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- sublety vs giving upJanuary 11
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subtlety is not my strong suit. ask any coworker, friend, or family member and they'll likely laugh outright at any sentence with both my name aside an implication of subtlety. i'm a force to be reckoned with, always have been, always will be. i don't know when to shut up, or speak up, from time to time, and lately, in the past half year or so, it seems more often than not, i'm regretting speaking up at all.
i speak up because i feel a coward when i let it slide. i feel a coward when i believe so strongly in my own warped little mind that my warped little sense of justice just has to be mentioned. the beauty and the folly of an amazing workplace and set of friends and wife is that these environments allow me to grow, to find my voice, and learn a bit better when it's best just not to talk or visa versa. i'm young yet compared to many of my peers and my cougar wife, sometimes by as much as 10 or 15 years or more, and i'm not alone in my fiestiness, so with this big setup for voicing my opinion, i sometimes do.
whatever.
the hard part about it is this: where's the middle ground? where's the point where you've cleared you conscience a token amount and can now safely stop giving a shit? where's the point where you can say "i tried, i did my part, this is out of my hands now."?
there's a principle that's popular at work, we call it the "good deed principle", it follows from the common phrase: no good deed goes unpunished. indeed. - if i could fly, i don't know that i would.December 23 2009
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if i could fly, i don't know that i would.
music: sigur ros - untitled 1
five a.m., the last work day of 2009 is only a few hours away. i put a couple extra hours in yesterday, and feel a subtle sense of bliss that i won't have to put in a full 8 tomorrow as a result. this is what my definition of a good day has been these past few weeks or months. i'll venture to guess this is her definition as well. 2009 didn't start off this way, though.
the new year always starts with amanda's birthday on december 31st. this one was a big one, she turned 30. we were married less than two months before.
our first year of marriage has been a good one, a great one, all things considered. being married brought/brings a huge sense of accomplishment and "belonging" that's very difficult to explain.
'belonging' means a lot of things to me: it means i've succeeded at shaking out a large portion of the bugs inherent in my twisted little maladjusted upbringing and turned into a fairly normal person, which is all i hoped for for many years previously; it also means - fogDecember 16 2009
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i am young, 10 or so. it is early in the morning. we are driving to go fishing on a lake. there is fog outside, everywhere. we drive to lake tiwakini, and it feels like i'm in a movie for the entire drive due to this eerie fog. i am safe inside the warm car with my brothers and my father, looking out at this movie passing me by.. fog everywhere. we put our boat onto the lake and go from cove to cove looking for wherever the fish went to. the coves are shallow, so there are dead tree stumps with all sorts of haunting looks to them, especially with the fog. we can't see more than 20 yards into the distance while in these fog-covered coves. it looks like a movie, and it seems weird because i don't feel scared. am i supposed to? i am safe in my boat, because my father is a cautious soul taking care of the world around us boys while we absorb the sights, experiences, and lack of sound. the day seems so odd due to the fog, a rare thing in texas. otherwise the day is unimaginative, fishing with my brothers and my father one early morning on some random weekend. i was likely too young to realize what "memories" were made of, but this was it.
flash forward about two decades, and the very same fog descends down onto austin for days on end, usually at night and early morning. the fog takes me back to that day 20 years ago. listening to this "drove through ghosts to get here" track while i drive through the fog around town makes me smirk, driving through ghosts indeed. again - experimental futility updateDecember 11 2009
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i updated http://www.experimentalfutility.com, like previous experiments, you get something new every time you refresh, but the message remains the same.
i listened to this jimmy eat world "cautioners" song on endless repeat while making it.
i dont want to spoil the meaning of the visual to others, but here are some random factoids, the content comes from the past half-decade or so of my life. and the message, as far as i know, has existed continuously through 99.9999% of those moments.
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today amanda was in a car accident. she is okay, the other person is okay, and its hard to even see the point where the car hit her truck.
she called me at 4:50. i was busy listening to two architects bicker about progress at all vs 'the grand vision, all at once!'. i hit "don't answer", then she called right back 2 seconds later. i excused myself from the heated oh-so-fucking-important discussion of the moment and called her back, and she was frantic. she said she was okay and the other driver was too, but her franticness and the intersection she was at made it hard to believe she really was okay.
as soon as i heard her frantic bleed through the telephone i started running out of the office to my car. within ten minutes i was at the scene, and like i said, and she said, she was fine and the car is too.
remember heartbeats? mine must have fucking stopped for th - November 24 2009
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Nov 22 2009
Music: Matthew good - champions of nothing ( on repeat )
And here are the parts I wish to remember.
We traveled endlessly on four hours of sleep for what seemed a never ending journey, landed and ate at one of his favorite places to eat (at my request).
The night was easy (for me), asleep within minutes, waking in the morning from the deepest hardest sleep in what seems like years.
We get to the funeral and see his family, she points out his mom and starts to approach. His mom does not recognize her with half her face covered in hide-me-away sunglasses. God, those sunglasses, she sees every waking hour of sunlight in polarized vision, it's like the world is beautiful to her pretty little eyeballs, nonstop.
She raises her glasses and his mother bursts into tears, they have not seen each other in years and it is immediately clear their bond transcends everything before and everything ever to come.
We enter the moratorium and make our way to see him in his coffin. We see him, but it's not him. This heavily made up empty shell that appears cold, blue, and gone... it just isn't him. I think of all of these years wanting to see my mother this way at her funeral, and yet here I stand in front of him and it's clear seeing the body does something.. but it's just not on/off... The denial is going to go on and on and on, even with this so-called visual, surreal, closure.
She is a mess. We