Cartography

My occupation is that of a cartographer.  I draw detailed maps of local utility features, which is as boring as it sounds.  Every once in a while, though, I’m able to design some very nice and very pretty maps, usually for public presentations.  There is a lot of art in making maps, even for engineering purposes.  Knowledge of chromatic interaction is necessary, as well as an ability to communicate complex themes through monochromatic media.  Then there is restraint. At times you just have to know what can’t be placed on your map.  It’s about focus. It’s like writing in a lot of ways.

You have to draw the eye to your emphasized feature. You have to know how to do that. People have been using maps now for about 10,000 years.  They have always been the same idea.  A picture of the ground looking down from the sky.  Until recently, no human had ever had that perspective, so it was all imagined.  And even now, maps have to be conveyed in such a way that your audience can imagine the ground from above. You have to make them God of your offered details. They get the oppurtunity to lord over the watershed system or the utility lines or the roads and byways of the land. And you have to make that possible.

It reminds me of a very deep theme in the Bible, and probably most holy writ.  Naming something gave you dominion over it.  Adam was given dominion through the process of naming, the same way Jesus cast out a deaf and dumb spirit by knowing its name. Names are power.

It makes me think of the way little kids memorize the names of dinosaurs, real life monsters. or fake, card game monsters.  They argue the merits and form favorites among them.  It’s power. So much of childhood is powerlessly resisting the efforts of the authority around you that it stands to reason you would grasp for a fundamental authority like that.  Maybe that’s why grown men memorize sports statistics and talk about lovingly their teams, though they are all complete strangers.

I never got into that crap. I thought dinosaurs were lame.  I would draw maps. I would make up an entire world and draw it out. I used some old styles and techniques I must have lifted out of text books. They were pretty damn good. I would make continents that made a lot of sense. I made mountains instinctively at suture points and rifts at triple junctions.

Maybe because the whole world was already explored before I was born and I never got to get in on any of it.

Here in the GIS era of map making, the maps have a shallowness and lack of realism. Even the highly detailed computer models lack the flourishes of the older schools.  It’s more accurate, but less real.

Anyway, I want to buy this series of late 60’s National Geographic maps of the ocean floors. I used to use maps as my wall hangings. Interior decorating is not exactly my strong suit, obviously.  USGS quads are not considered high art, I guess.

I really love this one in particular.

If I were a post tagging man, this would be under “Ridiculous Nerdery”

Dozer Lee

This is a character me and two very valued friends dreamt up over the course of some years. The original idea has changed quite a bit in two years.

“Give me a pitcher’a somethin’.”

“Ok, do you like ambers…? Are you in the mood for something a little more hoppy with a nuttier finish…?”

“Just put beer in a pitcher. Thanks.”

“Sure. Glasses?”

“One.”

His hair spiked up at random and held a few refugee snowflakes from the storm outside. Dozer Lee doesn’t comb his hair often.  He pulled an enormous and expensive bulging black duffel bag up and laid it on the bar with a startling loud metallic thud.  I felt my eyes go wide and the bartender jumped.

“Morning, Dozer,” I raised my glass.

“Morning. Cold out.”

“You’re looking lean, buddy.”

“Yeah, forgot to eat for a while. Makes my clothes baggy.”

“Forgot to shave last week, looks like.”

“Yeah.”

He lifted his bony leg on to the bar stool and sat himself down.  He was barely wearing a blue flannel shirt he’s had since I met him while he was celebrating his 30^th birthday four years ago by burning a couch to embers in his backyard. We celebrated his birthday three more times that year.

Last time he combed his hair was when he went on something resembling a date with my sister. She got invited to a rich person fund-raiser formal dinner, strictly black tie.  He wore a brown shooting jacket over a V-neck T-shirt with a pair of jeans to that formal dinner.  Far as I know, he never heard from my sister again. He picked her up for the date in his ’65 flat black and bondo Galaxie with 75% of its hubcaps intact.

“So,” the bartender asked him with the doe-eyed ridiculous devotion Dozer inspired in females who should know better, “what’s in the bag?”

He picked up the pitcher she set in front of him and started his pour. Without looking at her, he said as much to me as her, “Found a cracked cylinder head and a manifold in the alley. Some asshole threw’em away.”

The bartender stood gazing upon him waiting for some sort of acknowledgement. It never came.

I said: “Imagine what kind of asshole throws away one cracked head.”

“I know, and a big block head at that.”

He unzipped the bag to show us the greasy, rusted out chucks of iron and started in on the beer.

I nodded thoughtfully and tentatively. I’m generally of the opinion that angering Dozer Lee would result in some sort of tragic ass beating. “Dozer, what are you gonna do with one cylinder head that’s broke?”

“I don’t know, make a lamp or somethin’.”

“It sounds like a nice lamp,” the bartender breathed out.

Dozer looked up at her. She almost fell over.

“It will be,” he said. He lifted the empty glass of beer and raised it to her in thanks and refilled it.

Dozer looked over at me with a questioning look I have come to recognize as him trying to figure out what he’s supposed to do next in a social situation.

“How is your work?”

The question sounded contrived and painful. He drained his glass of beer and refilled it while I answered.

I talked for a few minutes about the new challenges and accomplishments since he asked me that exact question yesterday. We talked a little about forklifts. He knows more about forklifts than anyone I have ever met, though he has not, to my knowledge, ever held a job where he ran a forklift.

Dozer works sparsely at different paid-that-day temp jobs when he feels he needs to.  The closest thing to his occupation is furniture.  He builds amazing hardwood furniture in a pristine and modern workshop behind his house.  He is marginally famous for it, though he sells it barely above cost. His true source of income, and it must be substantial, has never been ascertained by the circle of curious people who tenuously consider him a friend.

That’s why I don’t ask about his work.

“How’s the Galaxie? Still running good?”

“Yeah, decked down the block thirty thousandths on the new motor and ordered up the cam. Bought a new heater for the car, too. I was getting’ complaints.”

Of course Dozer doesn’t bother saying who the mysterious complainer may be.

He asks me some trivial questions about my life and ignores my answers while the pitcher depletes itself. I’m not one to judge. It’s 11:00 A.M. and we’re both drinking our lunch. Dozer made a still out of an old radiator and some HVAC equipment that he stole, near as I can tell. Last summer, we used it to make the punch for two of his birthdays.

He looks up from his empty glass at the bartender cleaning off the brass taps in the corner. “Hon?”

She sprints over and wags her tail while he orders a whiskey neat. Well will do just fine.  He makes eye contact with her and I can see her imagining the next decision of which her father would not approve. Dozer’s always been like that. He’s never been rude or morally wrong about the whole thing, it’s just what he does.

She places the glass of lukewarm brown gasoline in front of him and they exchange brief words. Then he stares down into the glass.  The world seems a very wrong place when Dozer is sad.

“Birthday, Dozer?” I ask him and point at the yet to be drank whiskey.

“Nah. Long story.”

Dozer Lee does not finish his long stories.

Supplicant’s Budget

Thank you God, for the delete button.  Seriously, all of you, even the prickly atheists/terrorists say something nice about the diety of your choice for saving you from the rambly horseshit I almost foisted upon your reader service. It was complete and undeniable crap. It hurts me to even think I typed it. I’m going to go burn my fingertips off on the stove. I’m going to amputate my fingers and grind salt into the stumps so that new and awful-thing-typing fingers do not regrow in the stead of the unworthy and long-gone fingers left twitching on the garage floor.

What was it about? Personality trait budgeting.

Yeah, I don’t even know what that means anymore. I think I forgot what the hell I was doing halfway through my third paragraph. Fuck, I suck.

Really, delete me from your reader before it happens again.  It was awful. I mean, I’m all for speculation on the nature of attraction, but fucks, man.

That abortion of a post was precipitated by two separate conversations.

1. I had to ask and be asked one question by everybody in a class.  The artsy guy started off his question with, “You’re a big dude, like, a badass looking guy, what would you do if someone jumped in front of you in line at the grocery store?”

That irritated me progressively more as time wore on.  Why would he think I would react differently from him? My clan has a tendency to be ’stacked’ (I learned that word at my gym), it’s true. But I would have just sucked it up and not said shit.  If anything, being a badass looking person either licenses or forces you to be a kitten in those situations. I don’t want to scare anyone, especially the theoretical lady getting in front of me with a cart full of groceries. That’s how my ass would end up in jail.

2. A friend-girl was talking about how men who appreciated one aspect of her personality generally had some totally false impression of her. For instance: if they appreciated her active nature, they would expect ’some chick eating granola on a commercial.’

I have not watched really TV in a long, long time. I have no idea what she’s talking about regarding granola eating women on commercials.  I just assume it’s some Kashi swilling psuedo-hippie, which is pretty damn ok, in all honesty.  Sort of my type, in fact, though they generally go for some waifish artist-type who wears hats for non-professional reasons. 

Which brings up the one valid point in all of that deleted tripe.

I am generally not attracted to the type of women who find me attractive. And vice versa, obviously. It does happen, though rarely.  In those cases things generally get dangerously heated and desperately impassioned so I threaten to move away to Baja and use my last financial aid check to purchase a dugout canoe and an apartment in La Paz. Knowing full well that the choice of a dugout canoe is ridiculous.  Those things are death traps, even in littoral waters.  I might as well just pay a Mexican to drown me. What the fuck am I doing with a dugout canoe?

Well ask yourself that, you irresponsibly attracted to me literate and intelligent woman with a penchant for the rustic.  Look what you did. It’s your fault that my graying and bloated corpse washes up in San Felipe festooned with warm water crustaceans.

I hope you’re proud of yourself.

Complications Mount

As you have noticed, or maybe have not, I have been playing around with sort of goofy fictional stuff. This is to remove the heavy and punishing thoughts of how in the fuck I will manage to graduate this goddamn school any time soon.  Some days I see myself going to school forever. I am not good in a bogged down situation. I never have been.  Once the tactical situation is no longer dynamic, I got nothing.

Anyway, the characters I’ve been messing around with have all been alias’ I have used for one thing or another over the years.  Vox Proletariat, Rock Hammer, Dozer Lee (forthcoming), etc. The protagonist in the eminently shitty Rock Hammer stuff is just a lame narrator type.  I have a hard time developing characters, which is one reason I want to revisit a project I started years ago.  There are issues with that, though.

I feel it is the best fiction writing I have ever done.  It will probably grow to book length.  I just don’t like the main guy.  The reason for that follows:

I am not that guy.  I’m not even close, not really. We share two similarities, the appreciation of Bob Dylan and a signed DD214 somewhere in our mess of papers.  But because of that last little detail, I can’t have anyone read it without looking to me as the actual guy.  I hate that shit. It is straight fiction, not even slightly metafictional, i.e. Henry H. Lightcap. The guy is made up. If I wrote an autobiography, I would lie my ass off the whole time. Shit, look at this and other blogs. Complete fabrications abound.

So why would I write myself into some dickhead who’s dumb to know he’s on a losing track?

God, I hate people.

You can all go fuck yourselves.

Without and Within, the Continuing Rock Hammer

They say he was lost into the sun and he turned himself north and he left without and within to be alone forever and away.  They say he was dead and that he may be dead and that he will never die.  They said they saw him move upon the earth and under the earth and that he was older than the earth and was the earth before form found the chondrites of creation and found him as elementals, iron and nickel and heavy rare earth minerals.

“Who is that?” I asked the howling wild animal covered in glass.

Rock Hammer pointed toward the rumbling and murmuring stepside truck and said: “A 5.0 HO Interceptor with a roller cam in a primered redneck truck? Who else would it be?”

“I don’t know what you just said.”

Bikini clad women with yellow stars body painted upon their bellies were dismounting the truck and setting up a heavy perimeter, alternating between kneels and prone shooting position. They were obviously highly drilled. One dark haired crew stood overwatch on the heavy machine gun mounted in the bed.

I believe I smelled cheap bourbon.

Rock Hammer leaned back into the sun and dust and howled heavy and long, and he was joined by the motor revving up in a cackling screaming gutteral howl, the truck rocking to the side under its burden of torque.

I could hear her behind me say something, but I was intoxicated.  The scream of old American iron and howling wildness awakend John the Revelator and John fucking Wayne somewhere within and I ran toward the truck, toward the bikini clad warrior concubines, toward destiny.  I was pulled up short by my collar and she dragged me back into reality while the two screaming beasts settled into growls.

“You,” she said, “are absolutely not going to hang out with those two.”

“You know them both?”

“Of course I do. They’re the reason I was assigned you. C’mon, let’s go,” she pulled on me, “that guy is too much trouble when he’s with Rock Hammer.”

“Who is it?”

I couldn’t see him clearly through the heavy windows.

“His name is stupid, you don’t need to know. His name is Vox something.”

Rock Hammer raised his rockhammer to the sky and screamed “THE MOTHERFUCKING MAN!”

 

And the say that he’ll live still, on into the screaming black of the universe after the earth has fallen and died and the stars are gone and they say he’ll never die. Legendary and on unto the end. It’s all the same.

Rage!

Goddamn it.

The computer, it is stolen.

The room mates, they claim no knowledge.

There is a rageful and prideful place in me offended by belligerent acts such as these.

Luckily, I have the cash to replace it, but that does not make this any easier.

I hate them, whoever they are.

I should probably go back to the gym again.

Lately the running has been useless, so I stopped.

Who has time to run ten miles, I ask rhetorically.

Not this guy.

I certainly have Things To Do.

I have been hitting the weights pretty hard.

I have rippling bulk where used to be smoothness and naught.

I’m shooting for straight gargantuan, this time.

My diet will have to change.

I will be goddamn huge.

Rip faces off huge.

Break things in my hand huge.

Strangle laptop stealers huge.

Happy Fucking Day

Misanthropy is one of my more cultivated charms.  I can grow out a five o’clock shadow and be as unapproachable as K2 before normal people could afford all the spaceman shit mountaineering stores love so much.  What? That sentence wasn’t very clear? How about this one:

Go fuck yourself.

Short of possibly Christmas, this is the most irritating day of the year. I usually try to stay hidden away from sight, free to drink myself retarded in the comfort of my own home.  But no, I get drug out to lunch or to the bar or some such nonsense.  I am trying as hard as I can to maintain some friendliness for the sake of all the good, honest people saying nice things about me today, but I’m losing it.

I think the worst are the people, and there are a few, who say stupid shit like ‘Kill a few ragheads for me!’

A: Killing people is gross and it makes me sad.

B: You want to murder, don’t think I’ll let you do it vicariously, painlessly through me.

You make my day hard, I make yours hard, asshole.

I forget where I was going with this. Ah yes. I do. I had a brief revisit to the dreams I used to have. While I think it would make a really awesome horror story, I just deleted that shit off here. Too much, childrens.

I may reintroduce it later.  It has some real narrative legs. We shall see.

I grow irritated. This day will go well.

Rampage Drunk and So Forth

Last night I was fucking hammered. I got home, but it was ugly.

It always is.

I’m seeing everything in triplicate and the carbon is staining the periphery. They used to use lead in carbon copies.  Then they fixed it, but lots of them were radioactive.

My cousins have a beautiful and fascinating counter top with one zoned Uvarovite crystal right around where my eggs were sitting. It’s a beauty and distracting. But it’s just a counter top. I pored over it for hours, like a crazy person.

My body is one big ball of hurt right now.  It’s all burning and aching and half used up.  I’m supposed to go out again tonight, but I may not.  It will be insisted upon.  And I will refuse. And it will be more insistently demanded. At some point I must think of my liver, about the size of a quarter and weighing thirty pounds at this point.

The Parameters of May

That title has a ring to it.  I may use it for something some day.

Have you ever seen a diesel engine run away with itself? It’s a rare condition, and one that only effects diesels. Diesels have no electrical ignition system, no spark you can killswitch and no wires you can unplug.  If they have air and fuel, they run.

Diesels are beautiful machines.

I saw a Caterpillar run off, once. It had an oil leak in the turbo.  The engine ran hotter and faster, sucking in more fuel and speeding itself further.  The engine blew through the redline easily, the governor has no say in a run off.  The motor the size of a car roared and it gave me chills.  It was like a demonic possession.  Everyone ran scared. Then it all came apart.  Luckily the timing chain failed before the connecting rods or some other, heavier component. It still destroyed the engine, but it didn’t kill anybody.

I got exceptionally, primordially drunk last night.  I don’t feel too physically awful today.  This is rapidly turning into a blog post.

1. I have discussed the previous night’s activities
2. I have hinted at a hangover while at work
3. I have a numbered list for no apparent reason
4. Nobody really cares

I hate this time of year. You just can’t count on it.

That is a lie. You can count on it.  you can count on it to have a bunch of holidays that serve to remind you that you are completely and totally different  from  and wholly unknowable to anyone who really cares about you.  It has cold nights that remind you of the luxury of shared body heat.  It has those irritating couple-like-objects sitting on park benches and seeming happy. It has lots and lots of drinking.

I ran ten miles on Sunday. That is a huge milestone.  It’s a distance that’s always been shrouded in mystery for me. It took all I had and a little more and even at ten I din’t stop. Finally my ankles and knees had had enough and I knew they were going to fail on me.  And it still didn’t work.

• Something is wrong with me at the moment, I accept that.
• I can see all the signs of some pretty weird behavior in my recent life.
• Unless I cooked something for someone else, I haven’t eaten.
• Oh, I’ll choke down a little bit of  something someone puts in front of me to avoid rudeness.
• Roughly 80% of my calorie intake has been booze.
• Somehow, I don’t even get drunk.

I used to live like this.  I spent years in just this type of life.  It’s like you’re addicted to intensity and burning guts.

Running has failed me. I took on a membership at a gym today.  Maybe I’ll build myself into a machine again. Maybe I should.

We’re all just robots anyway.

Goddamn you

Got my bike out of the shop. Not the one I pedal, the fireball orange one with the motor. It is a motorbike, one could say.

I am happy about this.  It needs to spend the night with the battery charging.

The bike needs some work.  It needs a tuneup. It needs a bath. Thus doth the pot blackguard the kettle.

Goddamn you Wild Turkey! (1)

I’m going to sit here and get drunk. That’s plan A. I was going to stay sober whatfor I could ride the bike. The bike needs work. Goddamn you, bike. Look what you’ve made me do.

I said I was going to do 200 crunches pre-drunk. We shall see.

Goddamn you, Wild Turkey! (2)

I’m feeling all murdery. The bar is probably not the best choice of possible solutions to my somewhat non-existent boredom problem. That being said, my sister wants backup.  Not because she expects a fight, but because she’s heartbroken and needs people the way I’m heartbroken and need the cedar and sage and high lonesome.  The way I need a night freezing and hearing the frost crack the ribs of the trees.  But she is my sis, and I that means she gets first dibs on the heart matters. I’ll drink a plate of armor over that motherfucker. Goddamn you, sister.

One more little golden glass wouldn’t hurt.

Goddamn you, Wild Turkey (3).

And goddamn you, phone. always ringing with the number I don’t want to answer.

And goddamn you, Wild Turkey (4).

Burn me up. Burn me a new life machine down there in my chest-engine. Make the murder raise up, like only you do. Murder, the black greasy death of it, is more suitable to my veins than the cool and refreshing water of early nights and responsible living or the warm milk of self-pity.

I am Prometheus, come to destroy the gods, come to destroy the simple lives of the unlearned! There’s a handful of throttle outside waiting for me.