Boating with Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn.

Aaaaaaand I’m back!

I took a little vacation. I went up to Washington state with some people and spent a few days staying in a beautiful house on a lake. I had a wonderful time, thank you for asking. I got to ride on a boat. I got to run in the forest. I went to new places and met new people and I only embarrassed myself a little more than the normal amount.

The pandemic is not over, I know, but the scientific miracle that is these vaccines has given us back a version of life that I am incredibly grateful for.

It wasn’t until I arrived back in my empty little apartment on Tuesday night that I realized how debilitatingly lonely I have been. My situation is not unique. Lots of people went through quarantine alone. I was lucky to have family zoom calls and a supportive group of coworkers and friends to talk to, but nothing is quite as life affirming as being in the same room with other people. It is with good reason that some countries consider solitary confinement to be a cruel and unusual form of punishment. 

I’m not going to lie, I cried a little when I got back here. Not because it is terrible here — I’ve made the best of quarantine, I suppose — but because of how much simply being around other people felt like such a warm blanket. It was like walking in out of a bone chilly cold into a room warmed by a fireplace and with chocolate chip cookies baking nearby. I had to go back out into the cold eventually, but the experience of the cold is different after you’ve known warmth.

There is a scene I always think about from the book One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich. It is a book about prisoners in a Stalinist gulag. Each morning they have to pile out of the bunkhouse into the Russian winter and the guards inspect each prisoner to make sure they’re not taking anything illicit out on their work day. Solzhenitsyn goes on for like two pages about Ivan’s strategy for standing in front of the fire in the bunkhouse absorbing as much warmth as he can before he has to step out for inspection. About the way he’s learned to buckle his coat over his body to make sure he takes as much heat with him as possible. The thing that sticks in my mind about it is that Ivan knows that the guards are going to make him open his coat once he lines up outside. He’s not trying to take the warmth with him all day, he knows he’s only going to get to enjoy it for a few brief moments. But he has a whole strategy for it, because he knows that at the very least, those are moments that he can enjoy. Ivan has learned to appreciate things as brief as that.

Now, I am not in a gulag. I did think of Ivan though while I was gone. I so enjoyed being able to be a person in the world again, to talk to people, to drink with people, to play cards with people, to enjoy people again, to laugh until I cried. There is so much life out there still and bit by bit by ever-too-slow bit, it is coming back. And I am eager for its return.

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Sky Butlers.

Back in 2019 I was flying back to Arizona after a job interview in California and at that point I had already not gotten several jobs I’d interviewed for and I was feeling pretty bad about myself. I ended up getting the job in California, it’s the one I have now. The plan had landed and we were sitting on the tarmac and I was sitting in the back of the plane because I prefer to sit in the back of the plane and I was watching over the top of the seats as the passengers did that slow and frustrating thing where they both take forever to gather their stuff and also try to push past the people in front of them. You can learn a lot about a person by watching how they behave during this small moment. You can learn who is organized or not, who is pushy, who is patient, who is kind, who is self-important.

I was sitting at the vert back of the cabin and I could overhear a couple of the flight attendants chatting about what’s next and what city they would end their day in that day and I thought for a moment that I would enjoy that life. The notion of spending the day hoping from city to city, looking at hundreds or thousands of strangers, getting to watch them all in these liminal moments, getting to study strangers for a living, that all seemed really appealing to me. Plus, it would be an excuse to live a slim and streamlined life, since my days would have to fit into a single bag that I traveled with each and every day. I imagined having a cool little studio apartment that I barely ever lived in. I imagined nights at odd bars in strange cities. Having friends in lots of places. Having a life that took place mostly in the air.

Obviously I’m romanticizing that life, but I was having a tough time then getting the kind of work that I wanted and so it was probably healthy to think outside the box of my own expectations. After all, people do live a life like the one I’d imagined. Probably it is more grueling and stressful than I’d imagined. I’d heard before that flight attendants are actually extensively trained and actually highly skilled and have to be knowledgeable about their aircraft, but that they spend 90% of their time doing 10% of what they’re trained for. Most of the time they’re sky butlers, but every once and a while they have to save someone having a heart attack. What a weird job.

That weirdness appealed to me and, if I’m being honest, kind of still does. I even looked into it some, but before I could spend much time on it, I was offered this job and then it was off to California to do what I am doing now. 

And lucky me, because a few months later Covid hit and lots and lots of airline employees lost their jobs and the ones that didn’t were hurtling around the skies in sealed steel tubes with strangers who were so poor at risk assessment that they were on the plane in the first place. It must have been complete terrifying hell there for a while. I really feel for people who had to do that work, it must have been a total trauma and I haven’t really heard people talk about that. Honestly, we have kind of stopped having discussions about the sacrifices that front-line workers made. Probably because as we draw nearer the end of the pandemic, if we talked about them more, we might be asked to actually reward them in some way, which I think we should do, but which this country will never do because we are kind of a nation of assholes. But I digress, that is a topic for another time.

As we creep ever so slowly back toward some kind of normalcy, I have been thinking more about a life spent in the air. My own employer has been making plans about returning to face-to-face work and there are committees and proposals and waivers and union negotiations and clarifications of terms and underneath it all is the implication that some work simply can’t be done from home even though that work has been getting done at home for 15 months. I have been thinking more about a life spent in the air perhaps because we are approaching a point where many of our lives will return to something like normal, like we are all coming in for a landing, or maybe we already have landed (I remember hearing the whooshing noise of a 737 engine when I got my second vaccine injection) and so now our whole society is just sitting on the tarmac and we are learning a lot about each other while we sit here waiting. We are stuck here waiting and thinking about all the things we’ll need to do once we deplane. We are thinking about the lives we live when we are not up in the air, we are getting ready for our return and so we are thinking about what exactly we are returning to.

It is good to think on what we want to return to and what we don’t

It is good to spend this time thinking on the other lives we could be living, it is good to think on the world of possibilities that will be opening to us as the world is reopening to us. 

A lot of lives will be completely different a year from now, not just because of the vaccines, but because of what coming back to life will mean for so many of us. A lot of marriages are going to end. A lot of people are going to quit jobs that they realized they don’t want. A lot of weird little businesses are going to get started because people will realize that life is brief and if they really do want to open that cupcake shop, they had better get on it.

I doubt I will become a flight attendant any time soon, but I’m certainly thinking on it. And that is a good thing.

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Bastille.

A battalion of undergrads just burst through the front gate of my apartment complex hooting and hollering like they just liberated the Bastille. Only they haven’t liberated the Bastille, they’re just coming back from a house party. At 11 o'clock at night. Amateurs.

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The Existential Adventures of a Stamp.

Today I was thinking about stamps and how stamps spend their useful lives affixed to envelopes and how most of the time the stamps and the envelopes don’t even know one another beforehand and I was wondering what exactly that relationship must be like and what do you think that they talk about? You have to imagine that there you are – a stamp – pleasantly living life stuck to a sheet of that wax paper plastic stuff that stamps come on, you’re there with your friends or your family or whatever sort of alternative community of stamps that you’re a part of, just hanging out with other stamps who are exactly like you, all of you living a life of leisure, all of you exactly alike, you all have the same things in common, you all have the same history, the same tastes, the same basic elements, you’re all essentially exactly the same. Only none of you know what your purpose really is. None of you know what your future is. You’re all blissfully unaware. Life is good, except for the fact that every once and a while, one of you disappears.

Then, one day, without having ever even imagined to expect that it would ever happen to you, you disappear too.

You feel a pressure; a pushing down. Then a pulling, a ripping, nearly. You feel yourself being pulled away from your backing, which you had never realized before wasn’t a part of you. You’re slimmer and thinner and more vulnerable than you’d ever thought possible. You’re dangling free and moving fast and the speed is more than you can understand and then there is a smash and it destroys your sense of the world and for moments you don’t understand anything.

But you realize now that you’re somewhere new. Something has changed. Something is different. Itchy. You’re adhered do … something. You try to look around, to see around you, to see where your friends have gone, to see where your family has gone, to see if there is anyone you recognize anywhere nearby. But you don’t see anyone; no friends, no family. You see almost nothing. You just see a long white plane of fibrous nothing stretching out to an edge of nothing. You are alone and you have never even thought about what being ‘alone’ is before because you didn’t know that there could be such a thing.

There is, suddenly more movement, movement you can’t understand. Movement like the whole world is shifting beneath you. Then, in the distance, a mouth appears. Something like a mouth. Some kind of giant dark gapping. A gash of blackness that grows bigger and wider until it consumes, quickly, your entire flat white Earth. And just like that: darkness. A plummeting. A flat crooked landing hard.

Then stillness. Then silence.

Then something else.

Suddenly – you don’t know how you had missed it before, because it is so large, so strange, so present and undeniable – you realize that you aren’t alone. You feel a settling, the weight of sadness sinking in. You become aware of the fact that there is another consciousness and that you are attached to it.

Like a whale there with you in the dark, you become truly and horrifyingly aware of its size relative to yours. You’re too afraid to say anything or to breath. Or to think. You’re so scared that you’d stop existing right then if you could. For the first time you realize that you smell something, residual – like after a forest fire, which is something else you can’t imagine – and very nearby.

And then you hear it – softly, sad, resigned, and very calmly half-crazed – something is asking you: can you see what it says?

You don’t even understand the question and ever if you did, you wouldn’t have answered.

The voice comes again: Look now, what is written on me?

And you know that it is asking you and you know that you have to say something and so you say: I don’t know how to read.

You can feel the paper you’re adhered to grow thin with disappointment. Okay, it says. Well, we probably have some time then. I’m an envelope. You’re a stamp. Did you know that?

No, you say.

Of course not, it says to you. How would you ever have even known what you are?

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Ascetic Communist Anorexic.

I have been trying to articulate this idea for about a year, but when I have tried to explain it I have come across as some sort of ascetic, Communist anorexic*.

* Which I am.

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Reblogged.

From time to time I re-fall in love with life. I just had one of those profound moments of reflection.

Alfred Hitchcock said, “Drama is life with the dull parts taken out.”

Well I agree that 70 – 80% of life is tedium and monotony, but that other 30 – 20% is pure wonderfulness.

I realized that I have been to New York and Boston. I have been to London and St. Louis, Paris, Orlando, and I have eaten fried chicken in Philadelphia with my grandmother (whom I miss dearly). I have had sangria on the roof of the Met (one of my favorite places in the world) and I have watched the sky turn green in Ozark Missouri before a thunder storm. I’ve been to Branson and Las Vegas. I have stood at the top of the Eiffel Tower and at the top of the fake one at the Paris Casino. I have been thrown out of bars in San Francisco and loaned my jacket to a naked stripper in Fresno, who was trying to catch some ZZZs on the couch. I have been lucky enough to fall in love and unlucky enough to get stranded at Heathrow for two days. I’ve had fish thrown over my head at Pike’s Place Market in Seattle and I have stumbled ass backward into fist fights in Sun Valley. I personally discovered that the snow in Park City Utah is nature’s best beer cozy and also have experienced a couple of sublimely perfect days in Salt Lake City; there’s nothing quite as perfect as being in love in the cold. I have smoked cigarettes in San Diego while listening to Nada Surf live while landing jets passed overhead. I’ve driven a rented Vauxhall (on the wrong side of the road) all the way to Stonehenge and walked the world’s best museum in Shelburne Vermont. I have nearly died on a kayak off the coast of Catalina and I have been deliriously in love on 17-Mile-Drive around Pebble Beach. I have straddled the Prime Meridian and the US-Mexico border; for that matter I have flown a kite under a pier on a Mexican beach and personally haggled over the price of a lobster dinner. I have watched a Minute Man III missile launch from Vanderburgh before the sun had come up and I have stood on the flight deck of an operational aircraft carrier, with Tchaikovsky blaring in my headphones. I have known more amazing women than is fair and I have been lucky enough to love some of them and to be loved in return. I have unhooked corsets in dark rooms and made love on a bare stage (empty audience). I have been found guilty in court of a misdemeanor and I have cried in front of more than one therapist. I have fallen in love with the Brooklyn Bridge and been terrified by the Coronado Bridge. And next week I will go white water rafting on the Sacramento River and the week after I will hike into the Grand Canyon and then ride a helicopter out of it. There is no end to the things that I love about life, and while life never seems easy at the time, it is simply and always worth the effort.  

From time to time I re-fall in love with life.  

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Robots! Ham! Moving!

So, big exciting news! For me, I guess, not so much for you.

I have moved! Not far or anything. But still!

My roommates and I have moved into a new little place across town. It is a nicer complex and a nicer part of town and I like it!

But it is not all upside, no sir. I used to have a GIANT room, but my new room is much smaller. And having a smaller closet is forcing me to confront my clothes and backpack buying problems.

However I’m still coming out ahead in this deal because the new apartment is literally across the street from this nice big shopping center (how yuppie do I sound?) and so I can finally WALK to places! Which is something I like a lot. It has a grocery store and a really good local burger joint and a Mexican place with (slightly too) awesome margaritas! And there’s a place to get my hair cut (yes, even bald people get their hair cut ... because it makes them feel pretty, okay?!) and there’s a bank and a dry cleaners AND there’s even a Honey Baked Ham Store! Who wouldn’t be willing to go through the hassle of moving just to be closer to a Honey Baked Ham store?!

Also, this part of town has a system of “paseos” (which are basically just pedestrian walkways and bridges and stuff) that wind through the surrounding neighborhoods. This is super cool for when I go running because now there are all kinds of new and interesting places where I can trip and fall down! I went for a run last night and didn’t even get too super lost. Although I did see a skunk. He was not out for a jog, he seemed to be on some very important errand so I gave him a wide berth.

I’m very pleased with myself right now and I think I’ll be very happy in this new place. Not just because it has a Honey Baked Ham store next door, but mostly because it allows me some more walking-to-stuff. For some reason I can never quite figure out I almost always end up living in suburban situations even though what I would really like is to live someplace like Manhattan or San Francisco where it is more possible to live your life on foot (or mass transit). The truth is that I don’t really enjoy driving that much and would much rather take a nice stroll when I need to go run errands or got buy some ham, you know? So this new apartment offers about as much of that as I can find in the upscale, suburban, LA-adjacent wonderland in which I have found myself living (I’m not making fun of the burbs or anything. There’s a reason I moved up here and it is because living in Los Angeles can make for a very frustrating go of it; the traffic everywhere! The absolute lack of parking anywhere! The parking tickets!)

Well … that’s it I guess. I have moved! And now I can walk to get ham!

Oh, here is a picture of a robot I built out of moving boxes (because I'm a fricken' wizard!):



Jealous?
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Flower

Flower
by james bezerra

The thing I like about a flower
is that it has the patient power
to simply hang out;
it doesn’t yell or shout,
it doesn’t want a twelve round bout;
it doesn’t fight
or threaten to bite;
because all flowers know
that the best behavior is to just grow
and turn its pretty face to the sky
and lazily watch the sun fly
and enjoy the day as it rolls by.

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So it Goes.

Hi blog,

I know, I know, it has been a while, but it really wasn’t my fault this time. Life has been less than good as of late. I will spare you the gory details, but here are the highlights:

My cat is very slowly and very expensively dying. I am working with the vet, but the vet always gives me that stink eye look that seems to say, “This wouldn’t be happening if you were a better cat parent”, so that always feels good. Also, holy shit is the vet expensive!

My car has been slowly falling apart for awhile now. I did the math not long ago and figured out that I need it to get me through another year. At that point I will have some important things paid off and I will have been able to save some money, and also I think that about a year from now I should be able to make some big life decisions (job, location, some new goals, a revised plan for the future, all that good stuff). But my car is kind of a beater, so I have been trying to give it a little more TLC and as soon as I did, the wheels started to come off the wagon (almost literally) and it has all snowballed: get it serviced, get new tires, get the brakes fixed, stop that god-awful squealing noise, etc, etc, etc. If I really, truly believed in karma, then I would have to guess that this is all happening due to the hubris of my saving money in the first place. I was very proud of myself, I was able to save some money for the first time in a long time. Made me feel like a grown up; like a man. Well all of that is gone now and I will be living on minute rice and boiled dirt for awhile. But so it goes.

Finally, a few people in my life who are (or were) important to me have (separately and without provocation) gotten in touch with me to enumerate the ways in which I am an asshole. These are people for whom I still care deeply, regardless of the ways in which the winds of fate have battered us about. So that just plainly sucks. Though they did make some good points and it does make me think, “Shit, maybe they’re onto something!” And who knows, perhaps they are.

But I will be honest with you dear blog, I’m getting my ass kicked here. Like Mark Wahlberg for the whole beginning half of The Fighter. Seriously.

But I have weathered these types storms before. And some of them were much worse than this one. Much like all of us, life has moods and sometimes it can be kind of a bitch. But so it goes. That was a refrain that Kurt Vonnegutt used in Slaughterhouse-Five and it comes to mind a lot. So it goes.

However, I don’t want you to get the impression I’m spending my days sitting around in a puddle in soiled britches, clutching a dead cat and crying into my beer. Some days are quite good. Running is feeling better each time I go and I have been reading a lot and writing some. I’m impatiently looking forward to NANOWRIMO next month, even though I have yet to lock down a … oh, what’s the technical term … plot. But who needs a plot? That’s my refrain, who needs a plot?

I have a new backpacking bag I really like and I am itching to use it. I want to find a thru hike! I think I may have finally gotten my Base Pack Weight down to ten pounds! (I know, I’m a dork. Please feel free to Google “Base Pack Weight”). I bought a scale recently and I was happy to discover this is the least I have weighed since high school! And it’s not even because I got all binge-and-purge-y or anything! I’m slowly getting in shape! Which is maddeningly ironic because I also haven’t had sex or been naked in front of anyone in a completely unacceptable amount of time. Seriously, I’m starting to understand why people marry conjugal visit-capable inmates (What? Every movie I have ever seen about women’s prisons made them seem like pretty sexy places!)

Meet-an-Inmate.com

Anyway, there’s an update for you. I’m sure you were just dying to have all of that information. So it goes!

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