Here’s submission #3 for #nycmidnight Flash Fiction Challenge 2011.  Prompts were open (genre), a physical rehabilitation center (place) and a poisonous [sic: venomous] snake (object).  I kind of shit the bed on this one, I think.  Not too worried about it, though.  I was pretty happy that I made the cut to get to the second round (there are three rounds total – scores are added from the two parts of the first round to determine who gets into the second round).

BRIEF SYNOPSIS:  Trapped in a broken body, a man tries to make contact with the world outside him and avoid going insane.

WINDOWS TO THE SOUL

“And a one, and a four, and a ching-chong potato!  Hahahaha, look at that retard,” giggled Kevin, pointing at me as the orderly wheeled him by me, his left leg sticking straight out, parallel to the floor with the Ilizarov apparatus encircling his shin.  A car accident six weeks ago left Kevin’s tibia and fibula broken in several places; well over a dozen stainless steel pins connected the circular frames at his knee and ankle to various points on those broken bones, holding his leg together as the bones knit.

Great.  Only another 14 weeks of Kevin’s genius to endure.  I remember when Kevin came in:  the painkillers he was on at first left him as much of a drooling mess as I am.  It’s been barely a week since he’s been able to feed himself.  The meds he’s taking now have his verbal diarrhea scale set at approximately that of a wasted college kid who’s one drink away from getting punched in the face or kicked out of the bar.  I’ve seen this happen before.  They’ll switch his meds again in another few weeks and he might get some social skills back, but it’s pretty obvious what kind of a guy he is, and that won’t change.

We get all kinds in this rehab.  Jimmy over there was bitten on the hand by a venomous snake and suffered nerve damage in his fingers.  He thought he was getting a baby ball python, but it turns out the pet shop made a pretty big mistake.  Jimmy’s only here on Saturdays, so that the doctors can keep tabs on his recovery and give him new exercises to do for the following week.  He’s usually nice to me; sometimes he’ll sit next to me and talk a bit about his other snakes while he does his finger-articulation exercises. His hand is recovering quickly, so I’ll probably only see him once or twice more.

I’ve met guys like Jimmy before, too.  He’ll probably stop by to say goodbye on his last day – give me a couple of words of encouragement and tell me to look him up when I get out, even though he wouldn’t have noticed any change in me over the course of spending 10 Saturdays here.  The doctors probably explained to him that they expect me to die in here, anyway.

I’m getting sharper every day.  Smarter, it seems.  I’m more attuned to the world now than I ever was when I could walk and talk and move.  I can smell Nurse Diane when she walks through the door behind me at the other end of the big common room, and I can play out a hundred games of chess to the end when I watch Darryl and Susan practice their finger agility two tables over.

By and large, the doctors think I’m a vegetable, though Dr. Kline seems to know there’s someone still alive in here:  besides the fact that he’s the only one to make eye contact with me, he actually looks into my eyes.  Every time he does, I stare back as hard as I can and focus all my will on blinking.  It hasn’t happened yet, but I’m getting closer.  The doctors say it’s physically impossible for me to be able to blink (or, for that matter, do anything) voluntarily, but I’m sure I’m close.  If I can do that, then maybe they’ll believe there’s a person inside this broken body of mine.

I’ve been here for twelve years.

My friends stopped visiting ten years ago, my family six.  Still, enough happens here that I haven’t lost my mind or started thinking about suicide (not that I could do anything about either at this point).  My only worry is that new things will stop happening:  that it’ll turn out that I’m stuck in some loop of Kevins and Jimmys and Darryls and Susans – the same people over and over again, just different faces.  The chess matches I’ve watched so far point to that realization happening just about any minute now, but I really try to avoid thinking like that.

Here’s submission #2 for #nycmidnight Flash Fiction Challenge 2011.  Prompts were ghost story (genre), steakhouse (place) and a taser gun (object).  I’m kind of ok with how it turned out, though I put it together in about an hour (just before the deadline, as usual), so there are a few places where a word or two could be interchanged.  I’d have preferred to finagle it to get the twist to be a bit more emotionally impactful for the main character, but whatever:  it’s done.

BRIEF SYNOPSIS:  Will killing his murderer’s descendant bring peace and closure to a troubled ghost?

THINNING OUT

I’ve been in the saloon for a long time now.  “Steakhouse,” I mean.  They call it a steakhouse now.  No matter.  It’s still the same to me:  a place where the booze flows in and out of the people as the people flow in and out of the doors.  I suppose there are worse places to haunt.

I’ve been here for about 120 years, I think.  Depends on what year this is, I guess.  I don’t pay much attention these days:  it seems I’m getting thinner quicker, though I suppose it’s possible that the time is just passing faster and I’m thinning out at whatever the usual rate is.  No idea.  This is my first go-round as a ghost.  Shade.  Whatever.

The only reason I know anything about my current condition is because there’s a paranormalist who’s been having dinner here once a month (strip steak, baked potato with garlic salt, green beans) for the last couple of years.  He’s trying to sell his book, which is about how ghosts like me reach peace through some kind of closure regarding the circumstances of their death.  Sometimes he’s here with friends or colleagues, practicing his pitch for the publishing companies or comparing notes.  On occasion (ok, most of the time), when he goes to the bathroom, I’ll make the lights flicker and do that “ooOOOooo” sound against the tiles, just to freak him out.  That’s the extent of my ability to touch the real world:  some barely audible sound and, if I concentrate really hard, I can affect things that deal in electricity.

Anyway, from listening to the paranormalist and his cohorts, I know that being a spirit means I’m just some sort of energistic impression on the fabric of the universe that was left behind when my body was murdered here all those years ago.  I’m not actually a soul or anything, more like an emotional stain on this particular location.  The moment of my death was like a flashbulb going off, and I’m the afterimage left on the retina of this place.  Strange that I remember things from both my life and my time haunting this saloon – I mean steakhouse.

I can still see the blood – my blood – pooling on the hardwood floor as it spilled out the bullet holes in my body.  My body’s not there anymore, but the blood keeps running into that puddle.  It never gets any bigger, even though the blood continues to flow.  I’ve lost myself for weeks at a time, just watching the blood rush into that spot.  From what I gather from the paranormalist, that’s my anchor to this world:  I always come back to it and I can never get very far from it.  None of the living have ever appeared to notice it, and I haven’t met any other shades here, so I assume I’m the only one who can see my perpetually flowing puddle of blood.

So here’s what happened:  I walked into this saloon one night back in 1897, needing a drink very badly.  I’d just been in a pretty big fight with my best friend and business partner at our office down the street.  Just as the barman was pouring my whisky, my best friend stormed in the front door and shouted my name.  I turned around from my place at the bar to see him walking quickly toward me with his hand raised.  A six-shooter was in his hand and he emptied it into me.

We’d been arguing because he’d knocked up my baby sister and didn’t plan on marrying her or even helping her take care of the kid when it came.  Just before I left the office, I told him he’d better reconsider and have the answer I wanted to hear in the morning or I’d kill him.  I threatened to murder my best friend, but he got to me first.  He skipped town and my sister died during childbirth.

About five years ago, a man walked into this steakhouse who was the spitting image of my best friend and all the feelings I’d had at the moment of my death came upon me at once.  I’d never seen this man before, but I knew instinctively it was him, my best friend and murderer.  I reached through the security guard blazer he wore and poured everything I had into the taser gun clipped to his belt.  The shock bounced him off his bar stool and onto one of the steak-carving carts.  The inside of his forearm was cut pretty bad by the big knife on the carving block and I watched him bleed out onto the floorboards.  In the same spot where I’d bled out all those years ago.  I couldn’t tell whether it was my blood or his in the ever-flowing pool that is my anchor to this place.

He died there.  The papers carried the story a couple of days later:  turns out he was the great-grandson of my best friend and sister.  He was also the last of his lineage.  My lineage, as it turns out.

According to that paranormalist, wiping my murderer’s line from the earth is exactly the sort of closure that should bring a ghost like me peace.  But I can tell you right now, I sure as hell don’t feel any peace.  And I’m still here.  Maybe that’s why I screw with the paranormalist whenever he comes in.

Still, it seems I’m getting thinner – fading away – a little more every day.

‘Tis a sad day indeed, dear reader, when I’m scraping one of Josh Allen’s websites for blog fodder.  Wait . . . no; not really:  would that I could pull it together enough (maybe read something about internet copyright law and whatnot) to set up a separate Josh Allen tribute site, but I’m not exactly sure how that would work anyway.  [Would I have to get fatter and hairier and even more self-conscious/critical?]

Aw, fuck.  Now I’m all wrapped up in the concept of “tribute site” when all I really wanted to do was pass this little ditty on to you:

Thanks a lot, internet, for getting my hopes up. I really appreciate it, internet. Oh you stupid internet. BITCHFACE INTERNET. Why do I keep forgetting that you are run by people who look to Lord of the Rings for political philosophy. (“Even the smallest hobbit can make a difference!!!!!”) Oh I am done with you, internet. I’ve said it before, and I’ll say it again next week when my “that sassy Alice waitress nude” google search turns up hot nothing — I am DONE.

OK yesterday I’m reminded that to be an American is to be both arrogant andincompetent (you’d think one would cancel out the other! so weird!), and the problem is then I come in to work at an ad agency. And if you’re already thinking “our country is fuckola’d,” the last place you want to walk into is an ad agency. The last thing you want to have to do is sit in a meeting and talk about how to coerce people into buying more processed cheese, because then it’s really hard to dodge the fact that you are The Problem. Yes I’m using second-person to distance myself from the horrible truth — it’s the magic of writing.

So I looked around for a new job, as I do every evening while unwinding with a paper sack and some floor tile adhesive, and I see Victoria’s Secret is looking for a copywriter, and all of a sudden I love our country again. There is hope, there is a way to improve your life and the lives of your fellow citizens. The dream is still alive.

-the house of wigs #55

So yeah, would the “tribute site” work kind of like a tribute band, and if so, how the frig would that work.  I mean, a tribute band is a bunch of cats or kittens who do their best to . . . wait, let me just scrape some more from somewhere else (here) on the interwebz:  A TRIBUTE band captures the true essence of the experience one might have if they were to attend a concert by said band in the here and now.  …the fan walks away feeling as if they had just seen their favorite band live…almost. Aaaaand blah, blah, blah:  I didn’t read the rest of the forum posts in the thread because I can say in my own words that a cover band just plays someone else’s songs – whether they’re trying to get as close as possible to the radio version or putting their own twist on the music (which, parenthetically, kind of pisses me off about the word “tribute” in the Metallica cover CDs I own:  they’re just a bunch of different bands doing a “tribute” to Metallica by covering Metallica’s songs in their own flavor).

So could a “tribute site” simply be as easy as scraping my favorite stuff by Josh Allen and posting it thereon?  You’d read my site and sure as hell walk away feeling as though you’d just read your favorite internet author’s words directly from his fingertips.  Which would, of course be true – but what if, instead of simply highlighting, Ctrl+C-ing and Ctrl+V-ing, I actually re-typed each of his posts? Then it would truly be just like a tribute band:  you’d get my own typos, lazy non-linkings and general fuckups and whatnot, so it would be wicked close to Josh Allen’s stuff, but you’d get that “…almost” feeling too.

I’m totally onto something.

However.

I have no intention of doing any of the above right now.

But.

I’ll give you a bunch of links to Josh’s stuff.  He’s funny as shit smeared on a baby (when they think it’s chocolate and it’s somebody else’s kid) and has been my favorite internet writer for quite some time now.  We’re also facebook friends, but not the kind that post on each other’s wall and send messages and stuff.  I secretly think I’m just one of those “trophy friends” for Josh – which I’m totally ok with because I feel the same way about him, except that I do in fact hope to meet him irl at some point before one of us dies a gruesome death at the hands of Big Brother’s Machine.

Anyway, here you go, a bunch of links to Josh’s stuff:

Fireland Twitter Feed

Fireland (on tumblr)

Ten Sexy Ladies (on tumblr)

Chokeville

Fireland (the site)

house of wigs

And that’s all I’m going to give you right now because it’s all I can come up with off the top of my head.  I think there’s some other stuff out there, but mostly places where he’s a contributing author.  If you think I missed something particularly cool, please let me know.  I fucking love this guy.

Hoo boy.  It’s been 84 days since my last post.  That’s exactly 12 weeks.  Whoops.  Sorry ’bout that, dear reader.

Ok, you’re over it.

Quixotic Jedi mind trick.

Seriously.

I’m at work right now and relatively bored.  Well, not bored exactly, just kind of doing that same old deer-in-the-headlights thing with the stuff I need to do.  Lots of little things that won’t necessarily bring me any particularly flavorful instant gratification.  Just the dull, got-that-done kind.

The Taiwan pr0xy season has basically drawn to a close:  I have two meetings left:  Wednesday and Friday.  Went from balls-to-the-wall to holding my dick, wondering what just happened.  Well, sort of.  I know exactly what just happened, but that’s kind of how it feels.

So I’m not currently crushed at work, but I do have to get back to studying for the NJ bar exam.  I didn’t pass the February exam, so I’m taking it again in July.  Hopefully, “fourth time’s the charm.”  So I now have about 5 weeks in which to study and hopefully learn the stuff I needed to learn in the first, second and third places.  My scaled score was a 130 – I needed a 133 to pass.  That’s like 1/2 a point on one of the essays:  maybe two more (correct) sentences written.

Busy couple of weeks, all told.  Went to the Yankee game last Wednesday; sat in some damned fine seats about 6 rows behind home plate.  John McEnroe and Paul Simon were within spitting distance, though I neither spat on them nor said hello.  Like them, I wasn’t much in the mood to be signing autographs:  I just wanted to watch the game and hang out with my friends.

This past weekend was MINIs on Top:  200-something MINI Coopers gather for weirdo activities and a drive up to the summit of Mount Washington (highest peak in the northeast).  Got to hang out with Brandy and Don, whom I haven’t seen since last year’s MOT.  Val and I drove up to their place in Bristol RI on Thursday night, crashed there, and we all caravanned up to MOT on Friday (we also shared a hotel room and basically spent the entire weekend together).  Pretty awesome.  Brandy and Don are really good peeps.

Anyway, even though I’m lacking in motivation today, the day’s almost over and I have a couple of reports that need to go out before I leave.  I think I’m getting out of here at 5PM so that I can pick Val up at the Secaucus train station, so that we can run home and get the laundry started before it gets too late.  Maybe I’ll clean off my desk and put together a nice to-do list tomorrow.

Where the frig did the winter go?  I spent a good portion of the last 3-season pining for the time when I could break my snowshoes back out, and that time’s nearly over.  Not that I can complain:  I probably snowshoed close to 200 miles this winter and bagged about 40 peaks along the way.  I made it up to the Catskills every Saturday and Sunday of every week with the exception of perhaps two days (only one that I can think of).  Definitely a good time, which, I suppose, is why it passed so quickly.

So what’s been up?  No idea where to start on the updating process.  AND it’s midnight now.

So yeah, lots of hiking, and even more planned for the upcoming 3-season.  I’m at 171/420 on the grid and have a shit ton of mountains to climb; I’d also like to get up to the Adirondacks and finish off that 46rs list (I’m at 16/46 on that one) – hopefully I can make a dent in it if we get up there once a month or so.

Katie’s got 17 or 18 out of her Catskill 39 and is right on schedule to finish this year – her plan, not mine.

Scott finished his winter 35 this year and Valerie just finished her regular 39.  Debbie finished her 39 back in January or February – I’m crappy with dates.  So Deb and Val will pick up their certificates at the 3500 Club dinner this weekend and I’ll probably grab Scott’s for him because he and Katie will be at the Yes concert in Atlantic City this weekend.

Oh, I activated the Groupon for the Gravity Vault (indoor rock gym) that Katie gave me back in December.  It’s basically a free one-month membership.  I did my belay certification course last Wednesday (where they teach you how to tie the knots and hold the rope to make sure whoever your climbing partner is doesn’t fall and die).  Val took the train out on Thursday night and we climbed together, which was wicked cool.  We’re going to visit her rock gym in Brooklyn on Sunday and I’ll get to meet her rock climbing peeps and hopefully not make an ass out of myself on the wall.  I’m psyched.  Hopefully I’ll get to climb this Tuesday and Thursday.  It’s a nice thing to fit into my schedule.

Work is going pretty well.  No real complaints (worth voicing) on that end.  The bar exam is done and the Taiwan trip has passed, so no more major points of stress upcoming.  I find out whether I passed the bar or not mid-May.  I’m totally 50/50 on that:  if I pass, I won’t be all that surprised; if I don’t I won’t be all that surprised either.

No biggie.  I’m currently reading The Abolition of Man by C.S. Lewis and am chomping at the bit to get to The Crippled God by Steven Erikson (the next installment of my favorite fantasy series EVAR).  I’ll probably bring that to work with me tomorrow.  I was hoping to start it tonight, but didn’t get to because I was busy barely making a dent in cleaning up the clusterfucked mass of clutter that is my apartment.

So that’s it for now.  I’m bringing my tax stuff with me to work tomorrow, so I can hopefully get started on that.  It’s time to re-evaluate my finances (again) – seems like I just did that, but whatever.

Off to bed.  Peace out, dear reader.  Don’t be a stranger.

Ok, so here I am on a plane again, bound for Taiwan.  It’s 5:30PM ET; the plane left at 11:10AM – we’re just about halfway to Tokyo Narita.  I should probably be (or have been) studying up on my presentation materials, but instead I’ve been watching movies.  The time has passed relatively quickly.  So far, I’ve watched Red (Bruce Willis flick about retired CIA peeps), Blades of Glory (Will Ferrell figure skating spoof) and Percy Jackson and the Olympians AND the fucking Lightning Thief (PG-13 YA lit flick).  I have David Foster Wallace’s book Infinite Jest sitting next to me, as well as The Heroes by Joe Abercrombie (a gift from one of my co-workers for the flight; fantasy novel), but I haven’t picked up either of them.  Which, I think, is just as well.  While I’d like to read DFW’s book because of the hipster cred I’ll achieve by finishing it, and I’d like to read the Abercrombie novel because I’m pretty sure I’ll be able to get lost in the story, I just don’t feel much like reading.  Heck, I’m really only writing right now to give my ears a break – they’re a little sore from having the headphones on for so long (lol).

So yeah, I don’t really have much to say right now:  nothing’s all that pressing that I’m dying to write about.  Life is good.  I’m a bit nervous for this trip, but only when I project into the future.  I’m pretty sure I’ll do fine, but I’m totally walking the tightrope without a net on this one.  The President of my firm is on the trip with me, but he’s not all that familiar with what we’ll be presenting – oh, he’s worked in Asia before in the same industry, but the specialized nature of my experience makes me the only one who really knows the services we’re selling.

I’m currently in direct competition with my old employer.  Shortly after I left the old firm, a few other guys left as well and the owner closed that branch of the business.  A couple of other departments at that firm ended up dissolving, and the owner sold what was left to another firm; he brought the portion of the business I was responsible for with him, so I’ll be back out in Taiwan selling my new firm (and my services) to the clients I used to service at the old firm (and I’ll be trying to pick up new clients).  The owner of the old firm will be in Taiwan in a couple of weeks, pitching to some of the same companies.  I don’t plan on badmouthing him or his firm, and I hope he doesn’t badmouth me, but this is business, so I almost expect it.  Matter of fact, I’m kind of nervous about talking about this stuff at all because one or two people from my old firm know about this blog (almost none of my co-workers know about this blog or are friends with me on facebook – or any other social media site, for that matter – my work and cyber egos are separate).  So hi Tom and Jen if you’re reading this.  I trust our friendship outweighs your loyalty to Ken and his business and that everybody in the industry isn’t reading this right now.

But if you are in my industry and you’re reading this, welcome, I guess.  It’s always nice to have new readers.  Say hello in the comments or shoot me an email if you like:  maybe we can network and help each other out.

So yeah:  tightrope without a net:

At the old place, I did all the work for these clients, but the owner of the company was the one who made the trips to Taiwan and did all the selling.  Now it’s all me.  I’ll be selling and servicing.  I have no doubts about my ability to service my clients well, and I’m probably the most qualified person in the industry (boutique though it might be) to provide the services we do.  Which is kind of a scary thought.  Not that I don’t know what I’m doing, but rather because I’m just used to there being someone else around who knows at least a little more than I do.  While there are certainly many many people who know more than I do about different aspects of things, I don’t think there’s anyone out there with the kind of comprehensive knowledge I have – thankfully, there are people I can learn from, but that learning means acquiring bits of others’ knowledge about aspects of the process which relate to what I do.  I know I’m being vague:  that’s partly because I don’t want any of the keywords to pop up in a Google search, but also partly because if I started throwing around esoteric concepts and phrases, I’d lose you right away.  Anyway, this stuff’s all me right now:  there’s nobody I can really turn to when I don’t have the answer.  Which is fine:  I don’t have any issues with saying “I don’t know”, and I’m pretty good about finding out the answer.  I mean shit, my title is Director of Research:  finding answers is what I do.

Switching gears:

I met a girl.

I mean, we’ve met before plenty of times, but our relationship has taken a romantic turn.  One that is pretty much indescribably wonderful.  I want to tell you all about it, but I really don’t know that I have the words to do so.  And fuck me, my vocabulary’s big.  I just don’t know that I can do it justice with mere words on a screen.  Plus, I almost want to keep it to myself – lolz, I’m still worried about jinxing it, even though that’s doubtfully even a remote possibility.  Still, I’d kind of rather not say too much.

Her name is Valerie and I’ve spoken of her before.  We met in the woods – well, we “met” on the Upper West Side of NYC when Scott and I picked her and Debbie up to go hiking back in October, but that was mostly a “hi howya doin’”; we didn’t really talk until we were on the trail (and probably 6 miles into the hike, at that).  She’s a fucken wood nymph.  More of a backpacker than a peakbagger, though she’d identify herself as simply a hiker.  She moves like a dancer through the forest and it’s a joy to watch.

After hiking together (in a group) a few times, we had a good date back in November (the Friday before I left for Taiwan the last time), and she sent me the “just friends” email that Saturday.  I headed off to Taiwan with my chin on my chest, wondering what went wrong and spent the next couple of weeks in relative discomfort, self-esteem-wise.  (That’s the opposite of hyperbole, btw.)  We both continued to flirt with each other on the trail and date other people, playing Scrabble on our iPhones with one another during the week.  She stayed over my house a couple of times before a hike and I cursed myself for a coward each time I didn’t make a move.

I finally did and it’s been goddamned fireworks ever since.  Truly.  We’ve spent the last three weekends together, Friday evening through Monday morning, and it’s been just fucking joyous.  Hiking during the days with our regular crew and some really nice Friday night dates, just the two of us.  I can’t wait to see her when I get back.  What a flip from my last trip to Taiwan.

So that’s 1,260 words for now and my ears aren’t nearly as tender as they were a few minutes ago.  I’m going to hit play on the X-Men Origins: Wolverine movie and zonk out for another couple of hours.  Maybe next time I choose my seats on a flight I’ll keep my neighbors in mind and book myself an aisle seat:  I’ve had to hop over the poor bastard sitting next to me three or four times now in order to go pee.  Too much coffee and water.  Well, not too much, but enough to make me a pain in this guy’s ass, I’m sure.

***

Ok:  two hours left till Tokyo.  It’s now 11:16 ET (the time my body is still on) and I haven’t slept yet.  I’m not sure if I’m going to be able to stay up for this whole trip, though that would be ideal.  So it’ll be about 1:15AM when we get to Narita; add another 4 hours for the layover and it’s 5AM tomorrow, plus the couple/three hours from Tokyo to Taipei.  Yeah, I’m not gonna make it.  I keep looking over at the galley, expecting them to come around with more food and maybe coffee, but no dice.  Damn, but a cup of coffee and a cigarette would be nice right now.

On the up side, Narita has a very nice smoking lounge – and I’m pretty sure there’ll be a Starbucks in the terminal.  Or at least a Mr. Brown’s – their coffee’s good as well.  Another couple of hours and I’ll get my fix, lol.

Watched the Wolverine movie, plus Due Date (Robert Downey Jr. and Zach Galiflanakis) – which I thought would be MUCH better (some funny parts, but overall pretty meh.  Seriously.  I really expected it to be much better than that.  Galiflanakis had a real chance to shine and kind of didn’t – oh, he was funny, but I almost think his character should have been more of caricature than it was.  Downey did ok, but I think pretty much anybody could have played the asshole that the script set his character out to be.  He’s a good actor, but I’d rather see him ACT – not just play a run-of-the-mill character – I’m almost tempted to queue up Tropic Thunder just so I can watch him play a black dude for a little while.  That’s acting.  Oh, and I watched Surrogates after that (Bruce Willis flick – not sure if it ever made it to the theaters; not great, but it passed the time (90 mins)).

So here’s what I’ve been thinking, dear reader:

All I really have to do is the best I can.  That’s it.  I don’t have to get everything done:  I just need to do what I can.  I don’t have to do everything perfectly:  I just need to do do as best I can.  None of these things that are threatening to overwhelm me – studying for the bar exam next week, preparing for the Taiwan trip the week after, the regular-day tasks at work that keep flooding in – are things I have to do at all:  they’re things I GET to do.

When I spend my time worrying on what’s coming up and whether I’ll be prepared for it, I’m not in the moment and I won’t be prepared.  Staying in the moment is a joyful thing, because what I’m doing in this moment is *exactly* what I want to be doing.  My life is so incredibly charmed.

Nothing matters but this moment right now.  Because without this one, there can be no others.  If I’m not present here and now, I’m certainly not present there and then.

So yeah, enough of the abstract:  I’m taking care of what I can take care of at work today, a little bit of the short-term project stuff and a little bit of the longer-term project stuff.  Reports are being written, emails sent, numbers crunched, research performed, etc.  I’ve been studying in the cracks in my schedule and have a bar review lecture playing in the background now.  That’s really all I can do.  I’ll either pass the bar or I won’t – but if I spend my time between now and then simply freaking out instead of studying when I can, as much as I can, that’s me fucking up.  My trip to Taiwan will be successful or it won’t – but if I spend my time between now and then freaking out instead of doing as much as I can to prepare, that’s me fucking up.  I’m not fucking up by doing the best I can, because that’s really all I can do.

My life is indescribably wonderful right now, dear reader.  I’m going to just go right ahead and enjoy every moment of it, rather than wonder if I’m living up to it.

Hola, dear reader. Do you happen to live in South Carolina or Virginia and like dogs – or maybe know someone who does? We need some help transporting Brandy, an 8 month old Belgian Malinois:

Begging last 2 legs – PLEASE consider!!! Even if you can just take a portion of a leg it would help! We are offering fuel reimbursement on these legs. Brandy is in SC and headed to her foster home in NH. Sandy will join transport on Sunday morning and is headed to her foster home in NH, very close to where Brandy is going. All legs are flexible.

Please provide the following with all offers of transport: Sunday drivers must crate at least 1 Malinois.
Preferred email address:
Cell #:
Vehicle color/description:
Any preferred meet sites:

Contact Transport Coordinator Lin Karrels at linkarrels@wildblue.net

CROSS POSTING ENCOURAGED AND APPRECIATED.

Saturday, February 12, 2011
***********************
Leg #2 – NEEDED!
Santee SC to Florence SC
71 miles – 1 hour
Depart Santee 9:10 a.m.
Arrive Florence 10:10 a.m.

Leg #6 – NEEDED!
Emporia VA to Ashland VA
87 miles – 1 hour 15 minutes
Depart Emporia 2:20 p.m.
Arrive Ashland 3:35 p.m.

…with his whine?

I’m sitting in class right now.  The lecture is NJ Civil Procedure.  I couldn’t find any material in my bar review outline book, so I figured they’d be distributing something at the class.  They didn’t.  Turns out there is an outline in my book, but I just missed it.  The pages of my review book have all been ripped out and put into separate folders by subject, so my NJ Civ Pro outline is in one of my folders – I just don’t know which one.  It’s not one of the folders I have with me tonight, so that’s no help.  And on top of this, the professor is lecturing directly from the review outline – he’s basically reading it to us and commenting as he goes through.  So I’m doubly screwed.  He’s going too fast for me to be able to even keep up and take notes.

So I’ll talk to you for a bit, dear reader.  I might bounce in a little while.  Listening to the lecture can’t be anything but good for me, so hopefully I’ll stay for the full 3.5 hours.  Maybe I’ll end up convincing myself that I’d be better off at home, watching the lecture on my laptop and taking my notes into the outline.  Jeez, I hope not.  I also hope I can manage to keep this short.

So.  To the whining:

Three major things happening in my life right now:  studying for the bar (exam is in two weeks), working a full-time job (at which I have large long- and short-term projects coming due, plus daily tasks), and winter peakbagging (what I’d rather be thinking about and doing).  The bar prep class I’m taking is designed for someone who’s not working and has all day, every day to study.  I don’t.  It’s a lot of stuff to study.  I got 90/200 right on the practice test.  Very Scary.  It looks like I’m going to have to go to Taiwan again for work during the first week of March.  That’s immediately after the bar exam.  I will be sitting on panels and in (sales-y) meetings and basically have to remember everything about the nuances of s0liciting pr0xies in the T*iwan market by then.  I have to put together marketing materials and detailed descriptions of our service offerings.  Nobody else at my company does this or would even have a clue where to begin.  We’re doing a deal with another company for a partnership in Taiwan and I have to have those details hammered out like tomorrow.  I’m travelling to DC for lunch with the other company on Friday with the President of my company – he wants to finish negotiating at the lunch, the other company wants the details worked out in advance.  I’m in the middle and frankly kind of scared that someone else is going to fuck up and bring the whole house of cards crashing down (or just start our business relationship out on the wrong foot).  I’d rather be hiking.  Planning hikes.  The logistics of which mountains we’re climbing and who’s in what car and staying at whose house which night.  I’d rather be hiking.

I feel much better today, but I’ve been feeling pretty goddamned overwhelmed all week – persecuted, even.  Not that persecuted is necessarily the right word, but it’s close.  Kind of a mix of persecuted and oppressed, but without the necessary sentient being actually doing the persecution-cum-oppression.  But not like the world is out to get me.  Just overwhelmed.  Too much on my plate.  To the point where I’m like a raw nerve:  anything else added on top of all the (admittedly self-induced/initiated) stress seems HUGE.  The teeniest thing seems like the end of the world:  a simple question at work, an incoming phone call, remembering that it’s time to change the cat’s litter.  Anything.

What’s really happening is that I’m persecuting and oppressing myself.  I’ve taken on a lot and I expect myself to be perfect in all of these endeavors.  I’m mentally and emotionally kicking my own ass on a minute-by-minute basis for not being farther along than I am.  I am not loving myself.  There, I said it.  It’s all me.  There’s no other entity causing me to feel persecuted:  it’s ME.  I’m the oppressive, overbearing father screaming at his inner child “WHY AREN’T YOU PREPARED?  WHY HAVEN’T YOU STARTED?  WHY HAVEN’T YOU FINISHED?  WHAT’S WRONG WITH YOU?  YOU’RE NOT MY SON.”

Ok, this has nothing to do with my Oedipus Complex – I’ll tell you all about that another time.  This is just me setting the bar too high – and I’ll tell ya, dear reader, I don’t even want to publish that word ‘too’ because it feels like I’m admitting I can’t do something.  My expectations for myself are out of control.  AND, I’m adding the (real and perceived) expectations of others on top of my own, thereby making them heavier.  I told one of the girls at work that I was nervous about passing the bar and she said “but you’re like the smartest person in the world!  of course you’re going to pass.”  She also asked me if I was worried because the whole office – especially the President, it seemed to her – is pulling for me to pass the exam.  Jokes abound in the office about how much stuff I can handle – that of course they can give Ted one more thing to do:  if anybody can handle it, he can.

Holy fuck, dear reader I really don’t want to say I can’t handle it, because that would be an admission of weakness and I really don’t do things like that.  So please do me a favor and just read between the lines.

Any one of the aforementioned three things would be enough to fill my life by themselves.  And I think I can do them all at once.  AND, make them all look easy while I’m doing them.  Yeah, I’ll talk about my pride and ego another time.

I quit drinking coffee three weeks ago and only drink tea and water now.  I don’t feel ridiculously better, but neither do I feel as though I need coffee in order to get my day started.  Nor am I constantly battling dehydration.  I’d really like a cup of coffee, but for whatever reason, I’ve committed myself to this no-coffee-for-30-days thing.  I’m drinking apple cider vinegar and taking my vitamins and drinking kefir and trying to be as healthy as possible with what I put in my body.  But I’m full of knots and aches in strange places and all kinds of other manifestations of what I can only conclude must be stress trying to get out.

Anyway, that’s enough whining.  I’m happy with my decisions.  These are things I WANT to do and things I GET to do.  It’s just an awful lot right now.

Here’s what I need to do:

• Meditate more.
• Drink more water.
• Be proud of myself.
• Not beat myself up (regularly).
• Pick one thing and do it – don’t keep looking at the rest of the list.
• Laugh more.

There are probably more things I should add to the list, but right now I just want to publish this and go pee.

When I grow up and have nothing better to do than write weirdo stuff for my adoring public, I’m going to do it while listening to Led Zeppelin.  The writing, I mean:  not the growing up.  I’m currently reading The Sherriff of Yrnameer by Michael Rubens.  It’s funny as hell.  Light sci-fi; Vonnegut-ish with some Dick in there too.  My cousin gave it to me for xmas – he meant to give it to my brother and give me American Gods by Neil Gaiman, but I’d already read the latter, so he switched.  Which worked out well because I’d been telling John to read American Gods for a while now, and The Sherriff of Yrnameer is right up my alley (and not so much John’s).

Things are excellent, dear reader.  Extremely, wickedly busy, but excellent.  Adding the bar prep class on top of my regular work-day is kinda-sorta kicking my ass time-wise, but that’s ok.  I suppose it’s arguable that it’s keeping me out of trouble.  Maybe.  Still hiking both weekend days, which has been glorious, as usual/to be expected.  There have also been some interesting developments of a romantic nature – which I’m quite certain I’m jinxing just by mentioning it aloud, but whatever – which I’m not going to tell you about, dearest, dearest reader, because it would be inappropriate to do so.

I fired my acupuncturist.  Sent him an email on Monday morning stating that I wouldn’t be able to make it to my appointment that afternoon – that I’d had some things come up at work – but that I’d see him on Thursday and have been following all of his suggestions.  He responded with some stuff about his 24-hour cancellation policy and whatnot (people usually offer to pay for the session anyway) and I told him to cancel Thursday’s appointment as well – maybe we can re-connect when I can give his schedule a higher priority rating.  Maybe I’ll post the email exchange tomorrow.

I’m still following his suggestions:  drinking a pro-biotic, drinking apple cider vinegar and no coffee.  It’s been over a week since my last cup of coffee.  I passed the coffee section in Whole Foods this evening and took a big whiff – bad move.  It smelled SO good.  Maybe in a month I’ll start drinking coffee again.  I hope so:  I love coffee.  But for now, it’s tea.  Black tea.  In a similar fashion to my coffee requests, people look at me like I’m a weirdo when I say that I don’t want anything (milk, sugar) in my tea.  Strange.

Last week I had a hard time getting my brain to settle down:  it was like the wheels were spinning incredibly fast and not catching on anything – not linking up with the gears.  It was going a million miles a minute, but I couldn’t grab ahold of one thing and run with it.  Thoughts were whirling in and out, but they were fleeting and not staying put long enough for me to examine or do anything with them.  This week has been a little better:  I’ve been able to get the gears to catch and have had some really productive days at work.  I’ve at least made a start on a couple of the tasks that were sitting undone on my to-do list.

I ordered a Franklin Covey planner for my dad today and had it shipped to his office.  He loves Stephen Covey and a buddy of mine was regaling me about the productivity-adding aspects of the planning system (which, apparently, was developed by Ben Franklin).  So I figure I’ll photocopy a couple of the pages to get a feel for how the system works and incorporate some of it into my own life.  My dad can try the whole program.

I bought new snowshoes this week.  My old ones have probably 400 or so miles on them and I was really hoping they’d make it through the season, but I discovered a rip in the deck last week (which I was able to semi-repair) and they’ve been making funny noises, so I figured it would be safer to just get a new pair and have the old ones as a beater pair.

Speaking of beaters, I’m also looking for a beater car/SUV with four doors and decent clearance that I can use to shuttle people to and from the Catskills.  I’ve been doing a lot more hiking with other people lately and my two-seater just doesn’t cut it – I feel bad that we’ve been taking Scott’s Toyota Yaris (lol, “the big car”) up to the Cats every weekend.  Plus, having the truly bigger vehicle would satisfy my control issues.  And some safety issues:  Scott’s car ain’t exactly made for the snow.  I’ve been checking eBay; maybe I’ll explore other options as well.

So that’s about it.  I’m off to bed.  Maybe I’m wound down enough from the day and maybe I’m not.  It doesn’t really matter because I’ll be asleep five minutes after my head hits the pillow.  I remember a time when I had trouble falling asleep.  Hell, I still remember a time when I didn’t fall asleep, I just passed out; I never woke up, I just came to.  I do not remember that time fondly.

And so, dear reader, that’s all the verbal fondling you’ll get from me tonight.  Sleep well.  I love you, I want you, I need you – and three out of four ain’t bad, as the bard says.

*** *** ***

Alternate Scooby Doo Ending

And so, dear reader, that’s all the verbal fondling you’ll get from me tonight.  Sleep well.  Rye ruv roo, rye ront roo, rye reed roo – and three out of three is a perfect fucken score, so gimme those scooby-snacks or I’ll do more than just hump Velma’s leg while you and Freddie cry in the corner, knowing you’re next.

*** *** ***

Alternate Nondualist Ending

And so, dear reader, that’s all the verbal fondling you’ll get from me tonight.  Sleep well.  I love you, I want you, I need you because I am you.

*** *** ***

Alternate Fight Club Ending

And so, dear reader, that’s all the verbal fondling you’ll get from me tonight.  Sleep well.  I love you, I want you, I need you because I am you, and as soon as we get done fucking Helena Bonham Carter’s brains out, we’re gonna blow some shit up – especially if said shit happens to be cornflower blue.  Because we’re simply itching to destroy something beautiful.

Ok, ok, ok.  I know it’s been way too long.  Sheesh.  I’ve been busy.

Life is good, dear reader.  Busy, but very very good.

So here’s the skinny for the past couple of weeks or so:

I’ve been hiking (duh).  On the weekends.  Both days.  Lots of miles, lots of mountains.  Fifteen mountains and about 87 miles since the winter started.  My snowshoes *might* make it through this season.  I mean, they’ll make it, but I’m seriously considering getting a new pair.  I’ve already been at them with a file to re-work the grip on the outside, but even the new notches are quickly getting worn away.  I’m 150/420 for the Grid and have 11 mountains left to climb in the month of January.  I won’t get to all of them this January, but that’s cool:  9 for January of 2012 is totally doable.  I fucken love hiking . . . er, peakbagging.  Speaking of, check out this trip report from my friend Kevin – it’s a pretty nuts story (and very well written).

Work is going pretty well as well.  My nominal boss called me last Thursday while I was working from home, just to go over some ideas about “how to make Ted some crazy money.”  How cool is that?  Hopefully, we’ll be able to work something out in the very near future that will start netting me even bigger bucks than I’m already making.  I’m sure I’ve already mentioned it, but work is also paying for me to take a bar prep class so that I can take the NJ bar exam at the end of February.  Class is in Newark from 6-10PM, Monday through Friday.  It started a couple of weeks ago and continues through most of February.  It’s a real pain in the ass, but whatever:  I’d never find the time to study on my own and I’m learning a lot.

I get home kind of late and am missing out hardcore on the stuff I normally do in the evenings, but that’s cool – it’s only for a few more weeks.  I’m still working every day, but not nearly as much.  Same amount of work to do, but less time in which to do it.  Again, the people at work have been great about working with my schedule:  I’m usually in around 9/9:30 and out by 5.  The stuff that used to take me a day or so is now taking a couple of days and things are kinda sorta starting to pile up, but I don’t give a rat’s ass – which is (mentally) a really cool place for me to be.

As I mentioned, I took last Thursday off from work – I just had too many things of a non-work nature that needed to get done and I sure as hell wasn’t going to get them done in the office.  I took care of my laundry, house cleaning, and various other errands, and made appointments with the regular doctor for a check-up (“the works” is what I asked for), as well as an appointment with an acupuncturist.

That appointment was yesterday.  It was pretty interesting.  We sat down for a few minutes and discussed my lifestyle and general health-related habits.  I told the acupuncturist that I think I’m running at about 85-95% capacity/efficiency and that what I’m looking for is a tune-up:  I want to get to 95-98% capacity/efficiency.  I think he picked up what I was putting down, but we’ll see next week:  I have two more appointments (Monday and Thursday).  I’ll know better after Monday’s appointment if the acupuncture is working and whether I want to continue to see the guy.  White guy.  Irish guy.  Studied in China and a couple of other places in Asia.  He’s young, but I think he knows what he’s doing.  Again, we’ll see.  I’m reserving judgment at the moment.

After discussing my health/eating habits and whatnot, he told me to undress to my underwear and get on the table.  I was like “um, do you have a towel or anything, ’cause I’m one of those commando guys and I’m not really sure you want the whole show on the first date.”  So I ended up just stripping down to my suit pants and rolling up the legs.  It worked out fine.  He stuck a bunch of needles in my legs to start and attached wires to them to increase the flow of ions between the points.  Then he did this thing where he put these little silly putty cones (some kind of -wort) on my feet, lit them on fire, and pulled them off one at a time as they started to burn my feet.  Pretty cool.  I experimented with when I told him I could feel them and found that there was a second or two of lag time between when I felt them burn and when they actually did.  Which is to say that I’d say “ok” (meaning I could feel the burn), he’d pull the thingie off, and a second or two later I’d *really* feel the burn.  Pretty cool.  Er, hot.

After that, he stuck more needles in my legs and some in my arms and attached wires among them.  He said “it’s like conducting a symphony.”

Supposedly, I was to feel better/different when I walked out than when I walked in.  I can’t say that I really did, but again, I’m reserving judgment.  I figure if I were way out of shape or all kinds of fucked up (in a different way, I mean) that I’d've felt much different, but I’m in pretty good shape and wasn’t there for any kind of major overhaul:  just a tune-up.  Some fine-tuning of my meat suit.  I felt kind of the way I do when I get out of a particularly intense/meditative yoga class.  No great “heightened awareness” per se, but a little more open.

Following his advice, I picked up some apple cider vinegar, some kind of yogurty pro-biotic drink, herring and something else that I can’t remember, so that I can start getting some better molecule stuff into me.  We talked a bit about whether I was ready to quit smoking (he said he can help with that) and I said not really.  We also talked about quitting drinking coffee for about 30 days, after which I can have a cup once a month or once a week or something (I don’t remember).

So I didn’t have any coffee today.  Weird.  I really only drink two things:  coffee and water.  I’ve been drinking Gatorade more often after hiking to replenish my electrolytes and adding Nuun capsules to my water while I’m hiking for the same reason.  But normally, it’s just coffee and water.  Well, now it’s just tea and water.  I’m kind of surprised that I made the decision to follow his advice and quit drinking coffee so easily – I’d've thought it would have been more of a struggle for me.  I fucken love coffee.  I fucken love coffee.  So nice I had to say it twice.  Weird.  Again:  weird.  It’s pretty cool to know that I have that kind of willingness to change (ostensibly for the better).

I have an appointment with the regular doctor on Thursday.  Complete physical:  blood work and everything.  I hope “the works” doesn’t involve the finger-in-the-ass thing, but I’ll cross that bridge when I get to it.  My doctor’s name is Cynthia (Cindy, I think) and she’s a nurse practitioner.  I haven’t seen her in a year or two, but from what I remember, she was kinda cute.  Maybe I can finagle her into buying me dinner before she sticks her finger up my butt.  =/  I’ll let you know.

I’m going to cross-reference both the regular meat suit doctor and the acupuncturist with one another:  tell them about each other and see what I can learn from both of them.  They might have suggestions for each other.  No threesomes, though, I think:  unless Cindy knows a cute GIRL acupuncturist, in which case it’ll totally be game on.  We can take the tuned-up meat suit out for a spin – burn some rubbers and all that.

Yeah, I think I’m going to dream about hot chick NPs in fishnets, stilettos and black latex sticking needles into me tonight.

Peace out, dear reader; if I were you, I’d be wishing I were me right about now.

I’m on a plane.  Again.  To Denver this time, for a conference-type thingie.  This big law firm has put together a three-panel presentation for its clients and attorneys tomorrow.  I’m sitting on the first two panels.  Should be interesting.  I suppose I’m a bit nervous – or rather, I think I should be nervous, but I’m not.  Not sure why:  I’ve done absolutely no prep for either of the panels – not even read the presentation slides yet – and I’m not so well-versed in current events in corporate governance that I can do this on the fly (at least, I don’t think so).  This will also be my first time sitting on a panel like this, so by all rights I should be nervous.  We also have an appointment with this huge mutual fund just after the plane lands – it’s a sales thing and I have no idea what I’m supposed to say.  My current plan for both is to sit quietly, make eye contact with everyone and look serious and smart.

I feel pretty good.  Took the day off yesterday because I had too many things to do to get ready for this trip; it would have been a nightmare to try to squeeze everything in between a full day’s work and bedtime.  Plus, I only had about 11 hours of sleep over the weekend (5.5 Friday night and 5.5 Saturday night).  I hiked about 24 miles between the two days, so calling out sick/WFH was a good way to catch up on the sleep I missed.  I’m not sick, but if I’d gone to work (on time) yesterday after 6 hours of sleep, I’d have been well on my way to being sick.  I got all my errands done yesterday, though I ended up squeezing a lot in at the end of the day and went to bed later than I wanted.

No matter:  I was up on time and am on the plane now, so I didn’t miss my flight.  Everything after that is gravy.  Make eye contact, look serious, look smart.  Speak with conviction, don’t let the voice waver, and remember:  if anyone gets in your face, there’s a real good chance you’ll kick their ass and anyway, you’re WAY cooler than a bunch of weenies getting together to talk about corporate governance hot topics.

The plane ride is 3.5/4 hours long.  I have no idea how long we’ve been in the air, but I’m certain that I’m in the window seat and have had to pee since before we boarded the plane.  We just made it.  The idiot sales guy who booked my seat (and who happens to be sitting in first class), booked me under “Ted Wallace” instead of Edward, apparently didn’t use my Continental OnePass number (yes, I know how snooty that sounds), and didn’t send me any of the flight confirmation details, so it took a few minutes to get me checked in while all this shite got sorted.  I’m about five rows up from the back of the plane, stuffed in like cattle, and if I pee in my suit it’ll probably soak the seat too, and I have to sit in both for the next couple of hours – and I’m only guessing at how long we’ve been in the air.  So I think I’ll hold it for now.  Shouldn’t have let them take my cup.  =/

On the upside, the commercials make the new Harry Potter movie (HP & the G of F) look pretty good – and there are only three commercials playing in a loop, so I get to see it again every couple of minutes or so.

I wonder if there’s like a club I can join that will give me a patch or a pin or something for the length of time I’ve gone without having sex.  SOMEone’s got to be impressed by it.  They have churches and Planned Parenthoods in Denver, right?  One of those places will know.

Yes, yes, dear reader, I know:  they probably also have massage parlors in Denver too.  But that’s not what I’m looking for.  The physical act, yes – definitely – but I want more (yes, yes, I know “beggars can’t be choosers”), I want fucking communion:  an emotional and physical experience.  Hookers aren’t really all that emotional.  I mean, so I’ve heard and not in the movies.  A spiritual sexual experience would also be nice, but I don’t want to get too picky.  Don’t get me wrong:  neither would I turn it down.

Why TF do I always end up blogging about my desire for sex on these plane rides?  Weird.

I kind of like travelling.  I ate the little packet of green olives that came with my $7 in-flight snack pack (the “Select Snack Box”), and I hate olives.  Food ceases to be a matter of taste for me and becomes entirely about the caloric intake.  And my awareness is usually heightened when I’m travelling (by which I mean I’m more “on my toes”, not that I’m more psychic or spiritually fit than usual), so I’m pretty sure the physical effect is energy expenditure and thus the need for more fuel.  So yeah, I’ll eat whatever’s put in front of me, and I’ll eat it ALL.  The guy next to me was eyeing the bag of mini pretzels on my lap and I had to lean over and tell him I’d cut his bitch ass to ribbons before he could say stewardess if he didn’t stop eye-fucking my goddamn pretzels.  He’s now gently weeping next to me and pretending to be asleep.  If one more sob escapes his throat, I’m going to have another little chat with him about how my hearing is an extension of my personal space.  I’m also eating his Azar Fruit & Nut Mix, which tastes all the sweeter because it came with his soul.

MotherFUCK there’re a lot of hotties on this plane.  I need to have a word with the dipshit sales guy as to why I’m not sitting next to any of them.  I’d much prefer to be blogging about the woman next to me:  the loveliness of the curve of the side of her breast and how it feels when it touches my arm as she leans over to look out the window, “Excuse me, Ted, I’m sorry to keep bumping you.  It’s been ever so nice to meet you and for the last time: no, I don’t want to trade seats with you, I’m fine with looking past your cheek and smelling your man musk.  Would it be ok if I just caressed your ear and neck with my tongue for another minute?  I promise I won’t bother you again for the rest of the flight.  *giggle*”

Yeah, I’m moving to fucking Denver.

And yeah, fuck the sales guy who booked me this shitty seat next two old men whose mixed scent of cowardice and arrogance make me want to eat them last.  Seriously, buddy?  Corona Light?

The clocks on my computer and my iPhone (in airplane mode) both say it’s about 1:30PM right now, so I figure we’re about halfway there.  We’re supposed to land in Denver at 1PM local time, which would be 3PM normal people time, aka “ET” or “EST” or “East Coast”.

If I get laid in Denver, does that mean I’m in the mile-high club, or is being in an airplane a requirement for that?

In the early pages of The Tao of Jeet Kune Do, Bruce Lee’s notes are quoted thus:

Understanding oneself happens through a process of relationships and not through isolation.

While I see some truth in that, I think I also need a balance of relationships and isolation.  Solitude is really what I mean:  I need times of solitude.  I never got why Superman needed a Fortress of Solitude, but something really clicked for me this morning:  remember the part in the most recent “gritty reboot” movie, where Superman takes Lois way up into the stratosphere and they can hear all the voices of the world crying for help and whatnot?  All of a sudden, the whole Fortress of Solitude thing really made sense:  it’s a place he can go where he can enjoy the silence – regroup, consolidate, become one with himself again.  Then he’s able to go back out and face the help-crying voices again.

I had a busy day yesterday, and some of that busy-ness overlapped the times during the day I routinely have to myself.  I met a mentor for lunch; normally I sit by myself in the cafeteria and read while I eat.  I had to run home to let Christine and the cat into my apartment because the door I had left open for the PSE&G guy was closed by said guy; I had just sat down to eat dinner and read at Whole Foods.  So I had to take my dinner to my next appointment and wolf it down there.  While I was eating, a friend of mine was leaning over into my face/food space, wondering what I was eating.  She got too close and I snapped at her like a starved dog, “get the fuck away from my food, woman.”  Whoa.  I apologized quickly, but the damage was done.

As I’m sure you know all too well, dear reader, I’ve been alone for quite some time now.  I know that I’ve come to enjoy it, but I what I did not realize (at least not so overtly) until last night was that I’ve come to depend upon solitude.  I need it.  If I don’t have at least short periods of being alone with myself, time to collect and regroup, I may as well be carrying kryptonite around in my pocket. 

I think it may be time for some sort of retreat for me.  Solo hiking or getting engrossed in a novel for a few hours are usually my preferred means of solitude:  maybe I’ll take a day off work next week and burn some miles and climb some mountains by myself.  This weekend is already booked with group hikes.

So yeah: 

Dear Bruce Lee,

Don’t go forgetting about balance.  It’s the yin that defines the yang – the solitude that defines the isolation. 

See also melissa’s Tao Te Ching reference in her comment to yesterday’s post.

Sincerely,

Ted

Tonight was spent in – in blessed solitude.  Had dinner with Scott (as per our usual Tuesday routine), but instead of going to the Starbucks on 17 and ogling the baristas or Campmor across the road and ogling the gear, I came home and took care of one or two things on my list.  I filed some grip back into my snowshoes:  they have a few hundred miles on them at this point and the notches around the outside that give them the 360° traction are pretty much worn smooth.  So I filed new notches in and now my right forearm is sore.  Haha – I know what you’re thinking, but that’s the left one.  If I keep the filing up, they’ll eventually start to match and I’ll have no snowshoes left.

Cleaned a bunch of stuff off my kitchen table – put it away or threw it away – and re-packed my winter pack so that I’m a bit more efficient in getting ready this weekend.  Sunday is still up in the air – probably something in the bushwack range; Saturday will be Fir and Big Indian with Scott and Debbie and her AMC backpacking group, then on to Eagle with Scott and out McKinley Hollow.  About 10 miles, so we should sleep well on Saturday night.

I cleaned a bunch of stuff off my desk the other night, so my horizontal surfaces are starting to look a bit clearer – I’m getting closer to my feng shui goal for the winter.

And that’s about it.  My laundry needs to be done, but I still have a clean undershirt for tomorrow, so it can wait.  I haven’t done shit at work in the last couple of days – hopefully tomorrow will be different.  We’ll see.  I need to stop effing with my peakbagging spreadsheet while I’m at work.  I’ve got a bunch of long-term projects that I really need to get moving on, and a couple of loose ends to take care of for my bar application.  Yeah, hopefully I’ll be more on my game tomorrow.

I’ve had the beginning of this quote in my head today:

The path of the righteous man is beset on all sides by the iniquities of the selfish and the tyranny of evil men.  Blessed is he who, in the name of charity and good will, shepherds the weak through the valley of darkness, for he is truly his brother’s keeper and the finder of lost children.  And I will strike down upon thee with great vengeance and furious anger those who would attempt to poison and destroy My brothers.  And you will know My name is the Lord when I lay My vengeance upon thee.

Here’s the clip, in case you don’t remember it:

The only part that’s been running on a loop in my head is the very first part, “The path of the righteous man is beset on all sides…”

By all kinds of shit.  Not just the stuff in (the fictional) Ezekiel 25:17.

I wonder if I’m a righteous man.  I wonder if the karma I’m accumulating in this life is good or not.

Righteousness is a good thing, I believe.  Self-righteousness isn’t.  When I’m looking at myself and wondering whether this adjective applies to me, I can’t tell if it’s righteousness or self-righteousness.  The definitions and etymology of the word suggest that in order to be righteous, one must be God-backed.  Either on a mission from god, or acting on his/her behalf.  So it kind of stands to reason that one can’t apply this adjective to oneself – only god can do it

I don’t really go in for all the god-stuff:  I’m agnostic.  But I still have misgivings about applying this word to me.  It implies being on the right side of judgment, and I really don’t go in for judgment either.  I’m a perspectivist:  things aren’t inherently valuable or valuable in an absolute sense; they’re only valuable from one or more specific points of view.  ”One man’s trash…”

All that aside, I still wonder if I’m a righteous man.  Not because I want god’s backing – probably just because I desire validation of my thoughts and actions.  Weird, huh?

THERE IS NO ABSOLUTE VALIDATION OF THOUGHTS OR ACTIONS.  Kind of scary and disheartening to think about, no?

Life is good, dear reader:  life is good.

And busy.  Hoo-boy, is it busy.  What a great weekend.  I climbed North Dome and Sherrill on Friday with Heather, Tom, Debbie, Doug (whom I sort of know from the forum but hadn’t actually met in person) and some dude named Ed.  After dinner and dropping Debbie off, I swung over to my aunt and uncle’s house to catch the tail-end of their NYE party.  Saturday was spent (barely) sleeping in, running a few errands and heading over to my friend Wendy’s house for a NYD get-together.  After that, I picked up Valerie at her sister’s place in Rutherford, met up with Scott for dinner and got up not-too early on Sunday to go hiking with Heather, Tom, Scott, Katie, Val and Mike (another guy I know from the forum but hadn’t met irl).  We climbed Roundtop and Kaaterskill High Peak.  It was a good day.

I’ve sort of cleaned off my desk at home –  I need to adjust my feng shui for the rest of the winter, which is apparently already planned out.  Anything not related to winter peakbagging or the bar exam has got to go.  Those are really the only two things I’ll be doing between now and the end of March.

The bar is at the end of February and my review class starts next week.  It’ll be in Newark from 6-10PM, M-F.  Weekends will be spent snowshoeing in the Catskills.  Anything that doesn’t involve bar review or gear repair/prep simply won’t qualify as important for the next three months.

Except for sex.  I’ll make room in my schedule for that.  Match.com has not been particularly kind to me thusfar, but that’s no biggie – it’s an internet dating site and I have a love/hate relationship with those f*ckers anyway.  I’m open-minded but cynical and jaded, which is really the perfect combination for attracting a girl online, right?  We’ll see.

I had a couple of dates with this Russian chick who was pretty cool, but I haven’t heard from her in a couple of weeks.  I dropped the ball, but I did so on purpose.  Sadly, the test came out negative:  it seems that she’s not particularly interested.  And by “test” I mean I left the ball in her court to be the next one to initiate contact.  And she hasn’t.  Win some, lose more.  No big deal; I’m not in it for the chase right now anyway.  I’m looking for the weak/disoriented one so I can separate her from the pack and pounce.

Not really, but sort of.  I think I’m attracted to girls that need “saving”.  I want to be the knight in shining armor, riding to the rescue.  Thing is, the chicks that need “saving” aren’t really what I’m looking for in a woman.  I’m looking for someone who’s got her shit together and is going somewhere – anywhere, I don’t care.  I don’t need unbridled ambition or blind monomaniacal-ness, just not someone who’s maintaining a semi-acceptable status quo.  If I don’t like something about me or my life, I change it.  Character building can really suck, but it offers great rewards.  So yeah, I’m looking for a chick with character.

Fuck me, the looking blows, though.  Needle in a haystack and I’m not even sure if I’m looking in the right stack.

Again, no biggie:  you’ll get no whining from me tonight, dear reader.  Life is good and I wouldn’t have it any other way because it’s NOT any other way.  It is the way it is and I’m cool with that.  For the purposes of this sentence, I’m trying to figure out what part of my life I’d trade for a girl right now, and I’m not coming up with anything.  So yeah, we’ll see what happens.  I’ll keep you posted.

Again, I’m not really in it for the chase right now.  I’m not going to pursue and attempt to make something out of nothing.  The Russian chick was pretty cool, but I need it to go both ways – communication and desire and whatnot, that is.

Anyway, today was a day of exhaustion for me.  I could tell you why, but it’s probably NSFW and you already know enough tidbits about my inner workings.  Possibly that I didn’t have an opportunity to use my light box for most of this weekend.  I doubt it’s dehydration or malnutrition.  And probably not lack of human contact, though I could use some more of the full-frontal-skin-touching-with-a-girl thing.  *sigh* hold me.

lol fag.  It might be time to watch 300 or Gladiator again and/or read some Hemingway.  Right.  ’Cause there’s nothing gay in that sentence.  ”Do you like gladiator movies, Timmy?”  ”Ever been in a Turkish prison?”  Man-up, Ted, and stop being so damned sensitive.

My priorities are more or less straight (by which I mean figured out).  I’m off to bed now; hopefully to wake up refreshed and to have a productive day tomorrow.

I have Apocalyptica playing in the background right now.  A very sad version of “Master of Puppets” is currently playing.  Or maybe it’s just sad because the last track was “Farewell”, which (imho) is a sad song.

I don’t know – have a listen and you tell me, dear reader.  I think I’ve posted that one before.  It always makes me think of love lost and things left unsaid.  Or un-done.

But I’m not too much in the mood to get into all that weepy shite right now.  Things are pretty good on my end, dear reader.  How about you?

Work is slow this week and I’ve been able to catch up on a handful of things that needed doing.  I finally paid my $1200 in back taxes and took care of my car’s registration renewal.  I need to get down to Annapolis to pay a traffic fine and get copies of the court records of it and then swing over to DC to show them proof that my fines are paid so they can un-suspend my DC driver’s license, so that I can get a copy of my DC driver’s abstract – all for my NJ Bar application.  My NJ license abstract should be in the mail.

I posted a trip report for this weekend’s hikes over at the forum today – I should probably dump that in before this post so I don’t lose that piece of writing.  Not that it’s necessarily worth the read, but because this site is basically my pile of writings, whatever the nature.  Except for work stuff.  I’ve written some damned good emails for work, but I doubt you’d be interested in reading those; nor do I particularly want to save them outside of my Outlook at work.  =/

I need to get back to writing fiction.  I mentioned a few posts ago that I have an idea for a novel – though it’s not necessarily a novel idea – well, I’ve got about six of those iPhone voice memos with ideas for the story, just sitting there waiting to be written.  We’ll see if I ever get to it.

I’m currently reading Matter by Iain M. Banks.  It’s ok.  I’m able to put it down and I’m not dying to pick it back up right now, which means it’s barely ok.  There are only a couple of hundred pages left and I’m not exactly sure where he’s going with it or how it will end – which would be a good thing if it were a bit more exciting a book.  I prefer fiction I can’t put down, but hey, that’s just me.

Has anybody out there read any David Foster Wallace?  Infinite Jest has been recommended to me a couple of times that I can remember – once more and it will be three and then I’ll have to read it.  And no, if you mention it in the comments, that won’t count as #3 – it needs to be random and unexpected.

So yeah, kinda boring, I know.  I’m just not feeling all that excited about anything in particular right now.  I have a handful of things running through my head, several of which are nunya and a couple of which aren’t worth the pixels.

I feel like writing and I don’t feel like writing tonight, dear reader.  Physically, I feel like writing.  I wish I knew how to play the guitar or piano or some instrument with my fingers.  The only thing I can play is the goddamned QWERTY keyboard, and nobody wants to hear a recording of that.  But the way my fingers are moving across the keys right now is simply glorious.  One of the guys I was hiking with in Taiwan was talking to the hike leader about taking piano lessons (the leader teaches them and the guy has been playing for a decade or more – he was like 22 maybe) – his thing was that he had no problem memorizing the piece and playing it back for the teacher, but he had a “hard time with the interpretation part”.  That’s the part where you put some emotion into the notes.  Sure, the music sounds nice if you play the notes in the right order, each for the right amount of time, with the correct spacing in between.  But to really get across the feeling of the music – to elicit an emotional (or visceral) response in the witness, which is a defining characteristic of any art for me – means that the notes have to be played with both the left side of the brain and the right side of the brain.  The sequential and holistic, respectively.

That’s what I’m doing right now, dear reader.  Not necessarily making art, but flow-pecking away at my keyboard, putting thought and feeling into the words, the meanings behind them, and the actual striking of the keys.  Some strikes are soft and smooth and liquid; some are the cracks of my finger-hammers, adding emphasis to what I’m saying. 

So my friend Heather was once described as someone who was walking around with her hands out, palms up in offering.   In her hands she held her love and she went from person to person, offering it to them.  Offering them her love.  But nobody was accepting it from her, let alone exchanging it for theirs.  And Heather then flipped that analogy (metaphor?) around to describe me.  And she was right.  And that was a joyous occasion for me, to have such  wonderful description applied to me – because it fit so well and felt so fitting.  And it was a shitty feeling to have my feelings/vibes/emotions pinned down like that, a butterfly on the lepidopterist’s board. 

Because who really wants to be walking around, trying to give away their love to anyone who will take it, hoping that whoever does take it is worthy of it and will have a ≥ love to exchange for it?  That’s a crappy spot to be in.  Especially if one plays a lot of chess.  It’s like throwing capital pieces away in exchange for pawns that might actually be queens in disguise (which, as someone who plays a lot of chess can tell you, dear reader, doesn’t happen) or in exchange for better board position.  For what?  The pawns (years?  days?) that are getting slowly picked off with no capital pieces left to protect them?

Yay morbidity.  Cry me a river, you fucking emo punk.  It’s not emo if you’re not crying - Right.  Now.

So yeah, match.com is just another internet dating site, lol.  Nothing to report yet on that front, dear reader, though I hope for at least a funny story or two in the next six months for my hundred-twenty dollars.

Work is going pretty well.  I’ve got some kind of weird business pheromones going on right now:  all kinds of people want to meet with me.  Maybe to sell me things, maybe to just network.  They’re kind of coming out of the woodwork.  People are listening to my opinions and asking me if they can Ctrl+C & Ctrl+V some of the shit from my emails into their articles (and if it’s ok to give me a “thanks” in the article).  More niceguyted is slipping into my emails than I’m used to.  It feels weird – like I’m doing something wrong.  But people who know what the fuck they’re talking about because they’ve been in this business for fucking ever are nodding their heads when I’m expressing an opinion about how things are or should be or what’s coming down the pike.  I keep waiting to get the “what the fuck do you think you were doing when you said that??” email.  But it hasn’t come yet, and I’m getting just too busy to run every email by someone else to see if what I’m saying qualifies as a good line for the company to take.  Things come across my desk at the end of the day on the other side of the country that need an answer NOW, and everybody else has gone home to have their glass of wine while eating dinner with the wife and kids.

I have a lunch meeting tomorrow with an IR guy from the midwest I know from twitter, and will be training in this executive compensation modeling software on Thursday and Friday.  I’m looking forward to that:  I know what most of the words mean, but it’ll help to learn how to string them together into sentences and paragraphs.  By which I mean actually know what the fuck I’m talking about instead of kind of halfway faking it. 

My bar application is just about finished.  I’m going to mail it in tomorrow, so that I’m well ahead of the 12/15 due date.  There are a couple of things I need to get to complete the application, but that will require making a trip down to Annapolis and DC to straighten out some fines and get license abstracts and stuff.  I’ll take a day off next week and do that.  Meanwhile, I’m sending emails, editing documents, frigging around with spreadsheets, downloading stuff and all kinds of other things at work, while listening to bar prep lectures on constitutional law and criminal law and real property in the background.  I have no idea how much of that I’ll actually retain, but I figure it’s better than nothing.

So yeah, I’ve had enough AyePhone interruptions here at the Starbucks on 17 south that my finger-peck/flow groove is kind of gone.  Sort of.  I think I’ve just run out of things to say.  Mark your calendar, dear reader:  that’s a first.

Yes, yes, I know, dear reader:  it’s been far too long.  How’ve you been?

So.  The last two weeks.  Here’s a quick run-down of what I’ve been up to, then I’m off to read my book (The Algebraist by Iain M. Banks):

Got back from Taiwan and haven’t stopped moving.  Barely had time to do the laundry or a more than a cursory apartment cleaning.  That said, I don’t live in filth:  I have a place for (pretty much) everything, and (pretty much) everything is in its place.

Work is paying for me to take the NJ bar exam (and the $3k prep class), so that I can be the company’s General Counsel.  With the exception of (approximately) three things, I finished the application yesterday.  It needs to be in by 12/15.  I’ll have to send it in semi-incomplete:  driving records and the like will take some time to get (NJ and DC licenses, plus a 5-year old ticket in MD to pay for).  Pain in the ass, but it’s kind of forcing me to tie off a bunch of loose ends that have been hanging out for a while now.

I bought a bunch of new hiking gear and have been bagging peaks like a madman – 8 this past weekend alone.  The hikes on Saturday and Sunday were both awesome.  Katie’s also been coming hiking on Sundays, which has been particularly wonderful.  Everybody says she’s a natural, and I agree.

I joined Match.com tonight.  Not really sure why, except that it’s been a long time coming.  I’ll be happy to cross this one off of the sites I’ve tried.  Six month subscription – I’ll keep you posted as to how it goes.  Hopefully I’ll have some fun internet dating stories for y’all.  Obviously, falling in love would be the bestest, but I’ll be happy with a relatively intelligent and achingly beautiful make-out artist.  Shit, that’ll probably qualify as ‘love’ for me – I’m pretty shallow, you know.

Work is on/off crazy busy, but it’s all good stuff:  things I want to do.  I have an office with a window and a door and everything, which makes it MUCH easier to stay late.  Which I’ve been doing quite a bit.

I have three regular scrabble opponents on my iPhone app (all of whom I know) and three regular chess opponents on a separate iPhone app (none of whom I know).  And I’ve been devouring sci-fi novels like it’s Thanksgiving at the homeless shelter.  So, like it or not, I’m getting smarter and sharper every day.  Don’t be scared, I’m too busy (and slightly content) to become a tower-shooter just yet.

Slightly content.  Mostly content.  The winds of change are a-blowin’ – I felt that tonight as I was driving from somewhere to anotherwhere.  Not while I was signing up for Match – I’m pretty much just going through the motions on that one, not holding out for any kind of success.  I’m a shitty internet dater; I just don’t come off all that well in pixels.

Thanksgiving is my favorite holiday.  Happy Thanksgiving, if’n I don’t talk to you, dear reader.

Where did 2010 go?

I am come from the shores of Perelandra, where the soft honeyed fruits drip their nectar on my lips with naught but the slightest pressure from my fingertips.  It is the place called Elysium by some, and I speak now of ambrosia.  Others call it Venus, though I know not their word for its fruit.

“But Perelandra is an ocean world,” you say, “though there be fruits of flavour divine in that place, there are no shores.”

And I would say that you speak true, but that I still come from the shores, for the shores are where the seas end and I am not welcome there on Perelandra.  For there are but two who dwell in that place:  a King and a Queen and they are innocence personified.  They know neither clothing nor pain, wisdom nor shame; they are the untouched.  Vice does not exist on Perelandra, except that which dwelt within me; nor is virtue known in that place.

So come, sit:   your hearth is warm enough tonight to hold back the cold, the candles’ golden glow is enough to hold back the darkness – for a little while longer - and I’ve the time and inclination to spin for you a yarn. 

******   ******   ******

“Melt your fucken face, man, I’ll tell you what!”

“Huh?”

“This fucken squeeze, man, what’s it fucken called again?”

“What?”

“The drug, man, the drug we’ve been doing all night.  What’s it called??”

“No idea.”

“Well I’ll tell ya, it’s fucken good.  What were we talking about again?”

“Huh?”

“Dude, you were telling me about banging that chick – the one from Venus or wherever.  The dream you had.  She was hot.  A queen or something, and you were like totally raping her in front of her boyfriend.”

“The King?”

“Yeah, yeah, the king.  You were like fucking this queenie chick against her will in front of her king-man boyfriend and she was all like ‘ooh ooh, give it to me.’  Goddamn this is good shit.  What did you call it again?”

******   ******   ******

When I was a boy and just out of seminary school, I went to a Doors concert and heard Jim Morrison sing his song ‘Soft Parade’ – it changed my life.  I was raised to be a good Christian man and enrolled to become a priest just as I was hitting puberty.  I was uneasy with the thoughts and feelings I was having.  Maybe ‘uneasy’ isn’t a strong enough term.  The feelings, I just knew they were evil and I didn’t know what to do about them.  I prayed and prayed, but it just didn’t seem to be working.  I would kneel at the foot of my bed for hours, head bent and hands folded, my knees bruising on the hard wood beneath them, and pray as I had been taught.  I begged the Holy Father to remove the evilness growing inside and outside of me and try not to think about the gap between my mattress and box spring.  It was hard, I mean really hard to go to sleep some nights with the evilness that seemed to be raging everywhere.  I could barely sit through class and I can’t tell you how many pencils broke in my balled fist as I attempted to keep my eyes on my book or on the blackboard, instead of askance at my classmates.  After I had been studying for the priesthood for about three years, I left.  I told them that I was going to take a sabbatical, but the truth was that I was succumbing to the evil.  It never left me, even as I poured my tainted heart and soul into my studies, begging the Lord take it from me or to help me understand why the evil plagued me so.  But those answers never came, and I am but a man, full of weakness.  I wandered about for a while, eventually stopping at a gathering in Gold Creek Park, where I heard Morrison’s voice and words, forever changing me.  That was July 25, 1969:  the Seattle Pop Festival in Woodinville WA.  I took my first drink that night and did my first drug during that Doors show.  Shortly after I lost my virginity in front of more people than I can remember, Led Zeppelin took the stage and the rest of my life is but a footnote to that night. 

It’s 5:30-something in the morning.  And I didn’t just wake up.  My plane landed Sunday late in the afternoon; I was up until around 11 on Sunday night and slept the day away on Monday.  I got up Monday evening around 5:30 and did my laundry and ran some errands.  Stopped by Scott’s place to chill with his cat Poseidon (Scott’s in FL for his brother’s wedding), then came home and read Foundation and Empire, the second of Asimov’s Foundation series.  Maybe it’s the third, but my understanding is that Prelude to Foundation was written after the rest of the books in the series.

I’ve cleaned my apartment a bit, smoked a bunch of cigarettes, and put my work paperwork in some semblance of order for tomorrow.  My plan is to go in wicked early and hopefully leave early.  I didn’t sleep on the flight back from Taiwan, which made for a 20-something hour day on Sunday, followed by around 18 hours of sleep (give or take – DST has me kind of messed up, too), so I’m not really sure where I am in terms of sleep schedule or how to get back to normal.  I really don’t want to have anything to do with those hard-wakeups – the ones where I really don’t want to get out of bed, even though it’s time to do so.  But I suppose they’re inevitable.

I hadn’t really planned anything work- or life-wise past this Taiwan trip.  Work-wise, I need to spend some time at my desk, sending well-written follow-up emails to the contacts I made.  I also need to put my expense report together – that’s going to be a doozie:  about $2k just for the hotel and conference.  It’ll be a nice chunk of change coming back to me, and by the goddess, if anybody second-guesses anything on that report, I’m going to shit on their keyboard and rub it in with their face.  I was surely not extravagant in my expenditures.

I also have a handful of emails sitting in my inbox that need responses and a couple of small projects to complete that I was working on while in Taiwan.  Email is kind of fucked up – they moved from one server to another on Saturday, so I need to figure out what’s going on with that.  The only emails in my inbox on my work iPhone are the ones I’ve received since Saturday, and none of my folders are present.  The Outlook on my computer won’t sync with the server, and, from some of the emails in my iPhone inbox, it would seem as though my rules and alerts have been disabled.  I can’t get onto the webmail function either, so I don’t know which emails are on the server and which aren’t.  I’ll be pretty pissed if all the emails between 10/29 and 11/6 have been lost.  Email is pretty important at my gig.

So beyond getting to the office, figuring out what the fuck is up with the email system, sending out my nice-to-meet-yous, putting my expense report together and finding out why the fuck I haven’t been given a key to the office yet, I really don’t know what to do with myself.  If I had a key to the office, I’d have gone in tonight and sent out the n-t-m-ys and put my expense report together, but fuck me, I’m not driving all the way to Bloomfield in the hope that the side door is unlocked.

Plus, I think some of the guys in the office are expecting some sort of report for me on how things went.  I’m actually kind of anxious about that and feeling a bit like I should be able to get right back to work, jetlag issues aside.  Well fuck that.  I’m going to go into the office in a couple of hours, coffee and taylor ham egg and cheese on an everything bagel salt pepper ketchup in hand, do as many of the things I can before I’m too tired to do any more, and go the fuck home.  The jetlag will work itself out, I’m sure, but I’m sure as hell not going to bend over backwards any farther than I already have.  Those motherfuckers barely gave me any time to prepare for this trip, so they can damn well hang out until I’m good and ready to give them my report – whatever the fuck that’s supposed to look like.

Humility, Ted:  humility.  A ”worker among workers” and all that. 

Yeah, right.  I’m trying.  I’m a much better worker when I’m not hanging out waiting for someone to unlock the door or fix the email system.

No idea what I’m doing this weekend.  Friday is my birthday and that’s the last I’ll say on that.  I don’t do birthday celebrations.  Luckily, I was sick unto death on by birthday last year (and for the sandwiching days as well).  I’ll probably do dinner with my family on Friday night because my sister wants to (it’ll be a good excuse to bring my mother flowers), but that’s about it. 

Hiking.  Definitely hiking on Saturday and/or Sunday.  I have a whole bunch of mountains to climb for my November grid, so there’s that.  I’m considering going on this winter camping deathmarch in the first couple of days of December and I’ll need to get out and do some wicked long hard hikes if I want to get in shape for that.

I’m currently feeling a kind of violent and restless loneliness that comes over me from time to time.  The one where I don’t return phone calls or emails because they all seem to be just one more straw on this camel’s already burdened back.  It’s not an entirely unwelcome feeling; I just wish I had a direction in which to point myself.

I’ll sigh here, if you don’t mind, dear reader.

*sigh*

Holy shit, District 9 was fucking awesome.  Phenomenal movie:  I was on the edge of my seat with adrenaline pumping the whole time.  It’s been a LONG time since I’ve seen a movie that really kept me going from start to finish.  Fantastic.  Like they say in NYC:  fanTAS-tic.

We’re over the Aleutian Islands right now, 2827 miles into the trip back to the States (4158 miles to go).  Time is so weird.  Check this out:

I left the hotel this morning at 7:30, got to Taipei Tao Yuan Airport about 40 minutes later, and checked in for my 10:30 flight to Tokyo Narita Airport.  I guess the flight must have been close to four hours, though it sure didn’t seem like it.  I really want to say we were only in the air for a couple of hours.  The plane definitely didn’t take off until 10:30, and I think it was about 2:30 by the time I was off the plane in Tokyo.  I had about three hours to kill at NRT (I’d basically been reading during the time not spent doing getting-on-or-off-a-plane stuff) before we took off at 5:30.

The flight from NRT to EWR is about 11 hours long.  We’re landing in Newark at about 3:30PM (daylight savings time – fall back an hour).

As far as Sunday, November 7, 2010 goes, I will technically spend only 8 hours traveling (7:30AM to 3:30PM), even though I will have spent 21 hours in transit.  Weird, huh?

The clock on my computer says 8:44AM.  Whatever the fuck that means.  I think that’s the time on the east coast, which means my body thinks it’s almost 9PM.  Whatever the fuck THAT means.  I’m not sure if that’s bedtime or what, but I think it’s close.  I’d basically just started sleeping through the night, too.

No biggie.  I’m kind of looking forward to seeing my stuff again – sleeping in my own bed and stuff like that.  Which is not to say that I’ve been itching to get home or anything – I’m pretty sure I’d have no problem getting used to living out of a suitcase, but the fact of the matter is that I DON’T currently live out of a suitcase, so it’ll be nice to get home and hear some Bach from my stereo with the dodgy speaker.  I guess what I’m trying to say is that I’m neither excited to get home, nor am I sad that my trip is over – or any extreme emotion in between.  The trip’s over, and that’s that.  I’m going back to routine (after a week or so of jetlag), and that’s that.

Before I started District 9, I finished House of Suns by Alastair Reynolds.  Great book.  Except for the end.  Very disappointing.  The bastard really shat the bed on this one.  I’m talking excellent idea, but horrible, horrible follow-through.  It’s an undisputable axiom of writing that “if you show the audience a gun in the first act, it HAS to go off in the third”.  Yes, there are certainly writers who break this rule, but you and I aren’t one of them, dear reader.  Well, I might be, but you’re certainly not.  Seriously:  best way to fuck up a book:  loose ends.  Plot threads that never get tied off.  Maybe it’s just a Mensa thing, but an author that leaves me wondering what happened to a character at the end of a story is rarely an author I will speak positively about.  Again, there are exceptions to this rule, but they only serve to prove them.  And Alastair Reynolds, you incredible genius of a fuckhead, YOU ARE NOT ONE OF THE EXCEPTIONS.

Dear Alastair’s editor/publisher/whatever:  you suck the big dirty dongus.  I’m talking moose cock.  Huge.  Gobble gobble, you fucking homo (I’m assuming you’re a dude – I don’t have the appropriate vocabulary words or metaphors if you’re a woman).  Get on the ball and make your boy write a fucking ending.  Are you even reading these books?  This guy could be one of the greats.  His concepts are completely original.  His ability to manipulate perspectives is something I’ve never come across before.  Ever.  And I’ve read a lot of books.  Apparently more than you, you fucking shit eater.

Seriously, dear reader:  the perspective manipulation thing is really awesome.  Nobody does it, and Reynolds does it so well. I think the only of Reynolds’ books I’ve left to read is Diamond Dogs, Turquiose Days, which I believe consists of two novellas.  I think most of his other books take place in the same basic universe, but this one (House of Suns) consists of completely different concepts.  It’s masterfully done, but THE ENDING FUCKING SUCKS.  I think there must have been another chapter that just didn’t get published.  Probably a handful of them that ended up in bin, but fuck, man, you could have picked one of them.  Ending the book on the note you did was like pissing in the meringue.  Or something.  What takes a long time to make and involves a lot of steps that have to be done just right in order for it to come out ok at all?  Not meringue, though that’s a nice image.  Your unborn child’s placenta?

By the way, dear reader, I have no idea how I’m going to find my car when I get to Newark.  I know I’m parked in one of the long-term lots – I think they’re 6 and 7 (I’m probably in 6 because it sounds closer), but I’m not entirely sure.  I left my ticket in the car, so as not to have to worry about losing it while I was away or trying to find it when I got back (smart thinking, no?), but I never wrote down (or even looked at) the lot/area identifiers where I parked.  I know generally where the car is in relation to one of the shuttle stops, but not much else.  I was wondering why I had that déjà vu/I’m forgetting something type of feeling when I got on the shuttle bus last week.  Oh well, at least it’ll be light outside when I get back and drive around in the shuttle bus for a while.

4517 miles in now; 2461 miles to go.  We’re technically over the Northwest Territories of Canada – just near the borders of British Columbia and Alberta.  I just watched the Bond flick Quantum of Solace.  It was ok; nothing special.  The chick with the Spanish accent was hot.  The clock on my computer says 11:28AM; it’s 1:28AM back in Asia, according to the trip info screen.  No idea how that works.  I suppose I could fall asleep right now, though I don’t really feel like doing so.  I don’t feel much like reading right now, either.  I have that book of Phil Dick’s short stories, but I think I’m going to just watch another movie.  4h 6mins to EWR.

Only a couple of hours left now.  1:52 to be exact.  5951 miles traveled; 1025 to go.  Yay for traveling halfway around the world.  Twice.  In a week.  I think.  I just watched Star Trek (the new one).  I saw it in the theaters when it came out – whenever that was.  Long enough ago that it was worth watching again (sort of), but not so long ago that I didn’t remember most of it.  I still don’t feel  like reading, so I suppose I’ll just go right ahead and watch Hero – or at least the beginning of it.  Jet Li rules.  There’s probably not enough time left in the trip to get all the way through it, so nobody should see me balling my eyes out at the end.

So that’s it.  I watched Hero and fell asleep for the last half-hour or so before the plane landed.  Back in NJ now.

Well, the conference is over.  I have a meeting with my contacts at Wistron Corp. tomorrow afternoon.  The rest of today is free, as is most of the day tomorrow.  I took the MRT (Taipei metro/subway) to the Zhonxiao-Dunhua station (the blue Bannan line from Taipei Main Station) and walked over to Eslite, which is a 24/7 bookstore on Dunhua Road South.  Decent bookstore; it’s about the third I’ve been to and the only one with English titles.  Not so many, but enough for me.  I picked up House of Suns by Alastair Reynolds (I’ve read just about everything else Reynolds has written and had to check to see that I hadn’t read this one) and a book of short stories by Philip K. Dick.  Though I was looking at them intently, I did not pick up two books by Peter F. Hamilton – as per his style, they were the first two of a trilogy, each book probably 1000 pages long.  I’d really only need the first book (it’s doubtful I’d read both before I return to the States), but I couldn’t bear to leave only the second book of a trilogy all by its lonesome among all those Chinese titles.  Who would want to pick up only the second of a trilogy?  Maybe I shouldn’t be putting myself in the place of the next English-only reader to wander into that bookstore, but I did.  Plus, it felt kind of weird to carry the extra weight around (thank you, ultralight hiker friends – I think).

So here I am, sitting at a Starbucks with my tall black coffee, ogling Asian chicks and smelling the smells of Taipei.  I’ve been telling myself that I wouldn’t just get coffee at Starbucks (this is the third I’ve been to so far) and try some of the other coffee shops, but I figured Starbucks would have wi-fi.  This one doesn’t, which is why I’m typing these words to you in Word, dear reader.  So I lost out on both accounts.  Although not really, because I’m still typing to you while drinking my delicious and familiar tall black coffee.  There’s a little poodle-dog in a stroller with a blue and white striped t-shirt and red overalls on, looking expectantly at me right now, as though I’m going to get up and get his mommy.  His haircut makes him look like a monkey.  I “what do you want, little monkey-dog?” in one of those baby-only voices, but I don’t think he spoke enough English to take offense.

Taipei isn’t much different from any other city.  Or maybe I should say “not much different from the Chinatown section” of any other city.  Except it’s all Chinatown here, Taipei being located in the Republic of China and all.  Not everything smells like Chinese food, but that’s really only on the main streets.  If I wander off into the side-street areas, everything smells like Chinese food.  Which is not a bad smell, but it’s certainly not going to be the determining factor in my decision to never leave Taiwan.

Did I mention how fucking gorgeous I find Asian women to be?  THAT might be a determining factor in my decision to never leave Taiwan.  Not ALL Asian women, of course – there are less-than-beautiful (on the outside) ones, just like in any other country.  But I really have to say that even the so-so looking Asian chicks (on an Asian-only scale) are fucking beautiful to me.  It’s like my bar has been lowered, though that simile is too much a negative one to be properly descriptive.  Anyway, there’s lots of eye-candy for this skinny honky here in Taipei.

November is National Novel Writing Month and although I’m signed up for NaNoWriMo, I haven’t written a single word of my novel – nor have I spent any time on the NaNoWriMo site.  As much as admitting it feels like weakness to me, I’m dealing with a bit of sensory overload right now.  I’m not sure how badly jetlagged I am, but I’ve only been getting a few hours of sleep at a time in the past few days.  Last night I went to bed around 11, woke up at 2, then again at 4:30, 6:30 and finally 7:30 to start the day.  There were probably a handful of other wakeups in among those, but they’re the ones I can remember.

So, as a result, I really don’t want to do much but hang out and read my book.  Getting to Eslite was an accomplishment; there are two temples I’d like to visit (and say some prayers): one for a warrior and one for a doctor (the temples, not the prayers – those will be for me).  I’m for whirled peas and blowjobs, but I really only pray for the latter.  And by blowjobs, I mean love in its purest sense. 

That’s not really true; I just like the way it sounds.  My prayers mostly take the form of requests for the ability to be virtuous (humility, etc.) and that the Universe continue on as it’s supposed to be – I guess there’s a hope/prayer in that latter one that an underlying characteristic of the Universe is that things work out for the best for all involved (in a relative sense, obviously).  Not sure if that makes much sense, and I don’t really know that I’m optimistic enough to believe that the Universe is inherently good, but I’m trying to be (hence the prayers).

But yeah, there are certainly a lot of things I’d like to do while I’m here in Taiwan, but I’m not sure that I feel like running around like a tourist right now.  I‘m enjoying just sitting here and soaking up the atmosphere.  Which is wicked sticky right now:  it’s been threatening to rain all day and it’s probably 75 degrees out.  Add that to the smog and you’ve got a great recipe for a sticky Ted.

Tuesday night (the night before the conference started) I went to the pre-conference dinner, which was in the Yakuza-feeling restaurant on the top (86^th) floor of Taipei 101 (a wicked tall building – the world’s tallest building from 2004 to 2010; surpassed by Burj Khalifa).  On the limobus ride there, we passed a Mountain Hardware store and another outdoorsy-type store in the same block.  I dropped a pin on the map of my (work) iPhone so that I could find them later.  Fortuitously, the pin is not far from where I am right now.  I’m going to head over that way in a few minutes to check the stores out – maybe someone there can give me a suggestion as to which mountains are nearby and climb-able.  That’s my plan for Saturday.

That’s it for now:  my coffee’s almost done and I should probably start looking for a place to pee.

And so ends the first day of the Asian Corporate Governance Association conference for me – almost.  Good lord, I’m exhausted.  I know it’s 6:20PM, but I think part of me still thinks it’s 6:20AM.  I was up at 4AM (local time) this morning – wide awake.  I manged to get my ass back to bed after moving around a bit, and was sleeping relatively soundly this morning.  My alarm went off at 6:30 and I was glad of it, but I still rolled back over and slept a bit more.  Got up at 7:35 and emailed my 7:30 breakfast appointment that I’d be late.  Breakfast at 8, the conference started at 9, and here I am at the end of the day.

It’s been a good day; I’ve learned a lot.  I’m kind of shy, so it’s tough for me to walk up to people and introduce myself.  Which I’m not really doing a whole lot.  A few people have started conversations with me and I’ve been successful at keeping them going – I think I’ve made good impressions on that front.  I’m not going to beat myself up too bad for not tapping everyone on the shoulder and introducing myself – I’ve done that a few times in the past, often with less-than-favorable results.  The key to doing that (in my opinion) is to not only have conversation-starters, but conversation-continuers.  Even so, some people simply don’t want to be approached.

I’m pretty self-sufficient, though, so standing alone isn’t all that hard.  I don’t get any kind of crazy anxiety (like I once used to) that I should be talking to every single person there and making all kinds of new friends.  Call it a cop out or an excuse, but I’m going with the “quality not quantity” approach.  I’d really like to meet more potential clients, but there simply are not that many here.  The guidebooks I’ve read about doing business in Taiwan suggest that the best way to find new clients is through a third party introduction.  I’m doing ok on that end – the people whose cards I’ve thusfar acquired will be in a position to introduce me to potential clients later on down the road.  The plan right now is to lay groundwork for future interactions and sales efforts.  I can’t expect to do it all this week (i.e. go back to the States with new clients and contracts).  Business isn’t done that way in Taiwan anyway – it’s a long process.

So yeah, I’m almost done for the day.  I’ve got to head back over to the other hotel now for the gala dinner from 7 to 9PM.  Should be interesting.  And, at the very least, the food here is superb.  More coffee, please.

We’re in the Great White North now, flying just over the Northeast corner of the Hudson Bay.  12:22 left in the flight – hours/minutes, that is.  34k feet, 1621 miles traveled so far.  We’ll be landing in Hong Kong (still 6640 miles away) at 7:14PM local time.  I’m not going to say that I want a cigarette right now because that will get me thinking about having a cigarette and I can’t have one for AT LEAST another 12 fucking hours.  I’m glad I haven’t gotten cranky yet.

I don’t really know what to say, dear reader.  It’s 7:01PM, according to my netbook and body clocks.  I’m in business/first class and the seats are pretty nice.  I’ve got the window seat and the woman in the aisle seat next to me seems pretty selfish.  That’s just a vibe, though.  She just ran to the bathroom and is taking some pills now, so I figure I’d better go take a leak soon, in case those are sleeping pills she’s taking.

[REDACTED]

My Polyanna gut says the door opened and closed so quickly because someone’s watching out for me – there’s something better in the works, and that any kind of relationship now would be me taking my eye off the ball.  And the total pessimist part of me says that THIS is the story of my life; THIS is what the psychic in Sedona didn’t want to tell me about – and why she was so sad for me:  that I’m going to spend my life looking for and being open to love and never find it.  Fuck me, if I’m the one who picked this fucking karma, I want to go back in time to that place wherever I was before I returned to the wheel and kick my own ass.  This fucking blows.  Can a honky get some love??  Just a little?  Not fucking hope “which springs eternal” – that shit’s for sissies and idiots who don’t know the difference.  For fuckers who’ll drink the sand.

And I’ll tell ya, dear reader, this morning in the shower I was begging out loud for an opportunity to drink the sand.  Hope.  Bah.  Bunch of care bear bullshit, if you ask me – and even if you didn’t:  I don’t care.  Hope is for pussies.  And I’m dying for it.  Me.

Sure, I know what I want.  But right now it feels like I’m in the middle of the desert a million years ago, talking to some bushman who doesn’t speak English, telling him that all I want in the world is a cherry red convertible 1959 Cadillac Eldorado Biarritz:  not only does the guy have no fucking clue what the words are that are coming out of my mouth, there’s really no way I’m going to find that particular Caddy in this particular desert at this particular time.  Like, it doesn’t exist, man.

Fuck, I’ll take a single-speed messenger bike, if it’ll love me back.

Those are probably shitty analogies.  I guess the way I feel (vis-à-vis finding love) right now is more akin to being in a shitty little local used car lot, looking for a particular make and model that’s only manufactured and distributed overseas.  “Yeah, Citröen – with an umlaut.  Over the ‘o’.  Yeah, an umlaut – like two little dots over top of the ‘o’.  Know what I’m talking about?  Do you have one?  In the back?  Yeah, cool, let’s go check it out. . . No. . . no, that’s a dog.  I’m looking for a car.  A Citröen.  Yeah the one with the dots.  Never mind.”  Even the short walk around to the back of the lot was enough to get my blood pumping in anticipation; the thought that maybe I’d found what I’ve been looking for, or at least might be getting closer.

6363 miles left to go.  To Hong Kong, that is.

About halfway there now.  It’s 10:34 in the AM in Hong Kong.  We’re over the arctic, it seems.  3534 miles into the flight.  Yeah, the little plane on the screen is totally enveloped in white – we’ve passed Alaska and the Bering Strait.  Another 8 hours and 37 minutes to go.  I can’t wait to have a cigarette in Hong Kong.

So yeah, if something went wrong at this point, even if we didn’t all die in the crash, we’d sure as hell freeze our asses off in about 5 minutes out there in the presence of Mother Nature.

I just finished reading William Gibson’s Virtual Light.  It was ok.  Nothing special.  It’s been forever since I read Neuromancer, but I remember really digging it.  Possibly because it was really the first cyberpunk book I’d ever picked up.  I finished Count Zero last night, which I thought was pretty good as well.  Much better than Virtual Light.  Gibson seems to be a bit hit-or-miss.  Not much to Virtual Light, in my opinion.  Gibson’s style cuts both ways – in this case, the choppy, disorienting way he writes didn’t serve to plant seeds of thought that there’s a deeper meaning behind each of his words:  I mean, that vibe was there, but for this book, after a while I just didn’t care what those deeper meanings might have  been.  That style really only works when the author actually explains some of the definitions of the terms of art he/she is using.  Maybe one out of five or ten would work; one out of three background stories hinted at.

We’re over Russia now.  It’s 1:30AM ET, 1:30PM HK time.  We’re supposed to land in Hong Kong at 7:12PM local time.  3144 miles left to go.  I started to watch The Last Airbender, but it was horrible.  Way too much of a kids movie for me.  The A-Team was ok.  A couple of parts where I had to stifle a lol.

I’m torn between staying up for another 6 hours – basically pulling an all-nighter – and trying to get a few hours of sleep.

[REDACTED]

597 miles to go.  6:05PM; still on schedule to arrive at HKG 7:15AM.  Breakfast was pretty good.  7710 miles traveled so far.  I’m on the right-hand side of the plane, and we’re basically coming South into Hong Kong right now, so I’m watching the sun set out of my window.  It looks like a sunrise.  The land below is in darkness – every once in a while, I see small clusters of lights, but my first impression was that we were flying over water, even though we’re well inland.  The cloud formations are beautiful and diverse.  There are a couple of fireworks shows going on below – I wonder why.  Heck, there’s a whole bunch of ‘em.

I think it’s about time I shut this thing down and pack my stuff up.  We’ll be landing in just about an hour.

“It’s okay,” she says.  ”It’s okay.  You were just dreaming.”

That’s how it starts.  Every time.

Then she tells me, “You were screaming.”

I don’t remember screaming.  But maybe I was.  Maybe that journey between sleep and waking is so much that I can’t help but scream.  Maybe it’s just that long.  I look up.

I’m lying down, my head is cradled in her lap.  She’s naked.  So am I.  I see her face, somehow rightside-up, even though that’s impossible from the way we’re positioned.  She smiles at me and pulls a lock of hair off my forehead in that tender way that only lovers can.  We’d recently made love, though I don’t remember it.

She has almost-black eyes and auburn hair and round brown nipples that are always taut – as though in anticipation.  I don’t know what color auburn is.  I just know that’s the word that comes to mind when I look at her hair.

She calls herself Mama Legba, and so does everyone else.  I call her Jane, because that’s her name.

The words are always the same, but the forms differ:  We’re not always in bed or at home.  Sometimes we’re in an apartment; sometimes a house; sometimes on a cabin porch.  But she always tells me that it’s going to be okay and that I was screaming just before I woke up.

That’s how I know I’m dreaming.

We sit at the breakfast table, still naked because it’s always that perfect in-between season here, freshly-made omelets, coffee and grapefruit juice in front of us.  I don’t remember her cooking, or even walking over to the table, for that matter.

But here we are, at home, just finished with breakfast.  I’m washing the dishes and placing them on the drying rack and she’s humming some Bach as she putters around, never far from me.  I don’t remember eating or even being hungry.  She can make the most exquisitely soft and dulcet sounds with her vocal cords.

“Jane,” I say.

“Hmmm?”  Still humming.  No break in the melody.

“Why don’t I remember eating breakfast?”

She stops humming.  Our eyes meet.

And I wake up.  Screaming.

Every time.

I’ve been to every damned headshrinker on the East Coast and a handful of psychics in Sedona and nobody can tell me why I always wake up screaming and why I’m never hungry.  So even if you think your explanation is crazy, doc, lay it on me.  I’ve heard ‘em all.

I’m headed off to Taiwan for work this Sunday.  I’ll be at a conference on Wednesday and Thursday in Taipei, and I have appointments set up with former clients of mine on Tuesday and Friday.  I hope to bring these clients with me to my new firm and make some connections so that I can bring in a few more clients over the next couple of years.

Mucho gratitude to my friend and regular international traveler Scott Ireland a.k.a. WinterWarlock for being so generous with his time and advice with me this morning.

I cleaned up my kitchen a bit this evening.  I started by doing the dishes that have been sitting in the sink for what seems like forever.  Funny thing, I felt much better the second I turned the water on and got my hands wet.  You see, I’ve been pretty stressed lately:  I have what seems like too many things to do and not enough time.  I’ve got half-started/half-completed lists all over the place, and it’s been exceedingly difficult to get started or stay working on any one particular project – I can’t seem to shake the feeling that I’m wasting time on the particular task upon which I’m working because there are so many more pressing and important tasks to be completed.  So I switch projects.  And the feeling doesn’t change.

I’m having business cards printed with English on one side and Mandarin on the other.  I’m using the traditional Chinese characters instead of the simplified characters because Taiwan is ROC, not PRC.  The printer and translator wanted to do the cards in simplified characters, but everything I’ve read makes me think that the traditional characters are the way to go.

I’m a stickler for being culturally correct.  I like the stress that Asian cultures put on honor and being polite (or at least that’s how it seems to me).  Being an avowed American and capitalist on the outside and an idealist and romantic on the inside, I kind of have the feeling that I’ll be very comfortable in the culture of Taiwan.  We’ll see; no need for me to spend so much time projecting.  I just have a thing for being proper and so (it seems) do they.

I’ve been working longer hours than usual and coming home to basically veg out with a book for a couple of hours before heading off to bed.  Here and there, I’ve been getting a handful of errands run before I get home, but once I’m back at my place, that’s it.  I’m done.  I’ve been turning my computer on only out of habit; turning it off unused a couple of hours later when I rack out.  The shorter daylight hours are starting to affect me, I think, so it’s probably time to get back in the habit of using my light box in the mornings.  I still can’t make it to work at 8:30 (not that that’s my starting time anymore), even at the new firm.

Things are going pretty well in the new gig.  I have an office.  Let me repeat that:  I have an office.  With a door.  That closes.  It’s fucking glorious.

The COO got his dander up a couple of weeks ago about our firm having a General Counsel.  And guess who’s on the docket (no pun)?  You betcha:  yours truly.  When I get back from Taiwan, I’m going to press the issue a bit more strongly.  The firm is going to pay for a bar exam review class (and the bar exam fees) and I’m going to get my license to practice law (probably just in NJ) and new business cards that say ‘General Counsel’.  Two years with that job title and I can do fucking anything.  Not that I can’t do fucking anything right now, but it’ll sure be a nice feather in my cap.

This past Sunday I did a 23 mile hike of the Escarpment Trail with Debbie Melita, Valerie Accardi, Ronnie Cusmano and Bill Winterbottom.  It was pretty sweet.  I was a bit nervous because I hadn’t strung together that many miles in quite a while, but I made out ok.  I stayed towards the rear of the group for the first two-thirds or so, and got out in front to keep our blistering pace going for the last 5 miles or so.  We were really cooking the whole time.  My feet were a bit sore at the end, but that would have been remedied easily enough by taking my boots off and letting them air out once or twice more.  It was really more moisture than anything else.   We completed the hike in about 11.25 hours, starting off with headlamps and ending before the sun went down.  What a gorgeous day!  And believe you me, dear reader, the company was to die for.

So my fitness level has been constantly on the rise over the past few months.  I hope to get some hiking done in Taiwan while I’m there.  I wanted to climb the tallest peak (of course) Yushan, but it doesn’t look like that’s going to happen.  One needs a permit (which are only given by lottery) and a minimum hiking party of three.  I have no problem driving by myself in the HOV lane, but I kind of think this is different.  Plus, it looks to be WAY too far from where I’ll be staying in Taipei to make for a doable day hike.

November is National Novel Writing Month and I need to get my ass in gear for NaNoWriMo as well.  wtf.

So that’s it for now.  942 words is all you get from me tonight.  I’m off to bed.

On my hike last weekend I bumped into a bear.  I was moving pretty quickly and didn’t see him.  He turned around and shoved me.  ”Watch where you’re going, dickbag,” he said.  I thought it was a bit weird that a bear was talking to me, but I excused myself politely and, stepping aside, attempted to pass him on the trail.  He stood up, stepped in front of me and called me some unmentionable names, not letting me pass, despite my apologies.

Then he put his paws on my chest and shoved me again and I thought that this was just plain uncalled for, so I drew my knife.  The big one.  A couple of coyotes were cris-crossing behind the bear in a semi-circle, yapping encouragement to him.  ”Fuck ‘im up, the little tramp!”  ”Fucken ‘ikers, ai can’t stand ‘em.  Let’s eat ‘is bones.”  Strange that they’d be speaking Cockney – and a drunken version at that – I thought in the back of my mind, but kept my eyes on the bear and his overlong fingernails.  Claws, I guess.

I spread my legs a bit, with my right foot just a bit behind the left, and pointed my forehead – my third eye chakra – at the bear.  ”Let me pass,” I said steadily.  ”It was an honest mistake and I’ve no wish to fight you.”  My left hand was loose and my right gripped the handle of my knife, its point toward the ground.

Wrong thing to say to a bear – don’t ever be the first one to mention a fight.  Especially not –

“Fight!  We’ve got a fight!” shouted the referee off to my right.

Referee?  Seriously?

“Really?”  I said.  ”A referee?  In the woods?”

“Yup,” said the fucker, “it’s on like Donkey Kong; you just fucked with the wrong bear on the wrong trail, and I’m the one who’s going to make sure this is a fair fight,” continued the referee, “so drop the knife.”

Without taking my eyes off the bear, I turned my head toward the referee, then quickly flicked my eyes across its countenance.  A fucken panda bear.

Of course.

“I’ll do no such thing,” I said.  ”Look at the size of him.  And besides, I’ve admitted my wrong and already begged his pardon.  He’s been nothing but rude from the get-go and I just want to get by.”

At this point, the git coyotes jumped me from behind.  One grabbed my left shoulder with his mouth and the other my right wrist.  Instead of fighting it, I used their momentum, allowing the inertia to bring me down to my right knee (which landed sharply on my trekking pole – should’ve dropped those).  I crossed my right hand across my chest, aiming the point of my knife just above my shoulder, and let the weight of me and my pack fall as hard as possible on the ribs of the coyote latched onto my right wrist.

The point of my knife missed the coyote on my left shoulder, but it gave him enough of a fright that he let go of me, and so did the one on my right wrist.  I heard a couple of that one’s ribs snap as I landed atop him, the one on my left now standing on me.  I lunged at him and buried my knife in his bony chest, just to the left of his sternum.  He jumped back off the knife with a yelp and ran the fuck away.  I doubt he made it.  The other one sure didn’t, because I reversed my grip on the knife and probably stabbed him fifteen times before I got some blood in my eye and jerked back.

“Whoa,” said the bear with an astonished look.  ”You’re gonna fucken get it now, sissy-boy.”

And he came at me, while I was sitting on my ass, breathing hard and bleeding in two places.

I glanced over at the referree, but he was messing around with his iPad.

I scrambled back a bit and found my feet after untangling them from my trekking poles.  Really should have dropped those when this all started.  The bear lunged at me with his teeth and I just barely dodged to the left to avoid getting something bitten off.  He probably went another ten yards behind me before skidding to a halt, at which point, I was already high-tailing it down the trail, running as if my life depended upon it (which it did).

Then the goddamned panda referee came out of nowhere and shoulder blocked me into a big-ass pile of rocks along the trail.

At least, it seemed like a pile of rocks.

The pile shuddered and growled.  ”Watch what you’re doing, fuckhead!” it said in the deepest and gratey-est voice I’ve ever heard.  I looked up and yeah, it was a fucken dragon, pissed off with a forked tongue and smoke coming out of its nostrils and everything.

“Shit.”  I said.

Which was the wrong thing to say – dragons don’t like profanity, unless it’s them using it (they think they’ve got some sort of verbal monopoly on cuss words).

“What did you say?” the dragon rumbled.  I stammered something incoherent as the dragon’s eyes flicked over my shoulder at the two bears.  ”Yo!  Rufus!  James!  Que pasa, fuckheads?”

I turned around and the bears bowed politely.  ”Just taking care of some business, Nic,” they said.

***   ***   ****

So yeah, Saint Peter:  that’s how I got here.  Pretty fucked up, don’t ya think?  Anyway, I’ll just be on my way now – I’ve got to get to work on Monday and I’m supposed to hike with Heather and Tom tomorrow.  So yeah, the halo and wings are nice and all, but you can have them back:  I just bought these hiking boots and they’ve been doing me just fine so far.  No, I don’t think I’ll be back anytime soon – most of my friends have appointments downstairs anyway.  Peace out, bruvva.

Normally, I like to save the pages from my Zen-a-Day calendar to which I’m particularly attracted.  However, in tearing off the page two Thursdays ago, I accidentally tore the page in half.  It’s been sitting on my dresser in two pieces for a while now and I’ve thusfar been able to resist the urge to just throw it away.  I’m going to do so now.  But, by way of closure (and so I don’t actually lose the words), here it is:

Behind a temple was a vine with many squashes growing on it.  One day a fight broke out among them, and the squashes split up into angry groups, making a big racket.  Hearing the uproar, the head priest went outside, saw the quarreling, and scolded them:  “Hey!  Squashes!  why are you fighting?  Now – everybody do zazen.”

The priest taught them how, showing them how to fold their legs and sit up straight, and as the squashes began to follow the priest’s instructions, they calmed down and stopped fighting.

“Now,” the priest said, “everyone put your hand on top of your head.”

When the squashes felt the top of their heads, they found something attached there, which turned out to be the vine that connected them all together.

“What a mistake!” the squashes said, realizing their predicament.  “We’re actually all tied together, living just one life!”  From that moment on the squashes never again fought.

Ok, so I’m sorta tired, but not necessarily in the physical sense.   If you’re just tuning in, I posted the trip report from Saturday’s night hike below.   You can also find it here at the forum, if you want to read the comment thread of chop-busting.

I’ve been thinking about getting a puppy lately.  A pit bull puppy, because pits are the kind of dogs I like to rescue.  The ones that really need rescuing are 1-3 years old, but I’ve done that before and don’t know that I have the time or inclination to teach an old(er) dog new tricks.  I’m still boarding Laila Jo Connolly as well, so I don’t need the added stress of a dog that might not be cat-friendly.  A puppy, I believe, would be ok with the cat – or at least learn how to be after a couple of claw-swipes on the nose.

I’ve never raised a puppy before, so every dog I’ve ever had has always been someone else’s dog first – and if they became my dog, chances are that person didn’t treat the dog particularly well beforehand, because the only dogs I’ve ever had have been rescues (mostly pits).

I posted a few weeks ago that I was thinking about getting a dog.  I mentioned this in conversation to my friend Laurie, who later emailed me (during the course of our separate email conversation) a link to the Ramapo-Bergen Animal Refuge with the name of a dog she had been considering adopting.

Now, I never look at “dog porn” because I always end up wanting to adopt pretty much every damned dog I see.  But I couldn’t exactly be like “yeah Laurie, that’s a cute dog” without actually looking at the picture.  Well, I ended up stumbling upon the cutest little pit bull puppy EVAR (named Ripley) and figured he was perfect.  So, before doing anything rash like calling the shelter at 1AM, I emailed my sister a link and asked her for her opinion.  Katie responded that he’s the cutest thing evar and that I should definitely adopt him – so I told her that I was serious and not to f*ck with me on this one.  Katie responded that she doesn’t joke about sh*t like dog adoptions and that I really should look into adopting Ripley.  I called that afternoon, but he had already been adopted.

So I then spent too much time looking at dog porn at work, emailing links back and forth with Katie and Kerry (a girl who works in my office and will one day be my work spoose).  So now I’m all dog porned-out and really don’t know what to do.

I won’t get into all the messy details of the cute little puppies I’ve been looking at – you can go to petfinder.com yourself and cry your eyes out too, if you’re into emotional masochism – like I am, apparently.  I’m torn.  I’d really like to get a puppy – one that will grow up to be a big strong dog who can come hiking with me and share in all the fun I have – but I’m not sure if it’s the best idea or not.  And my mind is so mobius-twisted about the whole thing that I don’t know up from down, straight from crooked.

I’m sure that I’d be a good human to a dog – I’ve had dogs before and know how to take care of them (I’m going to leave the sappy emotional stuff out of this post – you can read between the lines for that – because this is a manly-man’s blog where everyone has Y chromosomes except for my readers); I know how much responsibility is entailed in adopting a dog – especially a puppy.  The thing I’m torn about – and this (if you promise not to call it melodrama) goes to the very core of my existence – is that I don’t know if I want to add that particular element of responsibility to my current life or not.

Getting a dog means I place it before work on the priority-scale.  That means I have to be home at more regular hours than I usually am – I have to touch base regularly to take the dog out.  I have no doubt that I can do this, but I’m not sure if it’s the best idea for me work-wise right now.  Rationally, getting a dog probably isn’t the best idea.  Right now I’m extremely mobile and my schedule is incredibly flexible.  If I need to stay in the office from 8AM to midnight, I can do that.  But is this really a good thing for me?  Would having that particular type of responsibility in my life put things more in perspective, work-wise?

My new gig is a good one and I’m making a lot more money than I did at the last one – which means that if I do things right, I’ll be able to pay off my student loans quicker than before.  And I’m all about unloading this debt.  Do I think that having choosing to adopt a dog will ruin this in one fell swoop?  No.  But I do think it’s a slippery slope:  what’s next on the list of things I’ll place before work on my priority-scale?

Thinking non-rationally for a moment, having a dog is an immense source of joy in one’s life.  And, as much as I am loathe to admit it, I’ve been pretty lonely for the last few years.  Rationally, the answer is (seemingly quite obviously) to just put more effort into internet dating – join Match.com, send more emails out on the sites to which I already belong, go to new grocery stores and laundromats and hit on chicks there.  But I’ve not done a very good job of any of these things so far, have I?

Another thought would be that if having a dog would make me happy, I should do that because I’m more likely to be successful if I’m happy than if I’m lonely.

There are plenty of other non-rational arguments – such as I’d really like to have a dog – but I’m not used to giving much weight to non-rational arguments.  So I’m in a total quandry; a pickle, if you will.

Any thoughts?

Heartfelt thanks to everyone who will be helping transport RedCloud up to Heather this weekend.  I’ll be taking care of the NJ legs and am looking forward to having a dog ride shotgun again (if only for the day and unless he decides to sleep in the back).  Thanks especially to Chris Shammel and Shannon Baranoski, who emailed/facebooked me with offers to help.

Tomorrow (technically today) is the Warrior Dash up at the Windham ski area – a 3.2 mile race up and down the mountain with 9 obstacles and lots of mud.  I think I signed up for the 1PM heat, but it might have been the 11AM one (can’t find the initial confirmation email and they never sent me another), so I need to get my ass in bed like NOW.

Work is busy.  Life is good.

Peace out.

Who lives on the East Coast and wants to help with an underground railroad dog rescue?

RedCloud is a Belgian Malinois who needs help being transported from Jacksonville FL to Olivebridge NY this Saturday and Sunday.  The Jersey and DC legs of the trip have been filled, but we need help getting him through the deep south (Saturday).  If you’re a dog person (or know someone who is) and can help, please contact me at QuixoticJedi[at]gmail[dot]com (or facebook me or whatever) and I’ll put you in touch with the transport coordinator.  Here’s what’s open right now:

I’ve been thinking a lot this week about getting a dog.  I don’t think I will; my lifestyle isn’t really conducive to having a dog – I’m usually away from the apartment for 12-14 hours in a row each day.  I mostly just sleep here and spend some time on the internet or reading just before doing that.  When I was married and lived in DC, we did pit bull rescue – at one point, we had six dogs in our two bedroom apartment.  I’m not thinking about six dogs – just one or two.  Puppies would be nice:  I’d like to watch them grow, and I like dogs in pairs – they can be friends and entertain each other by taking turns chewing or peeing on my stuff while I’m not there.  Puppies would probably go well with Laila Jo (my resident cat-ward) – she’d be large and in charge.  Older dogs (especially terriers) would probably make her life a living hell, and being a dude who’s walked in the front door to a dead cat (killed by one of the dogs), I’d rather not repeat that experience.

[On a brief karma note, a couple of days after coming home to the dead cat, I came home to a dead dog - the same one that killed the cat was killed by one of the other dogs, who happened to be a very close friend of the cat.  Kinda shitty memories, those.]

I saw that video on YouTube today of the merengue dog and it just about brought a tear to my eye.  I really wanted to scratch and hug that dog and give it all kinds of love for about fifteen minutes in a row after watching it do that dance.  The smile on his/her face during the dance was awesome!

My friend Heather Rolland is getting a new dog to grow up with her current dogs Iske and Lily.  I’m not necessarily jealous, but I sort of wish I were getting a new dog too.  My parents have three dogs:  Diesel, Radar and Riggs.  Diesel and Radar were rescues of mine from DC – they’re both mutts.  Diesel’s a big guy - well over 100 lbs – with that telltale pit bull blockhead and radar is some kind of weirdo terrier.  He probably weighs about 80 lbs.  Radar was the dog at the shelter that they couldn’t give away – hell I couldn’t give him away.  After my ex-wife and I had him for a while, we fostered him out to this old man, who brought him back to us after like two weeks.  He’s a sweetheart that I guess only we are able to love.  Both are my parents’ dogs now – they haven’t been with me in a good long time.  They’re still happy to see me when I visit, though.

Riggs is my sister’s dog – a little black terrier who tips the scales at maybe 40 lbs.  He’s a total asshole but everyone loves him anyway.  He lives with my parents as well, though my sister recently moved back home for a bit, so he probably qualifies as her dog again.  My brother lives with his dog Clyde:  an all-white pit bull of the purest and most badass-looking kind.  John’s not a particularly good human for his dog, so instead of being the incredibly handsome specimen he was when I rescued him, Clyde’s now a fat sack of shit with cysts all over him.  He’s still a sweetheart, but – much like my brother – is literally a bull in a china shop:  he’s absolutely not an asshole and has decent manners, but he’s not well trained at all.  A 100-something ball of fat and muscle is no fun to take on a walk – especially not when it involves going down a flight of stairs.

I’ve read a bunch of posts on the hiking forum about people hiking with their dogs, and I love meeting dogs on the trail.  Hell, I love hiking with dogs too.  Another reason why I’ve been thinking about dogs lately.

I mostly like big dogs – pit bulls and mastiffs.  I’m a big fan of mutts and I believe wholeheartedly in dog rescue.  I’m not a big fan of pure-bred anything, the first statement of this paragraph notwithstanding.  Labs are ok, but everybody loves them – I’d rather be human to a dog that needs the love.  Little dogs kind of piss me off.  I like the look of blue heelers, but shepherd-bred dogs (especially cattle dogs) can be a pain in the ass around other dogs. 

So anyway, we’ll see.  I’m not really planning on getting a dog right now; I’m just saying that the thought’s been crossing my mind lately.

“Listen asshole…”

I punched him in the mouth. 

Never met him before:  just didn’t like his tone of voice.  I don’t remember if he was talking to a lady or starting to pick on some dude smaller than he, but I’d like to think it was probably one or the other.  Truth is, I really don’t remember the surrounding circumstances all that well. 

He didn’t go down like they do in the movies:  he needed help to get on his back.  The knuckle sandwich set him back a bit and, I suppose, put him off balance.  I shoved him hard in the chest, just as his eyes were beginning to widen, and kicked him in the shin of the leg that wasn’t planted.  In retrospect, I think I got lucky, as he was a lot bigger than me and I wasn’t really aiming for anything in particular.  His feet tangled up and his back hit the floor a second later.  To my eyes, this all happened very slowly.

I was on him as soon as he hit the deck.  I grabbed his adam’s apple with my left hand, squeezed like I was going to pull out his trachea – I think I was actually trying to – and slammed the heel of my right hand into his forehead a couple of times.  The back of his head hit the wood floor each time I did so.  Again, luck was on my side:  I think if the floor had been concrete I would have done some real damage.

Ha.  “Real damage.”  The guy was in the ICU when I woke up in the jail cell.  Turns out he was a cop.  In a small town.  The town where it happened.  How I ended up in the state police holding cell, I have no idea.  Just lucky, I guess. 

I was pretty banged up myself.  This blood on my shirt?  Yeah, I don’t know if it’s mine or someone else’s.  My side hurts real bad when I breathe – in or out – and I don’t even want to know what my face looks like.  I can feel holes in my mouth that my teeth occupied only hours ago.  I had a hard time getting together the manual dexterity to zip my fly after I pissed blood all over the toilet and the floor of the cell.

Don’t ask me why they let me go:  I don’t know. 

All I know is that the state bear who shoved me out the cruiser door onto this here stretch of highway told me that the cop’s buddies were already looking for me, and that the state police would start doing the same in the morning.

I really don’t remember much else.  Nothing like this has ever happened to me before.  I promise I won’t give you any trouble – I don’t think I could, even if I wanted to. 

Please, just let me ride with you until we get out of state. 

You will never know the world aright till the Sea floweth in your Veins, till you are Clothed with the Heavens and Crowned with the Stars; And perceive yourself to be the Sole Heir of the Whole World; And more then so, because Men are in it who are every one Sole Heirs, as well as you.  Till you are intimately Acquainted with that Shady Nothing out of which this World was made; Till your spirit filleth the whole World and the Stars are your Jewels; Till you love Men so as to Desire their Happiness with a thirst equal to the zeal of your own.

-Thomas Traherne

Hoo boy, do I have a long way to go.

No, I haven’t finally figured out how to post photos.  Below is Scott’s first guest-post.  At his request, I’ve corrected some spelling and punctuation – otherwise, it’s directly from Scott’s keyboard to your eyes:

Ok so I’m going to rant this is my first maybe my last rant on this here blog.  Why do I get to rant here ‘cause I asked.  Sure Ted was in the woods with me and my new razor sharp knife when I asked but I’m sure he would have said yes anyway. That’s what friends are for.

“I’m so fat” yes these three words bring my blood to a slow boil.  I hear it all the time from women yes lots of times beautiful women but when I hear “I’m so fat” a lot of that beauty goes out the window. I know the most appropriate response is “no you’re not”, but when I was a little younger and a lot bolder my response was “ya you are” if only in an attempt to stop this behavior.

So you’re fat big deal change it or get over it.  And news flash not everyone likes a skinny chick sure if you let the brain washing that goes on on tv do its job all girls should be skinny blond and have a fake orange tan.  Which to me is gross.  It’s only a meat suit people (yes my meat’s made of veggies). Not everyone likes what’s protrayed as sexy I for one like a woman.  I like curves and for the most part curves don’t come with the body of one who strives to look like a 13 year old boy.  Sure I know guys who like em real skinny disgustingly so in my eyes and I know guys who like em real big.  Me I like em all but prefer curves.  So no matter what you look like rock it.  ‘Cause all women can be sexy but confidence is a true trademark of a real woman.  So when you say I’m fat ur giving up a 1000 sexy points.

I myself have been 135 pounds and 240 pounds and always found someone to love me, but it was more important for me to realize it’s a meat suit I wear for a little while and that’s it, as long as I like me.

And what the hell is with all this plastic surgery the hand of God is steady and true maybe ur supposed to look like that.  I’ve never looked at a woman and said hey she should put some plastic in that chest and I’d like her more, not once.  I like women real women.  Never said “maybe if she pulled the skin on her face real tight and her eyeballs where jumping outta her skull” nope it ain’t me and if someone needs you to do that find someone else they are out there.

You ever see seemingly mismatched couples walking down the street, “I know everyday”.  Holy shit maybe she likes large men with pony tales or maybe he likes girls with bad teeth and I dig it, every ship has got multiple docks go pull into your fucking happy harbor.

If anything I have said offended you deal with it.  Unless you want to talk about it over some veggies then give me a call.  We are all fucking snowflakes deal with it but we are all made of the same fucking snow.

If you want to reach Scott, you can email him here.

“Just write.”  Is what the psychic told me this afternoon.  It’s been quite a while since I’ve had my cards read – I think the last time was in the summer of 2008 in Sedona. 

And I think that psychic told me to write as well.  The psychic in Sedona also talked about my “spirit guide” (that I should give my will over to him) and the psychic at the Ren Faire today told me to follow my “holy guardian angel(s)”.  Interesting.

But yeah, in my conversation with the psychic today – RozeLisa is her name (and I shall henceforth refer to her as such) – she said I should write.  I said, “Write what?  Like work stuff or fiction or what?”  And she said “I don’t know, just write.”  So yeah, here I am writing.

When I started this blog, I posted every day for about a year.  Then I started to take a few days off here and there, and eventually I got to where I’ve been for the last few weeks – probably averaging two posts per week.  Man, do I hate bloggers that post about blogging or their blog-habits – almost as much as I hate blog posts that start with things along the lines of  “sorry I haven’t posted in so long…”

So that’s enough situational reference for me.

Today was a good day.  I woke up, showered and hung out with my brother for about an hour before Katie and Scott arrived (in separate cars) at my house.  We shot the shit for a bit, drinking coffee and smoking cigarettes, and headed off to the Renaissance Faire.  We met Heather Rolland (yes, the famous author), her husband Tom Moeller, her daughter Maya and Maya’s friend Chelsea at the Cock ‘n Balls Bull just inside the gate, and headed out to explore for the day.  While we were at the knife-throwning show, Christine (Laila Jo’s mommy) and her b/f Ryan called me to say that they had arrived.  I wandered over to the Kissing Bridge to pick them up, waited a few minutes and recieved a text that they were at the stage where the knife-throwing show was.  So I sauntered back over that way.  By that time, our cousin Danny and his girlfriend Pauline had arrived.  I think.  Maybe they got there sooner.

After the show, we rolled out – 12 deep - to check out the rest of the Faire.  It was a good day.  As is commonly done with a group that large, we split up into smaller cells and did things separately, occasionally meeting up to discuss what booty we had gathered or things we’d seen. 

As we were wrapping up with the card reading, RozeLisa gave me her card and I gave her mine – pointing out this web address and stating that this is where I predominantly write.  She noticed that my card says Wyckoff on it and I explained that I live in Ridgewood.  RozeLisa then said that she’s opening up a shop in Ridgewood – about a block away from my dad’s store, as a matter of fact. 

I think I’m going to see RozeLisa again in a couple of months – I don’t think the Ren Faire is the place for me to get psychic readings anymore: it’s too busy; too many people.  Whether it’s taxing on a psychic, I couldn’t say, but I don’t see how that kind of a situation wouldn’t be.  Plus, I can’t imagine that the tarot cards have that much of an opportunity to be cleared of the last person’s energy and fully accept mine with such a high turnover rate of clients.

I think that next time I’ll ask RozeLisa if we can use her future-seeing cards, instead of the ones that read the recent past – most of the stuff that came through the cards had just happened to me in the past couple of weeks.

No real luck to speak of on the “will I find love” question (at least not from the cards).  I’ve sent out a couple of emails on okCupid in the last week (no responses, but that’s t be expected).  RozeLisa said that I should probably get out more, and that I should basically man-up and make my own decisions and be confident in them – that they’re the right ones.

I’m in a pretty good head-space right now:  I didn’t really have any particular questions in mind when I sat down to have my cards read (which probably explains the lack of granularity in the reading).  I’ve been making my own decisions and following through with them, and I feel comfortable that they’re the right ones.  Mercury is in retrograde for the next couple of weeks, so I’ll be careful with my communications and try not to misread anything.

I’m taking Wednesday, Thursday and Friday off from work this week and will spend that time in the Adirondacks, bagging peaks and sleeping in the woods.  Right now, it looks like it’s going to rain the whole time.  I’ll bring my raingear.  I’m looking forward to the time alone.  I’ll reflect and get centered.

November is National Novel Writing Month, so it looks like this is my year to get on that.  Any novel suggestions?

What’s that, you ask (dear reader)?  Why, the awesomeness, of course.  Neither my sister Katie nor I forgot to bring the awesomeness to the Apocalyptica show last night.  Which was very important, because whoever put the show together did just that.  Forget to bring the awesomeness, that is.

Oh, Apocalyptica rocked the house in a typically bodacious manner – starting off with covers of Master of Puppets and Seek and Destroy.  When Katie and I saw them last year, there were a helluva lot more people taking care of the James Hetfield parts of the song.  This year, it seemed like we were two of a very few who knew the words to these Metallica songs.  We were also in the minority insofar as we also own the new Apocalyptica album (7th Symphony), which was released yesterday.

After the two covers, they went right into the stuff from the new album – which is pretty good; I need another few listens, but I can say at this point with confidence that the album overall is worth listening to, and a couple of the songs thereon truly rock.  It’s not ridiculously different from their last album, but that’s not a bad thing – Worlds Collide is an excellent album.

But back to my point:  Apocalyptica played for just an hour – from 10:30 to 11:30 (doors were at 8).  The last time we saw them, they played for at least two hours (which, in my humble opinion, is about average for a headlining band).  I think what happened was that the opening act Dir En Grey stayed on the stage longer than they were supposed to.  They were a decent choice for an opener, but listening to them for two hours was not why I bought tickets.

Dir En Grey is a five “man” Japanese group – two guitars, drums, bass and lead singer.  I think they sung in Japanese and I’m not really sure that they played their own instruments.  Katie remarked that one of the guitarists was only in the band because of his pretty hair.  I can’t really say that I found any one of them to be particularly talented.  As a band, their music was relatively cohesive and I’d say they have a certain “rock star” quality to them, but the music was a bit disjointed for my tastes.  And having to watch them for two hours of it was bullshit.  Needless to say, I felt free to go pee and smoke a cigarette while they were on stage.

</rant>

Apocalyptica was pretty excellent, as usual.  For one of the last songs, they even brought up Adam Grontier of Three Days Grace to sing I Don’t Care (from Worlds Collide) – and he did a splendid enough job that I was prompted to spontaneously yell “don’t kill yourself, emo scum” after the song ended.  [Yes, I'm wondering if something spontaneous could be prompted too, dear reader.]  In any case, I really dig that song.

The other dude they had up on stage to sing two songs from 7th Symphony really needs that metal surgery – and I’m not talking about adamantium, dear reader:  I mean the kind where he actually gets some metal in his blood, like maybe mercury or something.  I had a hard time even throwing up short horns for that queer.  And now I feel bad for associating his wussy-ass with all my homosexual friends.  Please forgive me this transgression, but I’m pretty sure he likes it in the pooper.

Anyway, anybody like Flyleaf?  After hearing the chick on one of the 7th Symphony tracks, I’m thinking about picking up an album.  Any suggestions?

That’s right:  move along – move along, dear reader.

So, how’d your week go?  Mine went fairly well.  Tuesday’s weirdness petered out on Wednesday, Thursday was relatively uneventful, and Friday (today) was good & busy.  Overall, I’m a pretty happy camper.  I’m settling in pretty well at the new gig; the only thing I really need to worry about right now is figuring out how to take a few days off so that I can spend some time alone in the woods.

I was planning to take next Wednesday to Friday off, but I have a project due by the end of the week and I think I’ve also got some meetings starting to stack up toward the end of the week as well, so I’ll probably have to wait until the week after next.  That’s ok:  as long as I take some time off before Labor Day, I should be good to go.  Once the Tuesday after Labor Day hits, it’s going to be balls-to-the-wall at work.  My industry is closely tied to the finance industry, and once Labor Day happens, everyone’s back to work.  Summer’s over and it seems like everyone has a million things that need to be done yesterday (or should have been done by the end of summer).

This was not a particularly relaxing summer for me, but whatever:  all I have is today anyway.

This weekend should be relatively relaxing.  Saturday I’ll be hiking in Minnewaska State Park Preserve with Scott and the White Sneaker Brigade.  I just (finally) bought a GPS unit for hiking, so at least I’ll be able to test that out a bit while we’re “hiking”.  This won’t be a particularly challenging hike, but that’s ok; hopefully the company will be fun.

On Sunday, Scott and I will be hiking Eagle and Balsam mountains with some Catskill 3500 Club aspirants – our friend Heather Rolland (yes, the famous author) is leading the hike for the club.  I’ve climbed both mountains a couple of times already, but not in August.  The weather report is calling for rain, so the hike should be extra-fun.  =)

And that’s about it for right now.  Back to work on Monday; what will be, will be.

Oh, and don’t forget to jump on over to WordFrolic! – your friend and mine (the famous blogger) Lauren Flax has set up this site for those of us who like to play with words.  I’ve had quite a bit of fun on it so far.

I think I need to meet with a psychic or spiritual healer.   I’ve got something going on with me that I can’t put my finger on to fix.  I mentioned a week or two ago that I’d been struggling with self-doubt.  Well, that hasn’t abated:  the struggle continues.  I don’t know why this is or where it’s coming from, but this is exactly the wrong time for me to be feeling like this.

I suppose it’s possible that I’m being guided towards caution, but I feel more like I’m running scared.  Not necessarily running towards something or away from something, so I don’t mean ‘running scared’ as in overly fearful – what I mean is closer to overly cautious.  Cautious to the point where it’s hampering.  It’s a fault, not an asset.  At least, that’s how I feel.

I’m in a relatively new situation at work – insofar as the players are the same and the circumstances have changed and/or the circumstances are the same but the players have changed – depending upon the circumstances and players I’m dealing with – if that makes any sense.  The situation isn’t entirely unfamiliar, even though it’s different from one I’ve been in before on many levels.  So, that said, I suppose I have good reason to be cautious.

In fact, I think that caution is definitely an asset right now.  But not this much caution.

So yeah, something weird is going on inside of me.  This is a time when I should be – figuratively speaking – taking the bull by the horns – both in my work situations and my outside-work situations.  But I’m not.  I’m dissembling.  I know I should be taking the bull by the horns, and I know how and where to grab those horns and from which direction I need to approach the bull so that I’m not gored, but it feels like I’m spending too much time evaluating the direction from which I’m coming, figuring out my hand placement and calculating the angles and forces involved, when what I really should be doing is letting go and simply acting.  Allowing myself to act and having the confidence that, even if I miss my initial grip, I’ll be able to adapt to the situation and turn it to my advantage.

But knowing the right thing and doing the right thing are two different animals.  Normally, I can snap myself out of these things, but this has been going on for a while.  Maybe I’m still coming down on the back end of feeling duplicitous about being at a job I knew I was going to leave.  But still, I’ve had enough breaks in the continuity of my mental reality that such a feeling shouldn’t still be lingering.

That’s basically why I feel that there’s something else going on.  Mercury isn’t in retrograde for another few weeks – and I’m not having communication issues anyway – and I don’t know enough about astrology to make another guess.  Any suggestions are, of course, welcome, if you’re an astrologer, dear reader.  There’s something that’s mucking up my internal energy flow.  I think it’s an internal thing, but my gut says it could very well be an external thing.

I’m going to spend some time cleansing the feng shui of my apartment tonight and see if that helps.  And then I’m going to get up tomorrow and face a new day and try all over again to get past whatever’s currently blocking me.  Hopefully my spirit guide will have some more definitive guidance for me soon.

Yes, yes, I know, dear reader:  it’s been quite a long time since my last post.

A lot’s been going on lately and I’ve mostly been keeping to myself.  Oh, I’ve been talking to people here and there about things, and it’s not that I didn’t feel comfortable talking to you about them, dear reader, but, well, I haven’t felt comfortable talking to you about them.

I quit my job on Thursday.  Scratch that – I ‘resigned’ on Thursday:  handed my boss my resignation letter at the end of the day.  I had to go into the office for a bit on Friday, I suppose to bring closure, though there wasn’t really anything for me to do.  Everything I’d been working on had been tied off or handed off in the past week or so.  I think my boss saw it coming, but I don’t think he was expecting it – if that makes sense.

I’m starting at a new firm soon.  It’s a start-up, and I’ll be in on the ground floor.  Several of my colleagues from the old firm are already there and I’m excited to work with them again – they’re the ones from the old firm who actually worked.

I’ve known for several weeks that I’d be moving firms, but couldn’t really tell anyone at the old place until I’d squared away all my stuff.  The last few weeks have been torturous for me:  I’ve not been sleeping well and my self-doubt has been at the forefront of my thinking.

After I resigned on Thursday night, and knowing that I’d have to go into the office on Friday and face everyone, I went to see Inception with my sister Katie.  It was pretty good, though I think it could have been much better.  At least it was entertaining and got me out of my head for those few hours before I went to bed.

And, it helped me realize that I’d been spending so much (too much) time in my head lately.  Mostly falling prey to my self-doubt and thinking along pessimistic lines.  I don’t mean to say that I’ve stopped all that and have reverted to a pollyannaish outlook, but rather that the movie helped me become aware of just how much time I’d spent concocting possible future scenarios in my imagination – and negative ones, at that.

Not blogging about my thoughts and feelings on the whole scenario was tough but necessary.  There are one or two people with whom I work who know about this site and I couldn’t risk letting any of my plans become public knowledge at work.

Special thanks to Jen, Heather, Anna and Didi for talking with me via email about what’s been going on in my head.

I’m still a bit nervous for the future, but I’m also confident that I can handle whatever comes.  I’m excited in a subdued fashion to see how things unfold over the next few weeks.  I just re-read Sun Tzu’s Art of War and am currently reading both Richard Branson’s Losing My Virginity and Bruce Lee’s The Tao of Jeet Kune Do.  I think I’m going to read a few books on military history, in order to have some practical examples to which I can relate the aphorisms from Art of War.

Game on.

So I’ve been writing all night, but not here.  If you’re interested in reading my trip reports for this weekend, you can follow these linqs:

Hunter & SW Hunter (Catskills) on Saturday

Tabletop & Phelps (Adirondacks) on Sunday

Maybe I’ll post the full text for tomorrow night or something, but I don’t feel like doing the copy/paste thing right now.

Last night included quite a bit of writing for me as well – but it was email correspondence that you’re not privy to, dear reader.  My apologies for that – you know you’re my favorite person to whom to write – but these emails needed to be sent, as they were to people I care about (just like you).

Anyway, things are still wicked icky at work.  Rumors abound, and peace, love and brotherhood are nowhere to be found.  I’m re-reading Sun Tzu’s Art of War and keeping my head down because I’m currently an indian in a tribe of chiefs.

I’ve not been sleeping all that well, but whatever.  I think the ghost in my apartment is picking up on my anxieties and f*cking with me for fun.  That’s fine; I’ll get it back when I’m feeling a bit more in control.  We have that kind of relationship.

Work has been really weird lately.  Several key people have left in the last few weeks and everyone is pretty worried.  Nobody will meet anyone else’s eyes and everyone’s wondering who’ll be the next to quit.  It’s pretty messed up and overall, the vibes are wicked icky.  I went for a nice long run after work today, just to purge myself of the negative energy that seemed to be stuck all over me.  And I really don’t like running.

Though I should be doing more of it.  I have that Warrior Dash thing coming up in September.  I have about six weeks to get myself to the point where I can run for 3.5 miles.  I’m definitely not looking forward to training for this thing.  The race itself, however, should be loads of fun.

On the upside, I ran farther for longer today than I have before.  I’ve been reading a lot of posts by trail runners over at the ADKHP forum, so that’s providing some inspiration.

I was hoping to take Monday and Tuesday off next week and spend it in the Adirondacks bagging peaks, but it doesn’t look like that’s going to happen:  I’m handling a few of the accounts for the guy who quit today.  Too bad.

I will, however, be in the ‘dacks this Sunday.  On Saturday, Scott and I will head up to the Catskills, bag Hunter and SW Hunter and visit with our friends Heather, Tom, Iske and Lily while they’re guarding the Hunter Mountain fire tower and doing the ambassador thing.  Then we’ll swing up to the ‘dacks in the early afternoon, hopefully in time to camp before it gets dark.  We’ll climb a couple of mountains in the ‘dacks on Sunday and head back to NJ.  I’m looking forward to seeing Scott’s boner when he sees the majesty of the Adirondacks.  I don’t think that last sentence came out right.  =/

So yeah, work is pretty icky right now and I’m very glad my cube is kind of a pain in the ass to get to.  Rumors abound and I’m not looking forward to the next couple of weeks.  Work-wise, that is.

I am, however, looking forward to snowshoeing this winter with lots of new friends.  I think I’ll probably miss solo hiking a bit, but breaking trail by oneself really sucks the big one.

Yeah, it happens.  But it’s a total bitch.  For me, at least.

I’ve been struggling with self-doubt for the last couple of weeks or so.  I’m not sure where, when, how or why it started, but it seems like all of a sudden I just can’t make any decisions.  And for someone who prides himself on efficiency in all aspects of his life, this really sucks.

I feel like Hamlet – I’m sitting in this morass of indecision as life passes me by and my decisions are either made for me or my choices end up being curtailed by the passage of time.  I need to get back to acting decisively and following through all the way.

But how to do this?

Duh:  start acting decisively and following through.  ”But it’s so hard to get started,” he whines.

Yeah, well, sometimes I’m a pussy like that.

Shortly after the Pope had apologized to the Jewish People for the treatment of Jews by the Catholic Church over the years, Ariel Sharon sent a proposal to the College of Cardinals for a friendly game of golf to be played between the two leaders or their representatives to demonstrate the friendship and ecumenical spirit shared by the Catholics and the Jews. The Pope met with his College of Cardinals to discuss the proposal.

“Your Holiness,” said one of the Cardinals, “Mr. Sharon wants to challenge you to a game of golf to show that you are old and unable to compete. I am afraid that this would tarnish our image in the world.”

The Pope thought about this and, since he had never held a golf club in his life, asked, “Don’t we have a Cardinal to represent me?”

“None who plays golf very well,” a Cardinal replied. “But,” he added, “there is a man named Jack Nicklaus, an American golfer, who is a devout Catholic.  We can offer to make him a Cardinal, and then ask him to play Mr. Sharon as your personal representative.  In addition to showing our spirit of cooperation, we will also win the match.”

Everyone agreed that this was a great idea.  The call was made. Of course, Nicklaus was honored and he agreed to play as a representative of the Pope.

The day after the match, Nicklaus reported to the Vatican to inform the Pope of the result.  “This is Cardinal Nicklaus. I have some good news and some bad news, Holiness,” said the golfer.

“Tell me the good news, Cardinal Nicklaus,” said the Pope.

“Well, Your Holiness, I don’t like to brag, but even though I have played some pretty terrific rounds of golf in my life, this was the best I have ever played, by far.  I must have been inspired from above.  My drives were long and true, my irons were accurate and purposeful, and my putting was perfect.  With all due respect, my play was truly miraculous.”

“How can there be bad news?” the Pope asked.

Nicklaus sighed.  ”I lost by three strokes to Rabbi Tiger Woods.”

The old Jeep pulls to a stop at the end of our driveway, lets us out by our own faded Jeep and pulls a youie, Bill’s gnarled hand waving goodbye to us from where the window would be.  At the same time, Jen and I take a deep breath and smile broadly as we exhale.  We don’t say anything to each other, though we both know we’re thinking the same thing:  it’s good to be home; it smells different – better – here.

Jen jumps into the front seat and cranks up the old machine – it seems she can ALWAYS get it started on the first try – as I throw our packs into the back seat.  By the time I get to the driver’s side, Jen is already buckled up and ready to go.  It’s a beautifully sunny afternoon, but not hot enough for the dust from the road to stick to the dust that’s already covering our traveling-clothes.

“You sure you don’t want to drive?” I say.

“Nope.  It’s all you.  But let’s take it easy on the way up, hmm?  I won’t fall asleep on you, but it’d be cool to zone out for a bit.”

“Okie-dokie,” I say, and throw it in gear.  I give it some extra gas, slip the clutch and spray gravel from our driveway onto the highway as I fishtail it around a bit.  I can feel Jen looking at me.

“What?!” I protest, unsuccessfully suppressing a smile.  “There’s no way you had time to zone out already!”

Jen laughs and slugs me in the arm as I roll to a stop and put the Jeep in four wheel drive.  It hurts and I drive (more or less) carefully for the remaining 5.2 miles of dry dirt track leading up to our house.  I’m sorely tempted to play in the mud as we get up the hill and into the forest closer to the house, but Jen anticipates this and is looking right at me when I glance over to see if she’s paying attention.  I feign innocence.  Poorly.  And she laughs again.  God, I love to hear her laugh.

We pull up under the port cochère (which I am NOT allowed to call ‘the car tent’, even though I built it)  just as the front door opens.  Jackson, our eldest, saunters out with a dish rag over his bare shoulder like he owns the place.

“You look like you own the place,” I say with a smile as we trade grips and our daughter Meghan (thirteen this spring and two years younger than Jackson) bursts out the door and into Jen’s arms.

“I do,” he laughs, “Unless you and mom changed the will while you guys were in town?”

“No,” I reply, “you’re still slated to get everything when we go.”  I have no idea where or how this macabre joke got started, but I play along because, well, it’s our joke.  We don’t even have a will.

“Daddy!” Meg squeals, jumping into my arms and almost bowling me over in the process.  (I swear, I think she’s really trying to – and one of these days she’s going to succeed.)  But I saw her coming and was ready by the time she was two steps away.  I have no idea how much longer I have before she’s actually able to take me down, but I pretend she almost does and turn it into one of those twirl-arounds the military guy from the old movies always does when he comes back from the war and sees his girl for the first time.

I let Meg down as Jen walks to my side and encircles my waist with her arms.  I put one of mine over her shoulder and we both heave one of those same happy sighs as we look past the kids at our cabin, which hasn’t burnt down in the five days we’ve been gone.  The kids have grown like weeds out here.  Jackson is a couple of inches taller than me – and he hasn’t even had a real growth spurt yet – and Meg is just about her mother’s height (barefoot maybe three or four inches shorter than me).  I don’t know if it’s the fresh air and exercise or their mother’s midwestern genes.  Jen’s dad and my dad are both 6’4″ – maybe that’s where they get it.

“What’s for dinner Stoney?” I say to Jackson, reaching for the dish rag on his shoulder with my free hand as Jen nuzzles my neck.

Jackson’s been cooking since he was about eight, and after seven years of practice at every opportunity, he’s probably better at it than me or Jen.  And that woman can cook.  ‘Stoney’ is short for ‘Stonewall’ – yes, just like the Confederate General – I forget why we started calling him that; it just seemed natural.  Jen gives me a squeeze and I turn to her and we kiss.

“Trout,” he says, “I caught them a couple of hours ago.  With baby potatoes and garlic and . . . okay, oKAY!  Ten second rule!”

Jen and I both turn our eyes to him and break our kiss; she pulls me closer.

“We really need to change that rule,” I say, “you guys are getting old enough to handle it.”

“Ew, gross!” says Meg.  “I’m going inside!”  And she bounds off into the cabin I built before she was, presumably to get back to commandeering her mother’s reading nook and hogging every last scrap of bandwidth of the mountain’s only internet connection.

“C’mon inside; dinner’s almost ready.  How was your hike?” he says over his shoulder as he steps up onto the porch.

I kiss Jen on the forehead and grab our packs from the Jeep.  “It was pretty nice,” Jen calls to Jackson, who’s already inside.  “We bagged six peaks and your father almost got eaten by a bear.”

“Now wait just a minute,” I say.  “That was just a cub and she only chewed on my boot for a second before I told her to stop!”

“Yeah, but what does a bear cub chewing on your boot mean?” Jen retorts.  “It means she’s probably hungry and you know her momma couldn’t have been too far away.”

“What?!” I say, looking dejected.  “We were playing.  And it was only for a minute and we skedaddled like two seconds later.”

“Maybe.  But that’s not how I remember it.”  Jen gives me a wink.

I give her a look that says that I concede (as always) to her infinite wisdom and she socks me in the arm again – in the exact same place as last time (how does she do that?) – I’m pretty sure there’ll be a mark by the time we go to bed.

“Jesus!”  I exclaim as I carry our packs toward the porch.  “How the hell did you carry this all week?  What’s in here?”  I know full well that Jen packs light and, if anything, my pack is the one that’s usually on the heavy side.  I put the packs down.  She gives me that look that can freeze well water.

“You know perfectly well what’s in there:  that stupid dominatrix outfit you insisted I bring with us.”

“What?!” I say, sidling up to her and putting my arms around her shoulders.  “I just thought it might be particularly sexy to see you in your leather corset, fishnets and stilettos by the firelight.  C’mon, you gotta give me points for originality.”

“Points for originality, sure,” she says, “but you’re in the negative for practicality.”

“Whatever,” I say (again feigning dejection – hey c’mon, sometimes it works), “you’da looked wicked hot.”

“Hey pop!”  Jackson yells from the kitchen window.  I love it and hate it when he calls me that.

“Yo!”  I respond.

“Meg and I are going to go down to the south meadow tonight with the telescope so we can work on her astronomy project, ok?”

“Sure,” I say.  “Are you going to sleep out or are you planning on making a racket after your mom and I have gone to bed?”  Just like when I was younger and still courting Jen, my deja vu tells me I used to ask the same underlying question of her parents:  ‘am I guaranteed some alone time with this girl I’m in love with?’  Now the tables have turned and I’m the adult in the situation, but I’m still asking the same question, in a probably too-strident tone, to cover for my inner butterflies.

“No, we’re going to stay there tonight,” Jackson laughs as he pulls his head in from the window.  With a slight echo from inside, I can hear him say “Why would we hike back with that heavy telescope in the dark?”

I turn to Jen and give her my strongest knowing-slash-seductive look.  She socks me in the arm.  Again.  And smiles.  God, I love to see her smile.  “Maybe,” she says and starts to giggle.  “Maybe.”

That’s a yes.  But still, I wonder if maybe my smile was too wide and the eyebrow-waggling was a bit over the top. 

After all these years, why do I still wonder about that?

____________________________

This one’s for you, Jen.

As written by Hakuri Murakami in On Seeing the 100% Perfect Girl One Beautiful April Morning (and unabashedly scraped from that linq).  This short story appears in Murakami’s The Elephant Vanishes.

Seriously:  this happens to me AT LEAST three times a week.

Haruki Murakami: On Seeing the 100% Perfect Girl One Beautiful April Morning

One beautiful April morning, on a narrow side street in Tokyo’s fashionable Harujuku neighborhood, I walked past the 100% perfect girl.

Tell you the truth, she’s not that good-looking. She doesn’t stand out in any way. Her clothes are nothing special. The back of her hair is still bent out of shape from sleep. She isn’t young, either – must be near thirty, not even close to a “girl,” properly speaking. But still, I know from fifty yards away: She’s the 100% perfect girl for me. The moment I see her, there’s a rumbling in my chest, and my mouth is as dry as a desert.

Maybe you have your own particular favorite type of girl – one with slim ankles, say, or big eyes, or graceful fingers, or you’re drawn for no good reason to girls who take their time with every meal. I have my own preferences, of course. Sometimes in a restaurant I’ll catch myself staring at the girl at the next table to mine because I like the shape of her nose.

But no one can insist that his 100% perfect girl correspond to some preconceived type. Much as I like noses, I can’t recall the shape of hers – or even if she had one. All I can remember for sure is that she was no great beauty. It’s weird.

“Yesterday on the street I passed the 100% girl,” I tell someone.

“Yeah?” he says. “Good-looking?”

“Not really.”

“Your favorite type, then?”

“I don’t know. I can’t seem to remember anything about her – the shape of her eyes or the size of her breasts.”

“Strange.”

“Yeah. Strange.”

“So anyhow,” he says, already bored, “what did you do? Talk to her? Follow her?”

“Nah. Just passed her on the street.”

She’s walking east to west, and I west to east. It’s a really nice April morning.

Wish I could talk to her. Half an hour would be plenty: just ask her about herself, tell her about myself, and – what I’d really like to do – explain to her the complexities of fate that have led to our passing each other on a side street in Harajuku on a beautiful April morning in 1981. This was something sure to be crammed full of warm secrets, like an antique clock build when peace filled the world.

After talking, we’d have lunch somewhere, maybe see a Woody Allen movie, stop by a hotel bar for cocktails. With any kind of luck, we might end up in bed.

Potentiality knocks on the door of my heart.

Now the distance between us has narrowed to fifteen yards.

How can I approach her? What should I say?

“Good morning, miss. Do you think you could spare half an hour for a little conversation?”

Ridiculous. I’d sound like an insurance salesman.

“Pardon me, but would you happen to know if there is an all-night cleaners in the neighborhood?”

No, this is just as ridiculous. I’m not carrying any laundry, for one thing. Who’s going to buy a line like that?

Maybe the simple truth would do. “Good morning. You are the 100% perfect girl for me.”

No, she wouldn’t believe it. Or even if she did, she might not want to talk to me. Sorry, she could say, I might be the 100% perfect girl for you, but you’re not the 100% boy for me. It could happen. And if I found myself in that situation, I’d probably go to pieces. I’d never recover from the shock. I’m thirty-two, and that’s what growing older is all about.

We pass in front of a flower shop. A small, warm air mass touches my skin. The asphalt is damp, and I catch the scent of roses. I can’t bring myself to speak to her. She wears a white sweater, and in her right hand she holds a crisp white envelope lacking only a stamp. So: She’s written somebody a letter, maybe spent the whole night writing, to judge from the sleepy look in her eyes. The envelope could contain every secret she’s ever had.

I take a few more strides and turn: She’s lost in the crowd.

Now, of course, I know exactly what I should have said to her. It would have been a long speech, though, far too long for me to have delivered it properly. The ideas I come up with are never very practical.

Oh, well. It would have started “Once upon a time” and ended “A sad story, don’t you think?”

Once upon a time, there lived a boy and a girl. The boy was eighteen and the girl sixteen. He was not unusually handsome, and she was not especially beautiful. They were just an ordinary lonely boy and an ordinary lonely girl, like all the others. But they believed with their whole hearts that somewhere in the world there lived the 100% perfect boy and the 100% perfect girl for them. Yes, they believed in a miracle. And that miracle actually happened.

One day the two came upon each other on the corner of a street.

“This is amazing,” he said. “I’ve been looking for you all my life. You may not believe this, but you’re the 100% perfect girl for me.”

“And you,” she said to him, “are the 100% perfect boy for me, exactly as I’d pictured you in every detail. It’s like a dream.”

They sat on a park bench, held hands, and told each other their stories hour after hour. They were not lonely anymore. They had found and been found by their 100% perfect other. What a wonderful thing it is to find and be found by your 100% perfect other. It’s a miracle, a cosmic miracle.

As they sat and talked, however, a tiny, tiny sliver of doubt took root in their hearts: Was it really all right for one’s dreams to come true so easily?

And so, when there came a momentary lull in their conversation, the boy said to the girl, “Let’s test ourselves – just once. If we really are each other’s 100% perfect lovers, then sometime, somewhere, we will meet again without fail. And when that happens, and we know that we are the 100% perfect ones, we’ll marry then and there. What do you think?”

“Yes,” she said, “that is exactly what we should do.”

And so they parted, she to the east, and he to the west.

The test they had agreed upon, however, was utterly unnecessary. They should never have undertaken it, because they really and truly were each other’s 100% perfect lovers, and it was a miracle that they had ever met. But it was impossible for them to know this, young as they were. The cold, indifferent waves of fate proceeded to toss them unmercifully.

One winter, both the boy and the girl came down with the season’s terrible inluenza, and after drifting for weeks between life and death they lost all memory of their earlier years. When they awoke, their heads were as empty as the young D. H. Lawrence’s piggy bank.

They were two bright, determined young people, however, and through their unremitting efforts they were able to acquire once again the knowledge and feeling that qualified them to return as full-fledged members of society. Heaven be praised, they became truly upstanding citizens who knew how to transfer from one subway line to another, who were fully capable of sending a special-delivery letter at the post office. Indeed, they even experienced love again, sometimes as much as 75% or even 85% love.

Time passed with shocking swiftness, and soon the boy was thirty-two, the girl thirty.

One beautiful April morning, in search of a cup of coffee to start the day, the boy was walking from west to east, while the girl, intending to send a special-delivery letter, was walking from east to west, but along the same narrow street in the Harajuku neighborhood of Tokyo. They passed each other in the very center of the street. The faintest gleam of their lost memories glimmered for the briefest moment in their hearts. Each felt a rumbling in their chest. And they knew:

She is the 100% perfect girl for me.

He is the 100% perfect boy for me.

But the glow of their memories was far too weak, and their thoughts no longer had the clarity of fouteen years earlier. Without a word, they passed each other, disappearing into the crowd. Forever.

A sad story, don’t you think?

Yes, that’s it, that is what I should have said to her.

The last five days passed like a dream.  I was really hoping for some kind of spiritual experience or battery recharge or something when I headed off to the woods last Wednesday.  And I got it.  Well, I got something.  Not entirely what I thought it would be, but something nonetheless.

I’ve been looking forward to spending a few days in the woods, hiking and camping, for the last few months (ever since just before the busy season started).  The last couple of weeks have been melancholy and frantic – in that rushing-to-do-everything-and-not-getting-anything-done kind of way.  I was hoping to walk out of the woods with a life-plan for the next few months laid out in my head.  What happened instead was that I waked out of the woods with a calmer and more peaceful mind, which is therefore more able to put together a life-plan for the next few months . . . maybe sometime this week – I’m really not all that worried about it right now.

So here’s a quick run-down before I head off to bed:

I left my house Wednesday morning and met my buddy SoloJoe Whalen at the Sloatsburg rest stop on 87N (about fifteen minutes or so from my house).  We then caravanned up to The Mountaineer in Keene Valley NY, so that Joe could pick up an air mattress and some other supplies.  We stopped briefly at a cabin called Random Scoots in Keene NY to visit with a couple of friends from the ADKHP forum.  Then we boogied back to the Northway, south one exit, and over to the Upper Works parking area.  The sun was just going down as we got there and we had decent light for the first mile or two.  Around 4.5 miles in (it was dark by this time), we bumped into the monument to the man for which the river we were following (Calamity Brook) got its name (his death was a calamity).  The monument was, however, a side trail, so after snapping a few photos, we booked it back onto the trail, happy in the knowledge that we only had to carry our heavy packs another .4 miles before we started passing lean-tos at which we might sleep.

Well, about two miles later, we hit a sign that read “High Water Bridge” – one which we found familiar.  We put our packs down, wiped the sweat off our faces and looked at each other in perplexity.  I pulled out my iPhone (upon which I was tracking our progress via my GPS app) and pronounced us to have backtracked.  We then said the F word a lot.  And then some more.  I laughed quite a bit at our predicament, as it meant we still had at least another three miles to walk that night and we were already exhausted from carrying those heavy packs.

By the way, when I say “it was dark”, I don’t mean the kind of dark you’re probably used to.  I mean the kind of dark wherein there is no visible light ANYWHERE.  If we switched off our headlamps, we could not see each other standing only a few feet away.  Starlight, yes.  Moonlight, not this evening.

Anyway, we finally made it into a lean-to close to 1AM, scaring the couple within it half to death.  Joe’s got great people skills, though, so he smoothed everything over pretty quickly.  I told them that we were bears, but they didn’t believe me.  Probably Joe with the whole talking-thing.  Joe and I decided not to eat, as that would prolong the already lengthy time we’d be keeping the nice couple awake.  Night comes early in the Adirondacks – about 9PM this season – so even if they had plenty of steamy sex in the lean-to before we arrived, they still must have been asleep for a couple of hours.  As we lay our heads down to rest, I could not, however, resist muttering to Joe “don’t make any moves on that guy, ok?  We just met and you hardly know him.”  I’m sure that was good for an extra couple of minutes of awake-time for the dude.

lolz

We woke up around 6AM on Thursday, had breakfast and were on the trail by 8:30AM.  The lean-to we stayed at was the third one we poked our heads into, and the only one not full.  As such, it was also .4 miles farther away from the trail upon which we would start our march.  It was kind of a long day.  Not in a bad way, but in terms of hours.  We hiked for around 10 hours, returning to the lean-to just before 7PM and covering probably between 12 and 15 miles.  We climbed Gray Peak and Mount Redfield (both “bushwhacks”), putting me at 9/46 for the Adirondack High Peaks and Joe at some ridiculous number beyond my meager 9.  I put ‘bushwhacks’ in quotes back there because the trailless peaks of the Adirondacks have very clear trails on them, but they’re just not marked with blazes or signage.  The bushwhacks in the Catskills are much tougher in a navigational sense, though I can’t imagine trying to get through the growth on the sides of the mountains in the Adirondacks – it’s wicked thick.

On the hike, Joe and I discussed literature, relationships, philosophy and other things sublime.  Come to think of it, I don’t think I said ‘boobs’ more than once or twice.

When we got back to the lean-to, we had something to eat while Joe packed his pack and got ready for the five-mile hump out of the woods.  I have no idea how that sonofabitch made it – I was completely exhausted.  But he did.  And then he drove 5.5 hours back to NJ, packed his stuff and was on a plane from Philly to Colorado by 8:30PM on Friday night.  Joe’s out there now, bagging 14,000 foot peaks.

I had the evening and the lean-to to myself, and I made good use of my time.  By which I mean, I walked down to the beach of the Flowed Lands reservoir (or whatever kind of body of water it is) and rinsed myself off in the cold mountain water.  I also rinsed out my shirt and socks and pumped some more drinking water from the spring.  I didn’t have a computer, so I couldn’t blog, but I made some notes in a notebook and read some of Haruki Murakami‘s The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle (thanks, Sara, for loaning it to me – it only got a little wet on the hump out of the woods and none of the pages are currently sticking together), which I am currently enjoying immensely.

I went to bed early Thursday night – maybe 10:30 or so – both out of pure exhaustion and lack of stuff to do when it’s black as pitch outside of the lean-to door (which is really the whole front of the place).

I woke up early on Friday morning, said “fuck-it” and dozed for a few hours.  I finally got moving around 10 or 10:30AM, just as the first raindrops began to patter on the lean-to roof.  I made and ate breakfast and arranged my gear so as to minimize the possibility of anything getting wet besides my raingear and my pack’s rain cover.  Then I humped the 5 miles back out of the woods to my car.  In the rain.  And when I say “rain”, I’m talking mountain lions and timber wolves.  It was effin pouring.  The trail wasn’t so much a trail as it was a series of rock-tops upon which to step, and small streams in which one might step without fear of the water coming above the tops of one’s boots.

Not that it mattered in any case; my boots were soaked by the time I got to the car.  I had on these goretex waterproof socks, though, which kept my feet and socks dry, despite the fact that my boots were soaked through.  I couldn’t believe how heavy my boots were when I took them off.  Nor could I believe that the next thing on my plate was to get down to the Cats to meet Scott and hump around all night and day in the woods in those heavy wet boots.

By the way, the hump out of the Adirondacks was simply splendid.  Even though it was raining, I had a great time.  The weather was warm enough that it really didn’t matter if I got all wet (not that I did – I was wearing raingear).  I kept a steady pace and it seemed by that point that my backpacking muscles had figured out what they were doing and gotten stretched out – they were not nearly as sore and painful as they were on Wednesday night.  On that hike, I thought about various hiking-related things, but mostly just enjoyed myself and my vacation.

I got to the car and headed down to the Cats to meet Scott.  Well, actually, I headed back north to Keene to get gas (should have done that Wednesday afternoon), and then south to the Catskills.  I toweled out my boots as best I could and put them in the passenger side footwell, under a blast of hot air.  My wet socks and shirt went on the dashboard, to be warmed and dried by the defogger.  Which created some fog, but not too much.

Believe it or not, by the time I got to the Cats, my socks and shirt were dry, and my boots were barely damp.  It took quite a bit of maneuvering on the drive to achieve this, but I’m glad I did.

I met Scott at the Alder Lake parking area at around 9:50PM on Friday night and we humped the 2.25 miles in to the Beaver Meadow Lean-to.  This night hike also involved some backtracking, though probably only about .5 miles-worth.  I wonder if there’s a patch for night-hike backtracking miles.

We hit the lean-to around midnight and ate, then slept in on Saturday morning and hiked a rather lazy six miles or so along Mill Brook Ridge, bagging the high point and the high point of Woodpecker Ridge (a quick bushwhack), while talking of recent events and things sublime.  That puts us at 47/102 for the Catskill Hundred Highest.

We then stopped back at the lean-to, gathered our heavy stuff and humped back out to our cars.

When we got home, I took a nice long hot shower and went to Steve’s Sizzlin’ for a big steak, then swung by Scott’s house to hang out for a bit.

Today was a lazy day, but I got all my errands run.  It was an excellent weekend and I’m currently walking the earth with a deep sense of peace in the background.  I’m pretty ok with going back to work in the morning, which means it was a successful vacation.

=)

I’m taking a couple of vacation days – Wednesday to Friday.  I’ll be up in the Adirondacks, bagging peaks.  I leave Wednesday morning and will hopefully be able to climb a mountain that afternoon.  I’ll be staying at the lean-tos at Flowed Lands.  Feel free to send me a fax.

Thursday and Friday will be big peakbagging days for me – hopefully I’ll get four or five mountains climbed on Thursday and two or three on Friday.  Then it’s hike back out of the woods (about 5 miles or so) and into my car for a quick drive down to the Catskills, where I’ll crash at a lean-to until Scott wakes me up Saturday morning and we’ll bag a couple of CHH peaks.

More detailed itinerary to follow, once Scott & I figure out where we’re meeting.  I hope.

In case this is my last post until Sunday night (which will inevitably be a LONG one), take care, dear reader.  Enjoy your week and don’t stress too much.

Heather Rolland, if you’re reading this and haven’t already done so, please check out the blogs of my friends Lauren Flax and Jennifer Wesner.  They’re relatively dissimilar and make for wonderful daily (more-or-less) reading for me.

Jen, I still owe you an email; I will provide that tomorrow during the day or in the evening.  Lauren, I think I’ve done a decent enough job of avoiding lascivious and inappropriate comments on your facebook statuses for the last week or so; likewise, I will provide those tomorrow during the day or in the evening.

Please do not be fooled, dear reader:  linqs do not love make (though it sure is fun to shout-out one’s friends via one’s own cozy little corner of the interwebz).

Adieu.  For now.

Scraped from here, but discovered at WinterWarlock‘s facebook page:

The Men Who Don’t Fit In
by Robert W. Service

There’s a race of men that don’t fit in,
 A race that can’t stay still;
So they break the hearts of kith and kin,
 And they roam the world at will.
They range the field and they rove the flood,
 And they climb the mountain’s crest;
Theirs is the curse of the gypsy blood,
 And they don’t know how to rest.

If they just went straight they might go far;
 They are strong and brave and true;
But they’re always tired of the things that are,
 And they want the strange and new.
They say: “Could I find my proper groove,
 What a deep mark I would make!”
So they chop and change, and each fresh move
 Is only a fresh mistake.

And each forgets, as he strips and runs
 With a brilliant, fitful pace,
It’s the steady, quiet, plodding ones
 Who win in the lifelong race.
And each forgets that his youth has fled,
 Forgets that his prime is past,
Till he stands one day, with a hope that’s dead,
 In the glare of the truth at last.

He has failed, he has failed; he has missed his chance;
 He has just done things by half.
Life’s been a jolly good joke on him,
 And now is the time to laugh.
Ha, ha! He is one of the Legion Lost;
 He was never meant to win;
He’s a rolling stone, and it’s bred in the bone;
 He’s a man who won’t fit in.

I think I might just go ahead and memorize this one: it definitely brought a swell to my heart and a tear to my eye.

So I’m still in a funk.  At least, I think I am.  Maybe I’m just exhausted from the weekend and today’s heat.  I got into my car at 17:30 today and the temperature gauge said 109.  The car was, however, sitting in full sun in the parking lot all day, and it quickly cooled to a balmy 104 as I drove home.  What a crappy day to be a smoker.  50-60 degrees in the office, 100-something outside.  Making the trips between the two temperatures was, to say the least, unpleasant.

I much prefer to blog when I’m in a happy mood and have fun things to talk about – how life is a bowl of cherries and all that shiz.  But someone (read:  sister Katie) has been giving me crap on facebook about not posting as often and/or posting infographics, so that’s why I’m writing now.

I can’t really say I don’t like it, but I just don’t have much to talk about.

This was, however, a good weekend:  Scott and I climbed Fir Mountain on Saturday and then Rocky and Lone Mountains on Monday.  Those were Scott’s last three mountains for the Catskill 3500 Club.  Congratulations, brother!

All three mountains were bushwhacks, and the last two were a 10-mile hike.  I’m pretty proud of Scott’s accomplishment.

Sunday was an off-day for hiking, so I just lazed about and got the usual errands done.  I finished Heather Rolland’s first novel Finders, Seekers, Losers, Keepers and started on her second one Honey Melon Fudge.  Book review(s) to follow shortly.  It’s been really cool to be able to correspond (via facebook) with the author of the book I’m currently reading.  =)

That’s it for now.  Work is slow as sh*t and I have pretty much ZERO motivation.  Maybe it’s the heat.  Maybe it’s dehydration.  Tomorrow will be a better day (not that today wasn’t a good day).  See you then.