:: The Blurst of Times ::

:: 3.13.2005 ::

A Shift in Paradigm at 7am CST on a Saturday. or: A Prayer for Raven Jackson

For being a smart kid, it seems like there are some lessons I have not, and will never, learn. Maybe the best way to handle the situation is to figure out what you will never learn and spend the rest of your life playing damage control.

I will never learn the lesson of brevity. When I have something to say, it’s going to take a while. I’ve tried to shorten stories. I usually end up shortening sentences and then just using more of them. Here’s a hint: I think I have a lot to say today - you might want to pace yourself. Read for a while, then take a break, grab a snack or a soda, maybe check some emails or do some work, then come back and read some more. Don’t be intimidated by the volumes of text - maybe copy it into some sort of word processing program and print it out. Then you can take it to your couch or your favorite coffee shop and read it while you enjoy some delightful ambiance and a cinnamon raisin bagel.

I will never learn the lesson of patience. I get my mind wrapped around something and it’s like an addiction, internal, gnawing at my psyche and driving me. Bouts with extremism shadow many periods in my life - impassioned thought compelling me to action based on blind judgment. Repeatedly the end result is self-destruction.

And I wonder: is the best way to keep yourself from destroying the best things you’ve ever had in life, to stop having things? Like when my mom decided it was just a bad idea to have nice dishes because I have a habit of tossing things to myself while I’m walking.

I have, however, learned that when you plant trees, it’s always better to plant an odd number in a massing. Asthetics. And that when you render a plan graphic, always shade to the nature of the sun, not the orientation of the drawing. Also aesthetics. And that Time is only linear because of the laws of Thermodynamics. That one’s physics. He can be taught!

[Metablogging: I hate the fact that whenever I get in the mood to go on hiatus from this creation, I retro-actively leave it with some short stupid and inane ‘final post’ that is so trite and superficial that one can’t help but read it and wonder if this truly is the work of a couple monkeys pounding on a couple keyboards for a couple hours. But to my defense, I have been thinking for the past four weeks that I need something to replace that, something significant, thoughtful, and possibly summarizing everything this blog has stood for for the last three years. I’ve had bus station inspiration end in a blank screen and blank mind at home, and I’ve had hours of pounding the walls, waiting for the inspiration to come, all to no avail. This is a final stab at it: Enough has transpired in the last to weeks to warrant an update; I’m listening to ‘Whatever and Ever, Amen’ (quite possibly the most unbalanced album ever) knowing that ‘Brick’ is going to cut me in two, but I’m anxiously awaiting ‘Selfless, Cold, & Composed’; and for some reasons my dreams are starting to get to me - no longer short clips with people I am familiar with, they have turned into epics with fully recognizable characters and roles to play - for some reason this seems to be an appropriate driving force that something needs to be written. Odds are, this will not be the last post, because I forget how much I enjoy writing when it is flowing, but when the flow ain’t there, it’s torture. You never know.]

You have times in your life when you realize that someone has taught you something. I used to not know how to spell tomorrow. Seriously. (For the record: I still can’t spell restaurant or guarantee without a dictionary). Then one day in seventh grade, Team C, Kiewit Middle School, in Mr. McGuire’s 4th hour Science class, a beautiful young lady taught me how to spell it - Tom, or, row. So I promptly fell in love with her. This relationship of learning a lesson and falling in love would become something of a habit for me in the coming years - so much so, I think I’ve mastered the art of fucking up the lives of people whose intentions are only the purest in helping me.

***

The sun doesn’t rise directly in the east or set directly in the west. You’d think it would be in the southeast/southwest, but it’s really in the northeast/northwest. Also, consider an entire time zone - a thousand miles wide. The sun won’t rise on the whole thing at once - the east side will get sunlight almost an hour earlier than the west. Suffice to say, when you’re used to the west side of the timezone and suddenly you’re sleeping on the east, you’re going to get woken up by the sun a lot earlier, and the sun doesn’t care if it’s Saturday or your day off.

***

I’ve never considered myself a religious person. Even when I went through my ‘Yes, I’m a good Christian’ phase (it lasted about three months, when I was 11), I was mostly just stoked by that shirt that said ‘Jesus knows Life is tough as Nails.’ What can I say: I’m a sucker for a good catch phrase. I’m not religious, but I think I have (and do) put a good bit of thought into it. I’m comfortable with my relationship with a higher being(s). I see glory and wonder all around me and cannot imagine how other people don’t. I wonder how people can believe in a God whose glory surpasses all, whose benevolence encompasses everything, whose power heeds no bounds... I wonder how those people can start wars, can hate, and burn, and devastate. And I wonder how can things ever change. Is this truly the ideal of human nature? Did we ever really leave the state of nature - or did we just made life nasty, brutish, and a bit longer? Civilization is nothing more than a means of creating bigger, fatter, and crueler means of killing more people from further away.

***

In all reality, the energy sources we are dependent upon as a global society are not sustainable. I don’t care if you think they will last fifty more years or seventy-five or a hundred or whatever, eventually it will run out. Avoiding Kyoto now for economic reasons will likely seal the United States’ fate as a second-rate nation in technological innovation in the realm of energy production. Even the possible benefits we can gain from re-applying nuclear power lag behind the better half of European nations. And nuclear isn’t much of a solution. Sustainability may be greater than the fossil fuels, but safety (in terms of meltdown and enriched uranium regulation) is certainly lacking, and the amount of waste (uber-dangerous, not-going-anywhere waste) is monumental. In addition, there will be no avoiding NIMBY-mentality when it comes time to construct plants and dispose of wastes, and the centralized control structure that leads to stagnation and price-gouging by major utility suppliers remains unchanged. It stands to reason that evolving our society and culture around wind and solar power will lead to sustainable usage, diminished environmental impacts, and greater local control over utility prices and outputs. Nuclear may be an adequate compromise (replete with enormous risks if the regulations are not heeded), but it will be a costly and lumbering fix, like replacing your Commodore with a IIGS.

***

When I was a junior in high school, two friends taught me a lesson. I have to say two, because I can’t remember which instigated it - I think one said something to me about a movie and the other gave me the book to read. [And I wonder if those two friends would be pissed if I give them shared credit, knowing that I loved each of them thoroughly, devotedly, and independently]. When I met these friends I was so angry - I was so anti-everything, it’s amazing I bothered to show up for classes. I fought cliques, rules, regulations, laws, standards, castes, and everyone who I thought swallowed it all. I was stupid, arrogant, and naive. To some degree maybe we all were, but I probably was more than my fair share of being an asshole.

A Prayer for Owen Meany made me a fatalist. I became convinced not only of my own significance in the greater scheme of things, but also that I could accept who I was for what I was. No, I didn’t think like everyone else. Why not? I don’t know, but there’s a reason - just because I’m not big enough to see it doesn’t mean it isn’t there. No, things were never going to work out with my first heartbreak. Why not? Well, probably for a lot of reasons, but that was just the way it was. Nothing personal buddy, just two puzzle pieces that weren’t meant to be adjacent. And there’s a reason you weren’t supposed to switch to going to school in Lincoln. No, you’re never going to get those four years of your life back, spent in reckless pursuit of a girl that could never see you for who you were (are). Were they wasted years? Absolutely not. To give credit where credit is due, both of my friends gave me the gift of Owen Meany, but it was the one who was afraid to be on State Street in the dark who taught me that I could live my life without regrets or embarrassment. So of course I fell in love.

***

There is a certain morbid streak that must run through every fatalist, especially those who tend toward Unitarianism/Atheism. It’s kind of a prerequisite - like being a socialist and being having compassion for your fellow man - if you’re lacking one trait, it’s doubtful you could have the other. To put myself in the company of great men, I’d say I share this trait with Kurt Vonnegut and Johnny Cash. But in all actuality I put myself in the company of a great many realists - I can recognize idealism, but instead of seeing a sweeping change tear through the society like a reform-minded tornado, I see ideas gradually replace other ideas as time painstakingly marches forward. I see an era of reformation that began with 94 Theses being nailed to an oak door, being about halfway over in the present time. I also see scientific revolutions being cut short by the waning attentions of “revolutionaries” less interested in results than in being known as revolutionaries. Thus, I’ve accepted the fact that I will not likely be known as a revolutionary, but would like to think that at the end of my days, I’ll be able to look back and say, ‘Yes, I did not make things worse than I found them.’

***

Sometimes when you’re a realist, it’s like watching the whole world in shades of gray. Or to make the metaphor more philosophical and less cinematic, it’s like you’re in the cave and watching the whole world as the shadows on the cave wall. A year and a half ago I was dealing with some pretty serious depression. Of course, I didn’t call it depression, I called it realism. I didn’t know... anything. Everything I had hoped and believed in and knew, changed. Suddenly left in the dark, my life became a study in minimalism. I was in the cave. Everything appeared two dimensional to me. It was a good feeling to be so planar - I grasped everything. I saw edges and definition on every issue. It was all clear. It was like being solid again.

Being complacent is a very dangerous situation. Someone once told me [in response to the idea of being green behind the ears]: “Think like a plant: if you’re not green, you’re dying.” A phrase like that can strike you deep, especially in my line of work. And it’s a good mantra - to have something that simple and powerful to live by. It’s like you have a reason to keep moving. Eighteen months ago, I didn’t really have a mantra. I wasn’t really green anymore. I had come to accept my lot, with where I was, what I had done, where I was going. And I never knew how bad it was until I met this muse. I met her when she stole my money and told me to buy her a drink. We lost a game of pool and I’d never seen anyone so happy. In the next month I became energetic, inspired, and most of all, alive. It was she who inspired me to take on the greatest model I ever built, quite possibly the greatest (and most successful) two week undertaking in my entire life. It was she who drove me, she who kept me smiling, she who lectured me at 2 in the morning in a closet on the third floor of Seaton, not about why I could finish it, but about all the reasons I couldn’t. She taught me to be green again, taught me to love the thrill of building something with my hands, or creation.

I here had the opportunity to break what was becoming a dangerous trend. The realist said to walk away. The realist said that I’ve been down this path so many times I own real estate on it, but I couldn’t get the idealism out of my mind. I was captivated and entranced. I had a minute, a second, a blink of an eye to make the decision, and the decision was made before we even ever spoke. Once again, I crashed blindly ahead, and crushed what I most treasured.

***

Planners are a group of people divided between being idealists and being realists. The ones you hear about, the Duanys and the L’Enfantes are the revolutionaries, chock full of half-baked solutions and snake oil. The realists will never be on TV or make circuit speeches promoting their latest books - they tend to stay in their hometowns, study hard at school possibly even teach, work on local planning boards or work with communities that have none, and quietly keep walmart from gulping down communities like a fat kid eats skittles. The realist planners aren’t concerned about current trends, they know that they’ll come to pass. So they make mantras like: ‘You can’t count on people to change - you can count on them to die.’ And they do. So it goes.

***

There’s a certain aspect of my extremism that occasionally demands I clean myself up. [As a footnote: I believe that I’m a fascinating study in irony - I can be at once the most anal-retentive bastard you’ve ever known, and the most sloppily dress bum you’ve ever seen; I extol the virtues of nature, but fear spiders and especially centipedes; At once I want to be the pinnacle of rigid asceticism and the epitome of debauched living.] There is also a reciprocal force that in the past has led me back to chemical supplementation, if not reliance (but never dependency, I promise myself).

Since I do make an honest effort to reform myself and my misguided ways, I will come to clear the slate here and now: Alcohol is primarily consumed in moderation. I can think of three instances in the last year I drank myself sick. This is down 40% from the year prior (five instances), but whole worlds better than when I turned 21 and really hit the bottle hard for a while. I have recurring issues with cigarettes, but haven’t smoked one in the last three weeks. These two will be the hardest challenges in the near future. I haven’t smoked marijuana in more than a month. I haven’t used adderall, ritalin, or amphetamines in over a year and coke even longer than that. I drank my last caffeine four weeks ago. I have started eating better, fixing full dinners and making sure I eat them, making a note to eat both breakfast and lunch everyday. I drink almost no soda and drink water all day at work. I make sure I’m in bed before one and up at six (both will be earlier when the sun starts rising earlier). This is my regimen. I will maintain myself.

***

When I was a little kid we took trips across the western half of the state of Iowa several times each year. My favorite time to go was in the late summer and early fall. See, Iowa’s the corn state, and called such for a very good reason. And when you’re flying by on the highway, past the cornfields with their rows and rows of corn stalks, about half the time, the rows run perpendicular to the road. If you stare at the field while you are driving by, in rapid succession, each of the spaces between the rows lines up with your eye for just a split second, creating a very animated and fascinating optical illusion. It’s probably nothing too major or earth-shattering for most people... if they notice at all. But if you see me driving across central Iowa and I keep sliding outside my lane, just remember some people are drawn to brightly colored flashing lights, others of us just like corn.

***

Sometimes in life, my brain works like this, too. Sometimes I’m just flying by everything, thinking, and reading, and writing, and smelling the roses, and just doing my best to somehow maximize existence, all the sudden everything just lines up. An instant where you feel like everything is equidistant from you because you are everywhere at once. You love everything, every alcoholic, every leaf, every broken promise, every single friend, classmate, roommate, every time she thought about fucking that guy while you were on a camping trip together, every baby, every homeless guy, every square foot of concrete, of ocean, of savannah, of lunar surface, every murderer and every welfare worker and every little kid who believes in God because he doesn’t want his grandparents to die. You start smiling at everyone because it isn’t even you any more - you’re someplace that won’t ever exist, looking back on things from the eleventh dimension and wondering how everything got so glowy. I feel this and I know that whatever I think at that exact moment will be the truth and will be the right answer and will become part of my soul. I’m a whale, opening up my existence to the ocean of water, straining millions of gallons of being through my neuro-baleen. What I pull from that experience will sustain me. Every row is aligned as I’m speeding by.

Sometimes what I find is that I haven’t pulled anything new from existence at all. Sometimes I find something that’s been stuck in my teeth for a couple of weeks. There’s information, a lesson that flashes in front of my eyes, plain as day and yet forever invisible: you can’t set expectations, you can only set goals - and somehow, right here, right now, in this enlightened state, for the first time, that makes sense. And as I come down I realize that I am going to make the same mistake that I’ve made countless times before. It’s the lesson I’ll never really learn. And I wonder if it’s that big of a deal.

***

I think Adam Smith must have been a fatalist. He was famous for referencing an Invisible Hand that was going to work wonders on the global economic situation. That’s a pretty slick creation for a fatalist - he didn’t even give it a brain or eyes or ears to hear people screaming for justice. It was just a hand that was going to move things where they needed to be, right place, right time. Kroger Parking lot. Last Thursday night. I think some people name this Hand, Karma, but I have no desire for retributive justice, so I think of it as fate.

:

Raven Jackson is 6, she’s in second grade, she likes science and chocolate. Her favorite candy bar is Snickers - mine is Three Musketeers. Raven is standing on the curb and can’t find her mom. I am rushing home because I am dying of the plague and I need to make cookies to take to work on Friday. Raven has been wandering in the parking lot for ten minutes now - I know because I’ve been watching her, waiting for someone to ask her if she has any idea where she’s going. [To maintain my level of honesty and integrity, if someone had asked me where I was going at that moment, my answer probably wouldn’t have been any better than Raven’s.] Raven didn’t know. She thought her mom had probably gone home, but Raven couldn’t get home because she couldn’t cross the street. I took Raven back to Kroger’s. They paged for her mom, but no one came. We looked around the store and didn’t see anyone fitting the bill. They paged again. No response. We got some candy bars - a Snickers and a Three Musketeers. Raven really likes chocolate, so she took the Three Musketeers, that particular bar being composed entirely of chocolate. I ate the second snickers of my life. They still put lots of peanuts in those things: it tasted about as bad as the first. After a few minutes, a guy stocking the shelves said there was someone checking out her groceries who he’d seen with Raven earlier. A quick scan of the checkout lanes yielded no recognition. We returned to the desk as a woman came in the front door carrying a half gallon of milk. She looked at Raven and said “I told you to sit still and not move.” She grabbed Raven’s arm and pulled her over against the wall. “Now stay there” and walked back to the checkout aisles. I asked Raven if that was her mom. She nodded. For the first, and probably last time, I told Raven Jackson goodbye. But who knows: the Hand can be a very fickle friend to believe in. Me, I only have the power to set goals.

Raven is going to have a lot tougher life than I had. It will be a lot easier for her to get angry at things and she’ll probably have more of a right to be mad than I did. I hope that when she’s 17, she isn’t as much of an asshole as I was.

“Have faith that there’s a soul somewhere that’s leading me around. I wonder if she knows which way is down...”
:: Freddy F. at 11:12 PM [+] ::

Comments:

I'm not jealous anymore.

# posted by  Anonymous : 9:41 AM

 

I start complaining and using nonviolent protesting to your lack of blogging...dang did you nail me back - gonna take me a day or two to read and digest all of this. Good to see the return of BAP! Lookin forward to seein ya in a few weeks.

# posted by  andebos : 10:31 PM

 

I think that Raven Jackson is lucky you found her before one of those sick freaks you read about in the daily news did. Hopefully in the short time you spent with her she learned as much from you as you did from her.

# posted by  Sylvia : 5:01 PM

 

It's funny how humans can talk about social ideas and bringing our lives into some better understanding. Yet, other times we may not know what our house mates are doing, or focused on in the next room for a year. Write, draw, research, debate and render us more fantastic pictures. I still have a lot more to read. One last thing before I go, what jantors closet on the thrid floor?

# posted by  Polaris : 12:16 AM

 

J'appr?cie toute l'aide que j'ai re?ue.Toodle-oo, Jame free drug rehab in san diego

# posted by  Anonymous : 7:51 AM

 

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