the unfinished classics of..

i love to write.. i really do. my problem is, though, that i rarely complete what i start writing. tonight, i went and fished out my paper journals from the back of my car. if you’ve seen my car, you know that they were buried under sleeping bags, climbing equipment, rubber boots, a few shirts, a propane heater, a telescoping light changer converted for climbing purproses, and a legion of other random bits of my life.

perhaps the next book purchase it’s interesting flipping through here. none of the notes are dated and they’re in no particular order: i’d usually open to whatever page fit my fancy and start penning away. i don’t know in what context most of them were written, what state of mind, what state of heart. howfun.. strange, incomplete snapshots of a developing character..

below are bits of those bits.. left in their full incompleteness for historical completeness.. :-p

i make no claims to quality. names have been chopped to protect the innocent.


mrs. m–,
i’ve started at least a half dozen letters to you. hopefully this will be the first i’ve actually finished..


anything worth writing..why is it we search so hard for purpose but we often feel happiest when pursuing no purpose – silliness.
everyone hates the auto shop. there’s something oddly intimate about it but universally embaressing.
she put her head down and cried softly.


mrs. m–,
if only i could capture the past couple years of my life and send them to you in a hand-written letter, how you would laugh, how you would comment on my silliness and dramatics, how you would smile and shake your head and go back to grading papers as you so often did on those hallway steps. honestly, i miss those times and the perspective they provided me. i need those times here and again when i get too worked up or too worried or take myself too seriously to remember that i’m just a kid, a kid too backward to go forward.


shifting gears in a faded blue mazda, ana [note: this was long before “stranger than fiction”]


silent and stirring, the nameless, shameless girl from the road slept in the back room of “grace’s landing gas stop.”


this february past, with the promise of spring in mind but the weight of winter on hand, i sat hugging a mug of coffee || the winter sun crashed and cracked down the naked branches of a formerly dignified oak.


i want.. to know her name..


she loved skirts that tickled the tops of her toes and danced like the waves at the slightest breeze.


the rain brought her down, she couldn’t lie.. and by the looks of detached concern on the faces of the strangers passing her on the swamped sidewalk she could tell she wasn’t hiding her dreariness too well. the mist gathered on her cheecks and saved her the trouble of actually crying; these collected, polluted tears seemed more fitting to her. she was a sad creature to see. arms crossed, fleece damp, eyes red, brown hair dripping, jeans clinging to her thighs, head hung low in her high coat collar.


she sat quietly, patiently on the steps, hands in her lap, white dress falling over her knees down onto her milky shins. her long blonde hair dropped behind her shoulders and framed her..

oldie but a goodiehe fondled the keys to the car and stood chilled looking back at the dark red door of the house he just left. white shirt, black pants, a tie and fleece hat. but nothing would keep him warm at four a.m. this friday morning in november. not so long as he stood quiet and alone outside on the dark side of that red vault door, though he wanted nothing more than to..


i can tell i would have no idea what i would be getting myself into with you. the drum beat of heart beat, you look familiar and i know that, for me, you’re less yourself than you are a colorful collection of pictured memories. i’ve made you into something else. and i’m happy you’re leaving now..


the real irony of his life was that, for being a materialist, he didn’t care a bit about the things he owned. if he had paid attention or was intelligent enough (in an original sense, not “high test score, i can spew facts for hours” sense) he would see how plainly he loved the idea of all his materialism. the care and house and suit and “taste” all brought him, he mistakenly though, respect and admiration. our dear yuppie, despite his attention to financial security, was bankrupt of personal security.


ahh.. the good dog and his writing..tangerine haze of the sierra nevadas tempers to taxi cab yellow and finally to shades of blue that even crayola couldn’t capture. birds of steal feathers shake the air and the ground beneath my nomadic feet. the hustle and bustle, the smoke and smog, the clammer and clatter that is LAX serves as staging ground for my innocence lost.


skipping class has become the norm. i woke up around 10:30a, showered, and went to the opc to meet with kp and cr about fly fishing. afterwords, we shopped for the climbing trip and attempted to get the motor pool van but couldn’t: we had it reserved only for friday at noon. that was followed by organizing fastpacks with k and g, a meeting with d (save me now before the trip is canceled all together), and then hanging out at the climbing with km and j.


word is m will be coming here next year. that should be interesting. i feel, though, that i will do my best to leave her to find her own place here. that’s extremely important, for the both of us


i left because i couldn’t stay.

the geometry of a boy..

this post made sense to me several days ago.. not so sure about it anymore..

you ever feel like there’s a little squeaky voice in your head? i do.. does that make me weird?

despite a rather enticing opportunity once, i never really pursued it. and i think that starts off this thought process below.. namely, about the kind of person running this show. mostly because that decision had two paths. one: a little crazy, incredibly challenging, an amazing compliment, and way outside my comfort zone. the other: ..err.. i guess it was financial in the end. (none of that is to say i regret my decision.. despite my mind’s wanderings and the occassional “yeah.. but what if..”s, i wouldn’t trade what i’ve come away with from my decision for most anything)

so, to put this in some terms that i enjoy, i’m going to consider all this slightly mathematically..

huh?i feel sometimes as though there are two people in here, in this “soul carrying around a corpse” (epictetus). there is the one who loves euclidean geometry.. that is, straight lines, predictable behaviors, logical conclusions, axiomatic frameworks.. congruency, parallels, and postulates. this person loves stability, control, consistency. slopes are known and can be forecast well ahead of time. there are no contradictions, no exceptions, no surprises.. given a sharp pencil and a quality compass, this person could declare themselves god. and sometimes they even believe that..

but then, on the other side, is the one who lives on the edge of math and philosophy early in the 20th century. this child walks the sharp line with the europeans, the wild-eyed germans, the calm pipe-smoking dutch, the always revolutionary french. this boy lives with chaos and uncertainty and lives in the wide-open spaces between the atoms and the possibilities. keep tightening a loop in space and you’ll eventually come to a point. is the cat in schrodinger’s box alive or dead? ..or both? ..what would you see on a train moving the speed of light? ..why can i know the position of an object but not the velocity.. or the velocity and not the position? that these questions don’t have answers (yet) thrills the child of chaos. talk about wave and particle theory and, though he couldn’t really understand the details, he’d still rocket through the roof in a burst of quantum exuberance. yes, partly because this kid is a complete and utter nerd.. but more so because this edgy heart realizes what all this means – that there is no measure to.. well, anything.

there are two pieces here, two competing voices..
the one, a narcissus or an emil, a father: planned, ordered, concise, practical, level.
the other, a goldmund or a demain, a son: unpredictable, unpredictable, infinite, unpredictable, impassioned.

mr. calculatedmost of the time, i let the father in me win. most decisions by me are considered, weighed with a near scientific zest for accuracy (and the inevitable uncertainty), given time to grow (and fester), and finally, when the more certain path for success or safety is found (or the most conservative one is settled for), i’ll cautiously start putting the parts in motion.

..but every once in a while the son screams, jumps wildly off the little horse, and tears through the woods on the path taken by none, the one untread, unestablished, unconsidered.. and he stops in an opening to make a snow angel just to be a little extra ridiculous. every once in a while, when the father wants to discuss kant and the critique of pure reason, the son slaps his hands on his ears and yells a lung-full of “i kant take it anymore“, looks up to see the effects of such an awful play on words, and falls to the floor bent over double, clutching his stomach with painful belly laughs racking his body.

crazy kidsthis boy asks questions, sometimes loudly, while i’m clicking away all day: “what are you doing this for? who cares about this? what if you left.. not in a few weeks but right now? why haven’t you seen the world? do you think you’ll have more time later in life? do you not understand the fierce urgency of ‘now‘? are you happy with your situation? no, i mean it, really? what if you really were a book? do you think i’d read about you? come on.. get a move on living! if you don’t give me a voice, a real voice, i’ll eventually fade away.. and what will you be then?”

there’s trouble with this boy, though.. or, at least, that’s what the father tells me. the father tells me that living off the cuff is romantic.. but ill-advised. he tells me, realism bleeding from his chest, that living in the moment is, by definition, short-lived. the long-term effects are another story all-together and consistently ignored by the child who refused to believe that space and time are definite structures. a child’s heart, mind, and knowledge, he tells me, like the boys stature; small and awkward. and, the father tells me, not all energy is good, for this child has often been the force behind the destructive energy that sometimes overwhelms the traveling pair.

so what about the geometry? well, geometry has greek roots: geo = earth, metria = measure. and since you could make a few transferences – earth = world congruent to.. our perception – you can say that geometry is the measure of what we perceive. i don’t know if it works but i think the idea behind it: i think it’s always good to put our perspective(s) into perspective. personally, i’m starting to see that my perspective(s) have been somewhat more limited than i originally considered.. they haven’t explored this other world, the world of (infinite) possibility enough.. the world of chance and risk. and it’s not that i don’t know how i feel about that, i do: i don’t like it one bit.. but there’s that father in me – “you don’t want that world. think about and plan for the future. make the safe choice and you won’t get burned.”

i’m not going to go out there tomorrow and turn everything on its head.. but i’m going to at least let the boy have his words.

i’ve been odd

and i know i’ve been odd..

so what’s holding you back? no, i’m not talking about kentucky’s seatbelt campaign.. i’m asking, as directly as possible, what’s holding you back? back from being/doing/thinking/saying/having/feeling exactly what you want..?

lately, if you haven’t noticed, i’ve been odd. there are, of course, plenty of excuses as to why.. but really only one reason: i’ve let myself get there, let myself need to be back on the living room couch to huddle under my blue afghan, trying to recite some mantra in hopes that it will mystically make things right in my soul.

now, i recognize that i can be overly romantic and/or dramatic at times but i do, sometimes, need to sink into my irrational fits of despair. maybe it’s a way of getting my dose of perspective.. i don’t know.. but i’ve got my phone call from buddy. and it’s time to get off the bed, go outside, and get to work.

salinger, the reclusefrom salinger’s franny and zooey

Franny shrieked, “Will you shut up, please?”

In just a second, in just a second. You keep talking about ego. My God, it would take Christ himself to decide what’s ego and what isn’t. This is God’s universe, buddy, not yours, and he has the final say about what’s ego and what isn’t. What about your beloved Epictetus? Or your beloved Emily Dickinson? You want your Emily, every time she has an urge to write a poem, to just sit down and say a prayer till her nasty, egotistical urge goes away? No, of course you don’t! But you’d like your friend Professor Tupper’s ego taken away from him. That’s different. And maybe it is. Maybe it is. But don’t go screaming about egos in general. In my opinion, if you really want to know, half the nastiness in the world is stirred up by people who aren’t using their true egos. Take your Professor Tupper. From what you say about him, anyway, I’d lay almost any odds that this thing he’s using, the thing you think is his ego, isn’t his ego at all but some other, much dirtier, much less basic faculty. My God, you’ve been around schools long enough to know the score. Scratch an incompetent schoolteacher–or, for that matter, college professor–and half the time you find a displaced first-class automobile mechanic or a goddam stonemason. Take LeSage, for instance– my friend, my employer, my Rose of Madison Avenue. You think it was his ego that got him into television? Like hell it was I He has no ego any more–if ever he had one. He’s split it up into hobbies. He has at least three hobbies that I know of–and they all have to do with a big, ten-thousand-dollar workroom in his basement, full of power tools and vises and God knows what else. Nobody who’s really using his ego, his real ego, has any time for any goddam hobbies.” Zooey suddenly broke off. He was still lying with his eyes closed and his fingers laced, quite tightly, across his chest, his shirt-front. But he now ground his face into a deliberately pained expression–a form, apparently, of self-criticism. “Hobbies,” he said. “How did I get off onto hobbies?” He lay still for a moment.

Franny’s sobs, no more than partly muffled by a satin pillow, made the only sound in the room. Bloomberg was now sitting under the piano, on an island of sunshine, rather picturesquely washing his face.

so are you using your real ego? do you even know what it is?

–sorry, yet another big thought condemned to incompleteness 😉

the son of man

tell me: why are you alive?

no, i’m not talk speaking objectively. yes, i recognize that there are heart functions, hemoglobins, and plenty of synaptic actions and membrane exchanges negotiating the release and capture of their respective na- and k+ that get us through the day. yes, i recognize that if it weren’t for simple charges, everything would fall apart.

but why is it then, that when it comes to life, it seems to be lacking the charge i imagined it would hold when i was twelve? and why does it feel like it’s falling apart, breaking down into its basics?

i’ll be as honest as possible about my day tomorrow: tomorrow, between 6:32am when my alarms start calling for me and sometime around 12am when i’ll succumb to the weights on my eyelids, i will, at best, survive. surviving.. not necessarily living, surviving is, to me, the act of just plainly and somewhat dully getting from time a to time b. it doesn’t require any major input, asking only for mostly preconditioned responses to a largely generic set stimuli.

i am pavlov’s tortured dog. i am p’s complete lack of surprise.

son of man

what if, though, life was decided by, hung on the stroke of a typewriter’s key? or the slight of a pen? or the batting of an eye..? would you do anything differently?

well here’s news: life does hang so tenuously. whether you believe in an eye in the sky or in the inevitability of entropy, life is fragile, life ends. reasons come randomly, if at all. there are no mailings with two-weeks notices that announce any termination of service. and no matter your faith in modern medicine, you will, one day, cease to exist.

but that’s unimportant – it’s how you choose to live that matters.

so, today: why are you alive? are you doing what you want to be doing? and, if not, why not? what inhibitions or obstructions are preventing you from complete freedom.. and why haven’t you rid yourself of them?! i’m sure you know but, just as a reminder, you can become, do, make, choose almost any destiny you might want (the details of this argument should be reserved for a much more intense and much less fruitless discussion on the merits and pitfalls of existentialism).

look.. i have a 401(k), a roth ira, and money in the stock market.. i even have life insurance. i have no illusions like, “live every day like it’s your last” or “live like you’ll die tomorrow” or whatever nice little jingle might suggest we live off our sleeves and throw our inhibitions to the wind. while it’s inspirational and might make work for a couple days, putting it into a true, everyday practice is, among other things, selfish, dangerous, and largely self-destructive.

but i have to believe it’s a great folly to wait for something to happen, to wait for something to happen, to confuse survival with living. if a book were being written about you and what you’re doing today.. would you read on? or is the part you would skim and later tell your friends that these are the chapters when you lost interest..? if third-, sixth-, or eleventh-grade you met today you, how would they feel: embarrassed, proud, excited, disappointed..?

now, i have faith in you, reader, that you are intelligent, mostly mature creatures who have used your eyes, ears, nose, hands, tongue, mind, and everything else attached to you quite well up to this point. believing this, i don’t kid myself into thinking i’m telling you something new or revolutionary. i don’t expect any “by god! he’s right!’ from the crowd. there’s a good chance, in fact, you stumbled upon these realities in elementary school, perhaps when you flushed old gills down the pooper or buried benny in the backyard. so no, i’m no prophet here to warn you of the fire and rain we all know will come and go like so many other inevitabilities of life. no, i’m only here to set you down on the couch, shake you a little, maybe slap you in the face a couple times if need be to get you to here the call to “wake up!”

livetoday, in a yet another meeting about the transition to stantec, i watched a face in the crowd and thought about what all this meant to them. i knew they didn’t seem to be taking the change with the cheeriest of attitudes. it got me to thinking about how the change must redefine how they are, how they used to be a big fish in small pond.. and now they’re another business unit, another payrolled-employee, another face in the ever expanding crowd. if it were me, i thought, i could see how it would flip my world on its head, how it would redefine where i was going and what i meant–

and i stopped cold.. was i honestly saying that i define myself, my person, my meaning through my role in the workplace?! wow, i thought.. you’re getting way off base. it’s about time to take a break and get a few things back in order.

so, to begin with, that’s to write more.. even if that does mean more posts in the “incomplete thoughts” category. and it means being less committed to the unnecessary.. the “unnecessary” accounting for a majority of my time loss recently and for my loss of perspective on what’s important. while i know that things won’t start to improve on that front until maybe june, i know my whiteboards and binders will surely help me get there. and it means planning a trip.. not sure where other than it’s definitely not here.. and not for a measly long weekend. 😉

.

i worry that this post might seem overly pedantic. i have to assure you that this post, as well as this entire site, is meant as a personal journal and any time that it might seem i’m being pejorative, it’s meant only to snap myself out of whatever funk it is that i’m in. and if i address you directly as a reader, i’m either still talking to myself or trying to steer you clear of my own mistakes.

thank you for smoking, pt. 1

thank you for smoking..the other day, while answering questions for our health plan, i was asked if i’d used tobacco products within the last year. slightly disappointed, i’d answered no, i hadn’t. it got me to thinking about a few of the times have i have had a cigarette.. or, as in one case, half a pack of joe camels.. and then lost my voice for three days.

i was spending the summer in oxford, working “downtown” at the uptown bakery (uptown, downtown.. oxford was small enough that they were essentially one in the same). and since i was also working at the outdoor pursuit center, i was pretty pressed for time as i usually had shift at the opc right after i got off from my bakery shift. but my friend m was spending her summer taking classes in mount vernon, just outside of columbus, and i’d long ago promised her that i’d come visit. i also had a friend from school who was spending the summer at home, also just outside of columbus. so, being the multi-tasker that i strive to be, i decided to roll it all into one evening’s trip.

now, if you know of ohio’s geography, you’ll understand the grand ambitions that this was: columbus is a good two and a half/three hours from oxford and mount vernon is another half hour still. tack on the fact that i couldn’t get out of oxford until 4pm and that i had to be at work at 7am the next morning and you have yourself the makings of an epic.

and so i set sail, oblivious to the turbid waters before me. beginning easily enough, i made it to shully’s place in decent time.. say 7/8pm or so. i remember i walked into the door, he and his mother led me in, and shully and i started quoting comedians for some reason. i started on lewis black’s rant against candy corn. i go on, “..And every year since then, Halloween is returned and I, like a–“.. i stopped. shully was frantically motioning with a hand across his neck, cut it off. so i trailed off and he took me aside a minute later. “her father passed away a couple months ago from alzhiemer’s.” sheesh.. good start.

by the time i was ready to part ways with shully for the evening, the hour was already in the double digits and my eyes were starting to get heavy. still, i pushed on through sunbury, centerburg, and was going through lonely mount liberty when i got pulled over for the first time that night. i’d just filled up on gas and, being tired and young, thought that gunning it out of the gas station might help wake me up. of course, i did this right in front of a cop. so when he pulled up behind me, i saw no reason to create a chase and so i just pulled over.. but he was confused. he pulled over behind me.. waited a bit.. then threw on his lights. he came to the window and asked, “is there a problem, sir?” i thought i was supposed to ask that..

but i answered, “umm.. nope.. just thought you were going to pull me over for pulling out of the gas station so fast.”

“oh.. nope, didn’t even notice. that’s why you pulled over..? well, regardless, now that i’m here, i have to run your license and registration.”

not exactly the upside-down tree.. but you get the idea..awesome. but nothing came of it, thankfully, not even a warning since i think he was confused about what to warn me about. so i went on through to quaint mount vernon.. met m and we hung out for a bit, talked about what to do for the night, then decided to head over to kenyon college. she wanted to show me the “upside-down tree” and the chapel they had there. now, there’s always an attraction to some type of action, something a little risky and dangerous, even if those two aspects are mostly imagined. so what were we, two good christian kids, to do when, at 1am in the morning, we found the doors were open to nearly all the campus buildings.. with no one in sight.. while school was out..