Category Archives: geekery

ambiance

Posted on by
Reply

There is a lot of ambient noise in my house.
The tv, fridge, microwave, computer, monitor… all give off this high-pitched whine.
I’m sure you’ve heard it, or felt it on some level. It’s an extra bit of high tension current oscillating in your living room.
There are plenty of days that I never notice this intrusion. Those are the days that should concern me.

My dad and I had a tool we called, “Damage Assessment”.
The way it worked was you go into the country, somewhere with only trees and fields and a night sky full of the Milky Way.
The measure of how weird it feels to be disconnected from all your phones and tvs and cars and radios and fluorescent lights and microwaves and jack hammers and neighbors and everything you are used to from living in a city is your “damage assessment.”
If you don’t feel odd at all, good for you! You aren’t damaged from your city livin’.
However, if you feel nervous, or vulnerable, or disconnected – the intensity of that feeling is equal to how much living in the city has fucked you up.

Do you remember how quiet it was the afternoon of 9-11 and the following days?
I remember walking my dog and wondering about the odd silence.
I was living in Chicago at the time. A city that gets just a wee bit more sleep than New York. Alyosha doggie and I went outside. There was something different, but I couldn’t exactly place it. There were fewer cars on the road, and not as many people walking on the sidewalks, but that wasn’t it.
I looked up and realized that there were no airplanes in the sky.
Chicago has a highly trafficked airspace. It has two major airports (O’Hare and Midway) on opposite ends of the city, plus some smaller airports (well, Mayor Daley took care of one of those in 2003) With no air traffic, there was a solitude to the city sky. It was unnerving to have a quiet in that vast blue overhead.
There is something intrinsically wrong with feeling weird because the sky is silent of machinery cutting through it.

When there is a power outage in your home, block, neighborhood, it is quiet. Storm-related power outages were not uncommon when I was a kid. I cherished those times. It was so peaceful, and exciting at the same time. We kept a heavy yellow flashlight magnetized to the fridge. Mom or I would retrieve it, then we would open the drawer with the thick white emergency candles. We lit those candles and placed them strategically around the house. We didn’t want to challenge the darkness, we welcomed it (but still wanted to be able to read).

Elie Wiesel wrote in his book, “Dawn”
“Night is purer than day; it is better for thinking and loving and dreaming. At night everything is more intense, more true. The echo of words that have been spoken during the day takes on a new and deeper meaning. The tragedy of man is that he doesn’t know how to distinguish between day and night. He says things at night that should only be said by day.”

I think that all these gadgets and noise and electronics act as a buffer for us against the night. We have an instinctual fear of the dark, but like many of the residual animalistic instincts we still have buried in our reptilian brain, over the millennia it has gotten distorted and misshapen into a caricature of what it started off for us: a protective device. Now we Masters of The Physical World fight back against the dark, our unknown assailant, by flooding it with neon and spotlights and noise in hopes that will keep the shadows at bay.

time flies….

Posted on by
Reply

Has it been over a week already? Did I miss my deadline?
Time flies, as the saying goes.

I prefer the slowing down of my perception of time that happens when I’m on a motorcycle ride, or camping, or with friends. The long, leisurely days. Sometimes during those moments on the road, or lounging about in a hammock on a warm day, time is as relaxed as I am.

Then there are days like today where time seems to be ticking along at a reasonable pace. It is Goldilocks’s middle bowl of porridge. Neither too hot, nor too cold. Not to fast, nor too slow. The screwy thing about time perception though, is that come tomorrow (Sunday), today (Saturday) will seem like it passed quickly and without fuss.

My dad once asked my elderly grandpa if he learned one thing from this life,
what was it?
Grandpa hung his head and looked sad.
He replied, “That life goes by very quickly.”

I think about that reply often.
How does one balance living life to the fullest with being responsible and pragmatic?
One answer I’ve often heard is to “find work you love.”
But that’s not possible for a majority of us.
My dad would have told me to find something I love in any work.
That is more feasible.
However, I don’t want to live a life of having to find joy.
I want to live it!
And for me “living it” tends to mean creative endeavors and travel – neither of which pay much at all.

So, back to the original question: How does one balance living life to the fullest with being responsible and pragmatic?

a writer writes

Posted on by
Reply

My dad liked to tell me “Honey, a writer writes. You have to practice each day in order to get good. It’s like anything – takes hard work and practice.” He even gave me some books on the subject. “On Writing Well” and “Writing Down The Bones” and probably a few other books too. The problem was, I didn’t think of myself as a ‘writer’, but rather as ‘a person who writes.’
There’s a difference. A ‘writer’ is someone who dedicates time and hard work to the art and craft of the written word. ‘A person who writes’ is an occasional thing, a hobby, something done randomly for the pleasure of it.

Over the years, I’ve done both. I’ve been a professional writer and have been paid for my works, I’ve won prizes for poetry, I’ve kept this hobby of a website up since July 10, 2003 (in various incarnations), and I’ve kept a journal since fourth grade. I am a writer. I am a person who writes.

I have never given much credence to the idea of “New Years Resolutions,” but this year I decided to at least make a solid run at being a writer who writes. The idea was to be more consistent with my posts here. Put up something new every Monday or some-such. It would force me to work on the craft of writing, to pay more attention to the output instead of my usual stream-of-consciousness post I usually send out. I was going to write something here each week regardless of how I felt. Not feeling inspired? So what. Nothing coming to mind? Deal with it. When I was in high school I complained to my dad that my history teacher was an idiot (he really was) and that the reason I cut class so often was because it was a waste of time to sit in there and not learn anything. My pop replied that in any situation there is always something to be learned. Maybe I could learn how to be more patient, maybe I could learn what not to do as a teacher and use those skills in other aspects of my life. There is always something. So, with this writing problem – there is always something to write about. Theoretically. Right, pop?

One of the reasons I dislike New Years Resolutions is because it seems like a fake promise to yourself. You only promised because everyone else was doing it. If you really wanted to do X, you would pick a random date and start. Instead, New Years Eve has become a high-pressure date. I hear “What is your New Years Resolution?” practically everywhere I go. Work, a bar, dinner with friends…. Why put that much undue pressure on yourself? If you don’t follow through, instead of just chalking it up to “Okay, I didn’t complete that this time, I’ll just try again,” instead you have BROKEN YOUR NEW YEARS RESOLUTION! Bad you!

Here it is Wednesday, January 8th 2014 and this is my first post, a week into the New Year. It is not Monday. I am not writing because I have a deadline for myself to post something by tonight. I’m writing because the thought struck me “a writer writes” and I started to think about my dad and those books he gave me and my wishy-washy New Years Resolution.

So, for what it’s worth, I will try. I will try to write something each week. I’m warning you up front that this experiment might lead to some pretty sucky posts.
Hope you stick around for it.