorce I could be trying to date someone.  It broke off, arguably the way it should have, but it always made me curious how many outstanding people think they’re average.

I asked her about it, the first time I saw more of her than the public at large would be allowed.  I asked her why she lied and said she was average.  She said:

“I’m not sure what an athlete looks like and a lot of girls in LA are more toned than me.  Besides, I figure I would just put average so at the worst, I may pleasantly surprise someone.”

I still think about that sometimes.  Not lying about body type, or even being confused by it.  But that the exceptional would be hidden in an intentional low-ball estimation of worth.  I wonder how often people walk right by the extraordinary.

Resurrection

Something heavy came down, alright.

Through all the passion and all the anger and all the frustrating bleeding out drunken rage, I can tell you.  Without trying to bullshit you into believing or not believing in me (time will take care for that for me), I can tell you.

When the lightning rolls over the Uncompaghre and the last aching thunder goes past me, and when the waters roll on forever and ever into Mexico and into the air and into space and sometimes back down onto the land, when I lay here mightily drunk.

When the sun shines and I know yours does not.

I miss you.

That is all.

Maybe that’s enough.  I doubt it.

New

John Pine. I like it. It veers away a little bit chronologically. I decided just to write down anything I wanted to and say fuck the linear story line.

Also, I was reminded the other day that John Pine was based on a real person. Not his personality so much as the lifestyle. I have a friend who lives down by the river. He left for the summer to go fishing somewhere. He has an old camper and a pickup truck as his principal possesions. He makes some damn good wine. I have no idea how, since his camper has no air conditioning.

I’m fairly sure he caught Vietnam, but I’m not certain. We both know what each other knows, so we don’t talk about it. He’s got me through some rough times, generally associated with war and/or women. Mostly by getting drunk and fishing (poorly) in middle of the night.

Can one be too drunk to fish? Indeed they can.

But a real friend doesn’t bother pointing out when you are.

Here’s the page:

http://voxproletariat.wordpress.com/john-pine-p10/

WANT

The jet wing thing, not the Swiss guy who built it.

Here’s more about him: Jet Man Is Coming.

Jaguar

Like a roll on a loosened snare drum and a fuzzed out bass line, she slides down one of my hands.  I can feel the smooth drift and moan of her keel under my fingers.  I warned her, I am tactile in nature.  The bouts and gulleys of her intrigue my fingers while I rearrange myself to better hold her.  She is mostly passive, but easily woken.

The plumbline of her spine twists and compresses with movement Stanislav Szukalski could never muster in sculpture.  The dust, illuminated by the square beam of evening sun coming in my window, eddies and pools in the lee of my moving hands.  She is lean.  The long, tall Stratocaster looking on is not an analog for her.  The Strat is a large guitar, asymmetrical and maximal.  The carved edges of this woman are not rounded and bulging lines.  They are tight, sinewy, minimal.

She moves like a Blue Period Picasso.  Subtle and laconic, but full of autumn languid avarice, malice.  Her breathing is a steady harmonic thing.  She breaths like leaves fall.  To hear her scream would be to witness some minor apocalypse.  Her minor key body never heaves against me in an over powering display of desire or need.  She is an introvert.  The energy of the room, the energy of me, is channeled down through my hands into her lithe body.

She and I have never met, not here.  Not in this bed.  I woke up to thunder in the night.  I am alone, with a paper analyzing the kinetics and dynamics of Unaweep Canyon half done up on my computer.  My computer speakers tell me the vagaries of being a Crawlin’ Kingsnake.  The ceiling I stare at, my old friend, flashes blue and green with the pulsing of a wireless router on my desk.

I haven’t been sleeping alone.  Laying there, compact, the sort of minimal that made the 1970 Mercury Cougar a legend, is the one sharing my sleep.  Muscular and toned into a straight American flawless beautiful destruction machine.  Maybe sharing my dream.  An electric wet black that sucks away the reason and intellectual accountability of my mind, she reflects the lightning outside like a mirror in the sweaty and close September air.

Such is life sharing your bed with a Jaguar.

Groceries

Mostly, things make sense. It’s not that things work out the way they should, or even less plausible, the way they were meant to. That’s just the line you’re fed from infancy. It’s the morphine of societal condition.

Believe in fate. Believe in love. Believe in deities.

There is probably some event horizon of the mind. Where the weight of one thought is pulled forever and away from the the other. On one side, the atomized and heavy thought drifts toward some sort of annihilation and the other escapes.

To drift. To live on. To end elsewhere.

The shifting of the horizon is a scraping blade piling up the inconsistencies you recognize over time. As the horizon creeps out from the gaping maw of the ridiculous assumptive black hole where consciousness originates, the Easter Bunny is no longer real and the person you loved becomes the person you used to know better. And so you lose.

You lose comfort. You lose warmth. You lose belief.

It never gets to you, really. You never live out this life and think to regret it. The decision’s you’ve made all led to who you are and the things you do. It’s not that anything was meant to be, or that it worked out for the best. It’s just that you can never ever go back. When you are born, you have paths available in myriad display, and some paths not so well displayed. With the years, the entropy increases inside your nearly closed system. The myth of the second law of thermodynamics is that a system must be closed for entropy to creep in under the door and breathe cold on you, or even that a closed system exists. The system simply can’t have enough energy creeping in to organize the chaos that is slowly and definitely claiming it all.

I once heard the second law of thermodynamics used in the words of a man telling the world how Genesis was right all along and creation must have been created. I regretted that he did not understand the full power and beauty of the law. He attributed entropy to mere deity. When you do that, you ultimately lose.

You lose beauty. You lose asymmetry. You lose power.

Sometimes, you walk into some store you two used to frequent (damn the commercialized homogeny) or you listen to an old song. Then you can hear her touch and feel her words. You can remember the time and space you shared. Reality is nothing more than a function of space and time, at least that’s the only way we can perceive it. The impermanence of it all can be a just a little bit tragically heartbreaking.

The orbits of those around you always decay eventually. Finally, you will either be lost in one another or lost to one another forever. But even with their departure, you feel the tides. Geodicists spend their lifetimes trying to find the true shape of the Earth. It is a delicate and difficult quest. The changes in the rocks underneath you effect how heavy you are. And since the gravity is the only way you can possibly understand anything so complicated as the displacement of one spherical object floating through the infinite, you can only conclude the shape by judging the gravity. The tides effect the land, too. Some places on Earth, solid land will rise and fall fifteen feet.

Depending on lithography. Depending on season. Depending on time.

And so you walk along the refrigerated dairy section. Without any real thought, your autopilot rocketship mind selects the gallon of 2% and your feet wander off. The body you occupy, forever changing and forever changing the world around it, moves off. And you can feel it. The narrowing eyes. The one long breath. The slipping ring gear blues of bucolic loneliness. And you know this is what you chose. But sometimes, just every so often when you’re walking around the grocery store at midnight, you wonder if you fucked it all away. You gave up everything for this. This life with no twin body sharing your pull and your air and your gravity. The warmth of her body next to yours is a distant–and honestly fading–memory compared to the coldness of the milk and the rough paperboard carton of eggs. And you did the right thing. You had no rights on her. You maybe should have fought the distance, and the ambivalence, and the gravity.

But it’s lost and gone. And this is how you’re supposed to live. With a phone full of numbers you don’t call as much as they call you. With the occasional date. But it’s the driving need to focus on nothing but you and your goals and your loves that keeps you away. The repelling forces of your own ambition are too great. And so you live out your commission. You pay out at the register. You laugh at the checker’s jokes. You think of your next challenge. And you think of your next step in a years long process of dying to anyone but you. You focus on what you need to do. Your next mission. Eventually some outer reaching body, some comet, may break into your orbit, but until then, you only have the tides of the departed. Memorializing forever that once, maybe twice, you were capable of something like that.

Something worth doing. Something gone forever. Something reaching on.

International Scout

I mention this vehicle often.  I have a 1970 International Scout 800a.  These stocky and aesthetically challenged vehicles gather quite the following among IH fans.

The name of the company was International Harvester for a reason.  They were a Chicago tractor company.  In fact, all the powerplants in their vehicles were sourced straight out of industrial and agricultural applications.  So, you end up with what amounts to a tractor with vaguely car like appearance and sometimes a radio.

I was browsing YouTube the other day and found this:

I love the weird 60’s methodology to this commercial.  Buy the Scout or I will shoot you!  I fish this way! I fish that way! I have sheep! More music!

That first montage where it appears a man is shooting random directions out of the back of the thing kills me.  Then he points the gun at you and you finally see what the commercial is about.

It’s a pretty damn cool way to get around.

I know I’ve put it on here before, but this is mine:

Holy sweet badass

Curves

The Earth is almost impossible to understand with simple algebra.  Most of the universe defies simple substitution and modeling.  Once the reality gets to be too much, it all turns into estimation and general models that are at once so infuriatingly complex that no one can understand them, and so outrageously scientific looking that people buy exactly what they say.

Most natural cycles follow a magnitude frequency curve.  This is a curve where data points are used to plot on a logarithmic scale the probability of magnitudes.  Every stream has a flood magnitude-frequency curve.  Every seismic area has an earthquake mag-freq curve.  Every time you decide to punch someone, every one of your muscle fibers responds somewhere inside the plot of the mag-freq curve.

The problem with the idea of these curves is that they give a common enough sounding phrase enormously complex ramifications.  Take for instance a hundred-year flood.  If you live and die along a river, especially a batshit frenetic river like the Colorado, you have heard the phrase.  Hundred year flood, fifty year flood, five year flood, these are the terms you pick up and use over the Sunday morning coffee at the Raintree Diner.  And usually every one uses it wrong.

A hundred-year flood has a .01 probability of occurring every year.  That means that a hundred year flood is not something to count on.  And given that water metering along the Colorado has not been reliably practiced for more than one hundred years, the front-side error is fairly high.

Which means:

It means nothing.

“So, geologist, when is the next hundred year flood coming?”

The subtext to the question is, “What magic can science perform for us today?”

While you can predict intervals, you cannot predict frequency.  When you first meet someone and their eyes shoot some sort of loin shaking laser beam into your soul, you have no idea what the magnitude of this natural occurrence will be, you only know that the water is rising.

When you live in California, you feel the wrenching away of the Pacific plate from North America and when you catch the first rumble and the first sound of breaking glass reaches you, you say silently to yourself, “Is this the big one?”

There is no way to know.  The Richter scale has been more or less abandoned.  The actual magnitude of earthquakes adopted the handy and impressive sounding log scale.  A magnitude 9.0 will knock a city on its ass.  But a mag 7 won’t do too much in a city like Tokyo that is engineered to take the occasional shake.

When you meet that person, and after the rumbling ramps two or three times, you begin to wonder more loudly inside the seismology department of your head if this is the big one.  The one that surpasses your preparations.

But the magnitude-frequency is only telling you it will happen.  Never what any of it means.

The Rule Redux

So, if you talk to any woman for any amount of time, you eventually hear about The Rules.  It’s a book written by two women with absolutely no qualifications whatsoever and has turned into something of a lifestyle cult. Like Fight Club for women.   Basically, the premise is to train men and, quite frankly, use them as an economic resource.

So I made my own goddamn rules.  There are twenty of them, just like the lame lists of rules women have been posting on different venues around the web.  Or, in one case 168 qualifiers to date her.

The rules for women:

1. I am a grown man. I look, smell, talk, eat, drink, dress, and walk like a grown man. I don’t even pretend to be capable of anything else. I won’t pretend for a minute to understand you, and I would appreciate the same courtesy.

2. You must have a real job or be a full time student. This is not negotiable. If you are not working for something, we have no common ground. And you’re probably just whoring out for free meals and a baby shaped paycheck someday (unless you already have a couple).

3. Be nice. To everybody. When I saw you Friday at the Ale House dressing down the very nice, but very busy bartender outside, you became the ugliest individual on the planet. That is why I quit you. It is a shame you spent so much time making yourself look good and forgot to leave the ugly at home.

4. Thanks for putting out so fast. No really, it was great. Probably just what we both needed. See ya later.

5. Thanks for NOT putting out so fast. It shows me you think we may have a chance to be something more.

6. You must be educated. This is non-negotiable. Educated does not mean you skated your way to a degree on Daddy’s dime. Educated means you have a pervasive consuming desire to learn, and have acted on it. Education generally comes with opinions. You better have some.

7. You must love Colorado country accents in men. Maybe not love. Maybe just tolerate. Whatever.

8. Do not lose your shit on me. If you want to fight, go elsewhere. I won’t put up with your bullshit.

9. The mancave is not to be violated. Should you hear guitar playing or wrench turning/cussing or weight lifting coming from that strange concrete floored room where some people park cars, you know it has transmogrified into the mancave. If you absolutely must enter, bring sacrifices of iced tea and possibly fried chicken to appease the mangods. Being mostly naked helps.

10. For me, my family, my school, my job, and my personal goals all have priority, even over you (for now). My machines, my toys, my sex drive do not.

11. You have to care about yourself. Don’t paint yourself up like a hooker or surgically alter your body, but try to stay healthy, and in doing so, you look healthy. Healthy is sexy. Fake is irritating. If you don’t care about yourself, it shows. It isn’t that hard to go for a hike or take a bike ride once in a while.

12. Be an individual. Have a tattoo or quirky hobby or a goofy sense of humor. Stand out.

13. If you suspect I would sometimes rather spend time with a a motor on an engine stand than you, you are right. Sometimes.

14. Want to talk for hours? Great! I’m probably not listening anyway, at that point. My ability to care and the number of words you use share a market/vendor relationship. Keep the supply low if you don’t want to saturate the market. But if you just need to talk, do it.

15. You must be passionate about something. The above rule about talking is waived if you are discussing something you are truly passionate about.

16. I like beer. This isn’t really a rule. I’m just saying.

17. You must appreciate food. Obese people sitting on their couch killing a Valu-Size bag of cheetohs and watching TV do not appreciate food. I mean you have to like the idea of diverse food and have appreciation for the methods of its preparation. Bacon is God saying he loves us.

18. Cooking is sexy as hell. It’s part of the deep fundamental sexy that some women have. A drawn out, all day sort of cool that makes me want to wait until after dinner. And cook you breakfast the next morning.

19. You must be creative. I don’t exactly expect you to be a master of portraiture, but I like to see someone make creative efforts. Painting your face is not creative. Writing is.

20. Be yourself. If you end up not liking me, or the other way around, at least we were honest.

There you go, those are my rules. It is very hard for a women to draw my attention, but the ones that do are usually following these rules.

Oh, and don’t be afraid to flirt once in a while.