Normalcy

I ran today. I’ve been creeping back into the habit, but it’s not the easiest.  The reality of Colorado in the winter is that the air is cold and dry and there isn’t much of it. It causes physical pain to breathe it at the rate needed for moderate exertion.  It causes something primal and agonal when you push it a little harder.

Killing it.

My concerns about a fundamental change in myself were probably premature. There is still within me a desire to hurt and exert. Thank God.

I kept pushing through two miles and my lungs were on fire. I coughed and coughed and every time, my chest ached across my collar bone and down to my sternum. The muscles were cold and sore.  My knees hurt and my ankles were threatening failure. But I kept going.

I remember one time a freshly unencumbered ex read what was basically an online workout journal I was keeping. She said, in a most egotistical way, that she was concerned with how I was coping with my loss. The loss of her, in case you’re not following.  I told her I was fine. She said I was making unhealthy decisions. I told her I was fine. She said she was concerned with my running routine. I told her running was healthy.  She said running until I puked was not healthy. It was, indeed, a detailed log she had been reading.

It pointed out to me a fundamental misunderstanding on her part of what I was then and probably still am. I don’t run until I puke because of anyone. Because I’m sad or angry or any other reason. I run until I puke because it is Run Until I Puke Day that day. Have you ever pushed yourself like that? If you haven’t, then you probably wouldn’t understand.

There is a point of exertion where you are no longer yourself. It’s not a runner’s high, it’s a runner’s particulate extinction.

I found my forever pace again. Everyone has one. It’s the pace you can hold forever. Lay it in and you can glide for miles and miles and miles until the run is just another thing you do. Like breathing or hearing. Five miles or ten miles, it doesn’t matter. It’s the pace where your footsteps are silent and your breathing is another orbit of another world, important but not pressing.

Somewhere in the 30/60/120 sprints and four mile motto runs, I lost my forever pace. It was gone. I only knew how to push it or stop.  I could burn it up or leave it cold. Words I have heard a few too many times in my life: It’s all or nothing with you.

But I found it again, though it is not necessarily between all or nothing. It isn’t some middle path. It’s another world of deep convergence. I’m not even sure what that sentence meant, but it describes it perfectly. It’s all and nothing.

But then there’s those times you hit two miles and just want to run hard and fast in the cold until your lungs bleed. And that is greater than happiness or sadness or contentment. This is the greater part of me.

Killing it.

They’re All Love Songs, Bitches

I’ve adopted the role of songwriter for my band. It’s not as easy a fit as one would think. I find any form of poetry difficult and approaching impossible. Luckily, all our songs are about fast cars or hookers.

I also dug up some old recordings I made years ago on a four track tape deck. They suck about seven different ways. It’s amazing. If I find some way to host them, I’ll make them available to download for all you nice people. It reminds me of a very true thing: I really, really like over-driven vocals. No really.

I used to run an improvised effects loop (out the headphone jack, back into the input) with my guitar stompboxes as standalone effects. A Big Muff Pi running into a Tubescreamer really turns ghosted out reverb soaked vocals into something amazing. I had to do all this crazy vocal fucking up because I can’t sing for shit.

Why am I telling you nice people all of this? Well, I plan on firing up my pirated copy of Cakewalk Sonar and plugging in my $40 USB interface and starting up the whole project again. I have a hard time writing non-folky singer/songwriter type crap when I’m playing guitar at the same time. And now finally, the whole point of this post:

Don’t you think it’s funny how you have to separate yourself from your true talents to do something truly creative?  I can play guitar all day. It’s what I’m good at. But to write (good) songs, I have to be hearing fully realized and coldly rendered music divorced totally from my hands.

Lately I’ve been thinking about writing as a vocation instead of a hobby. Maybe to be able to tell a real story, which I am bad at, I need to divorce myself totally from my main talent. For example, maybe I should lay off the settings and characters.  That John Pine project, among others, is kicking my ass. Probably because I can make it beautiful as long as nothing ever really happens.

My biggest challenge in thinking up plots (this relates to a recent school project) is that I don’t see the world around me as plots. The stories never really start and never really end. Characters don’t arc, they sine wave. So, how do you capture a cyclical universe in a plot pyramid?

I just don’t know.

 

 

 

As an aside: http://www.dirtragmag.com/print/article.php?ID=1244&category=features

Murderous Intent

I took a break from this blog for a while. About all the posts the last couple weeks were in queue from a while back.

Honestly, I’ve been taking a break from everything. Most nights I’m home, I sit with a my guitar and watch reruns on Hulu. I haven’t cooked a meal in quite a while.  I haven’t done a lick of mechanical work on anything. I don’t hang out much with family and friends, short of holidays. This has been going on almost two months.

Some astute people have noticed. Others have not. I judge neither.

If I’m not at work or the gym, I’m probably just killing time by myself.

Those readers who have Facebook privileges probably know not to worry about me too much.  Someone posts at least one picture of me a day where I look happy. That may be what’s nagging at me.

I’m maybe a little happy.

It’s probably not the new friends or the old friends or being in the best shape I’ve been in a long time. It’s probably not the girl. I don’t know why I’m happy. I grew a damn beard to try and regain my normal winter misanthropy. The beard is more whimsical than anything. I try to brood and drink, but I just end up getting tipsy and laughing at The Office, which seems to have recovered itself.

This is awful.

Prickly unapproachability is 85% of my charm.

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.