musings of one sweet chuck

Still Asking…

2010-10-18T23:30:00.001-05:00

After nearly a year, I’m still asking why. But, more and more, I’m seeing that asking is the most important part. I find myself walking through my day, taking mental notes on what I see and hear, and asking why. Why is the sky blue? Why do so many drivers here stop a car length before the stop line? Why do I dream the things I dream? Why do we punish criminals the way that we do? Why does the roof of my mouth itch? All sorts of questions, popping in and out of existence, and I haven’t written any of it down.

Rarely do I find complete answers, but that isn’t as important as what I always find, and that’s more questions. My muse has woken, and she’s full up on life’s little, and not so little, mysteries. So, while she’s awake I’m going to put her to work, and start writing again. I don’t know where this is going, but that’s half the fun.

Asking Why

2009-10-20T20:23:00.001-05:00

Little kids don't seem to have any problem with the simple question, “Why?” Once they learn to talk, and learn how to ask, it becomes the perpetual question. Lately my why has been, “why haven't I been writing?” I haven't written anything more substantial than a 30 second VO kicker in months. I don't really feel that much of an obligation to write, and except for school, I never have. I wrote because I wanted to write.

Writing has been my confessional, my psychotherapy, my way to mourn, to vent, to celebrate life, to show my love, to escape, to face my fears, and many, many other things. I am certainly not done with any of those things, but this silence still remains. This lack of desire sits on my brain, like a skin of oil, blocking out the sunlight. Part of it has been a shift in how I think, I am trying hard to move away from the internal conversation, and create opportunities for more external dialogs. But I am, as I have always been, quiet, observing, thoughtful, and noncommittal, trying to change that has been a slow, and sometimes painful process.

I am not sure where I am going from here, I strongly suspect that I will focus less on writing and talking to the faceless masses, and communicating directly. So, for now... that's all I've got.

Changing Directions

2009-09-08T01:54:00.002-05:00

Emerson writes, “The eye is the first circle; the horizon which it forms is the second; and throughout nature this primary figure is repeated without end.” I’ve thinking about my circles recently, both as a primary function of existence, like the circle of life, and as a mundane fact of life, like the turning of day into night and back into day. The days pass into weeks, into months, into seasons, into years and we live through all the revolutions or we don’t.

My own circular logic brings me back to this place, at the start of something new but along the same worn paths I will walk and find myself thinking and feeling many of the same things. Occasionally I’ll catch sight of a novelty that I hadn’t noticed before, but mostly I trudge along from one day to the next, content that at least I know where I am going.

That path, however, well never lead me to my center. There may be a fundamental discord in the search for self and the search for god. While the search for self requires shrinking the circle down to a point to find the center of a man, the search for god requires a circle of infinite radius, a circle where the circumference encompasses everything, and the center is everywhere. Perhaps the singularity of the one and the infinity of the other connect directly to complete the circle, I don’t know, I have been to neither place.

I’m not sure that I am ready to collapse my circle, and I’m not sure I’m capable of extending out to the edge of existence. A long time ago I became convinced that I needed my circle to be big enough to include one other. I’m not sure when or where that idea took root, but it has stayed with me, and now I wonder how to shake that thought free. I wonder how to get that idea to spread its wings and expose all its beauty and all its flaws so I can reexamine my own nature, and find a way to put my center at my back and walk to the horizon.

Emerson starts the final paragraph of his essay on Circles with this thought:

“The one thing which we seek with insatiable desire is to forget ourselves, to be surprised out of our propriety, to lose our sempiternal memory and to do something without knowing how or why; in short to draw a new circle. Nothing great was ever achieved without enthusiasm. The way of life is wonderful; it is by abandonment.”

Zen Delusion

2009-09-01T01:10:00.001-05:00

“The most important point is to establish yourself in a true sense, without establishing yourself on delusion. And yet we cannot live or practice without delusion. Delusion is necessary, but delusion is not something on which you can establish yourself. It is like a stepladder. Without it you cannot climb up, but you don’t stay on the stepladder.”

- Zen Master Suzuki

The problem I continually have is that I get to the top of the stepladder and find my expectations for what was up there far exceed reality. And then when I try to climb down I find that the rungs were removed as I stepped off of them, so all I have is to sit there or jump off and start over. Sitting there becomes very painful after a while, starting over is just depressing.

“Zen practice is a style of discovering what the right way to act is. It does this, as it must, by being without presuppositions, without expectations, without knowledge of end.”

- Jeffrey C. Ruff and Jeremy Barris

So it would seem that I need to have delusions, and use them, but not have any expectations, or at least no expectations based on those delusions.

Space

2009-08-25T00:07:00.000-05:00

I’ve been interested in space travel and NASA since I was a kid. Largely due to sci-fi like Star Trek, I attended Space Camp in grade school, and I even got to see a shuttle launch live. Right now I’m sitting in the newsroom watching NASA TV after hours waiting to see if weather is going to scrub the Discovery launch.

At this point I’m more of a casual observer, in the same way I am interested in severe weather, and really, science in general. But I also am fascinated by adventure and exploration, and space is what’s next. Think about the raw excitement of strapping yourself to hundreds of thousands of pounds of liquid and solid explosives and launching yourself into the air. The very idea is absurd, except we’ve been doing it for nearly half a century.

And the last point I’ll make is this, watching a shuttle launch is just, awesome. The lights and sounds, the raw power, the acceleration, it’s just fracking awesome. My pulse starts racing at T minus 1:09 and counting. Pretty much anytime I get to watch a rocket go up I’ll take it.

Finding Balance

2009-08-16T17:11:00.002-05:00

The funny thing is, I don’t remember the last time I had both feet under me. I’ve been leaning one way or the other for a long time, and a lot of that time I’ve been floating off the ground entirely. If I were addicted to drugs or alcohol, I would gladly seek treatment, but there is no 12 step program for the “hopeless romantic.” The nice thing, is I have haven’t really lost much, if anything, to my insanity. But in order to move on, I have to find balance.

My twenties started off right where they are going to end, right here in this building. I’ve been gone and back again, willingly and not, I’ve been hurt by people I thought were friends. People close to me passed away, and some people close to me were, and are going to be, born. I have developed great friendships, and let some great friendships slip away. I have loved and hurt, laughed and cried, sinned and repented, fired and re-hired, and in all of this there has been some balance, but I only seem to find it at as the pendulum swings through the bottom of its arc.

Now I’m off again, to search outside and within, perhaps looking for intrinsic parity that may already be part of my system. I’m going to plant both feet on the ground, and if I fall over… well then I’ll pick myself up again.

Twenty: Part 12 Running Quiet

2009-08-14T23:30:00.000-05:00

Some days, I really just don’t know what to write about. Today was a rather eventful news day early, we had a river rescue, some flash flooding from torrential rain, and the sentencing for a man convicted of killing his ex-girlfriend. But with all that, everything went smoothly, and the rest of the day was pretty quiet.

The newsroom has felt especially quiet the last few days, I’m not sure if the quiet is just in my head, or the result of the rotations of summer vacations, or maybe it has just been quiet.

Twenty: Part 11… All the lonely people…

2009-08-14T01:04:00.001-05:00

This post is at least partially inspired by a guy I know who passed out in his truck listening to Polka tapes. And also in a small way to the guy that killed four women in a fitness club last week.

I truly believe that everyone can find companionship, friendship and love, and that there is someone for everyone. It seems though that lately I’ve noticed an epidemic of loneliness, and the resulting extremes have been in the news. Now, they guy in Pittsburgh seems, by many reports, to have been a psychopath, I know I probably wouldn’t have wanted to hang out with him, but I wonder how his life went so wrong. The line, “[he wasn’t] born wanting to do this” keeps repeating in my mind. The problem is, I know just enough psychology to think that maybe he was born with the capacity for psychopathology, if not the desire to go into an exercise class turn off all the lights and open fire.

But it’s interesting to me, how different people handle the same basic situation. Like the guy who is passed out in his truck. I know him well enough to know that he’s probably clinically an alcoholic, and that’s something probably caused by both genetics and environment. He’s been “alone” for as long as I’ve known him. I don’t think he’s had a steady girlfriend ever, and I don’t think he’s been the recipient of any kind of physical affection as an adult. But he’s not violent, or even angry. Depressed, and self medicating, probably.

Now, here is the happy ending. While the first case ended violently, tragically, stupidly, there is still hope for the second case, because anybody can be a friend…

P.S. Perhaps appropriately, as I was getting ready to post this, Heuy Lewis’ “It’s Alright” started playing on my iPod…

Twenty: Part 10

2009-08-12T21:29:00.002-05:00

It's been enough days that I have to check now to see which number this part is...

I wonder how people in other jobs unwind while at work. In the decade since I've started here we've played music in the newsroom after the rest of the building leaves for the day, we've played “newsroom baseball” between shows and pick-up basketball games behind the station. Mostly though we talk about the day's stories, or sit and chat, with an ear to the scanner to listen for breaking news.

I really enjoy the people I work with, so even on the most frustrating days we can usually find a way to laugh and smile. I like the work I do, editing video and creating graphics, but what really makes the job is the people. Without them I wouldn't work here.

Twenty: Part 9… Post hoc ergo propter hoc

2009-08-12T01:13:00.000-05:00

One of the surprising things about life is the process through which events progress. Event A leads to person doing thing X which causes event B… and so on. I think about some of the major “events” of the last few months. LA Fitness shooting, a couple of plane crashes, the midair crash over the Hudson River this week, all the result of a confluence of events, some obvious, some not, I would love to be able to look at a time line and mark all those points.

When I was young, and naïve, I remember asking my math teacher if there was a way to mathematically predict the importance of any given event. I still have a dream that I might find such an equation… I don’t know if I would share it if I did…

Twenty: Part 8

2009-08-10T21:32:00.000-05:00

For me, one of the biggest missing pieces in television news is science coverage. I don’t think the average viewer is interested, and even if they were, I don’t think many reporters are interested in covering science stories. We’ll occasionally see coverage of a shuttle launch, or a space walk, but rarely does anybody cover the actual science.

We hear more and more often that American students are falling behind other countries in Mathematics and Science. I have wondered if increased coverage and accessibility of science would start to reverse that trend. Most likely though, the roots of the problem go much deeper.

I’ve seen many people, when presented with a new phenomena or event, instead of trying to figure out why or how something works, they shrug their shoulders and say, “It’s too complicated for me to understand.” I can understand saying that about Quantum Chromodynamics, but I think society has a tendency to give up far too easily. Think about it this way, how many times as kid did you ask why? How many times did you get a satisfactory answer? How long did it take you to realize that asking why doesn’t usually get satisfactory answers? Eventually kids just give up, and they just never get that curiosity back.

Now some questions. If you don’t know the answers, don’t worry, look them up. You might just learn something.

Why is the sky blue?
Why does mint make your mouth feel cold?
Why are flowers colorful? (Bonus if you answer both why we see them as colorful, and what purpose the color serves?)
Speaking of color, why are leaves green, and why do they change in Autumn and fall off?

This is fun, I may have to answer these in the near future, and if you have questions, ask.

Twenty: Part 7

2009-08-09T23:59:00.000-05:00

Working in television, like working as a police officer, fire fighter, or EMT, allows me to see a lot of bad things happen to good people. Which usually means that every once in a while, I’ll get a strange feeling, that something bad is going to happen to someone I know. Usually the feeling doesn’t entirely go away until I talk to the person. I imagine that these feelings must be the cause of many parents’ grey hair.

Sundays during Football season are usually pretty quiet as we usually have only one show, at 10PM. So starting next week there will be somewhat of a party atmosphere in the newsroom on Sundays. We don’t get drunk or anything, but it is definitely more laid back. Going to work feels less like going to work, and more like just hanging out with friends. I like it, I’ve missed it, and I’m looking forward to it.

Twenty: Part 6… Rain Delay

2009-08-08T21:09:00.001-05:00

While television news doesn’t get rained out, we do, from time to time, have delays in programming due to sports or the President. If those delays are planned, we end up with some time to work on other projects. If the delays are not planned, we usually end up standing by where ever we are supposed to be fore the show, waiting for it to start.

Most of the delays are not to long, less than thirty minutes. The one big exception is for March Madness when we can be on as much as two hours late for our 10PM show. There is no hand off to the morning crew, no pre-taping the show, so we wait.

And we wait.

Eventually the show goes on, and usually it’s a great relief to just be done with the day.

Twenty: Part 5... First Friday

2009-08-07T20:54:00.003-05:00

I found an article, via Brad Willis, on the Washington Post's website that talks about how news organizations, and pseudo-news organizations “borrow” from each other to provide the news. Outright copy theft happens more often than you might think, not usually between direct competitors, like two different television stations in the same market, but maybe a radio station will “borrow” a story from a newspaper.

I use the term borrow pretty loosely because sometimes it can be as simple as, just getting a story idea and then doing the leg work to get the facts and interviews. But borrow can be as severe as directly copying a story from one source and using it without attribution.

We recently covered an offbeat local story that was very popular on our website, one of the stations in our corporate group copied the web story and posted it on there own site, which is sort of forgivable. In the corporate sense, what's yours is ours, so posting the story wasn't too much of a problem. Unfortunately, their web page was submitted to Digg.com and received several thousand diggs, resulting in a ton of traffic to their website and presumably more advertising money for them.

What isn't so forgivable is when a local radio station steals copy from our website and then posts the story as their own, as if they had covered it. This sort of plagiarism pretty much goes against what most of us believe in as journalists. What it does support is the business model. Why pay ten people to go out and get ten stories, when you can have one person sit at a computer and copy ten stories in considerably less time, and with considerably less cost.

There used to be a legal basis for news organization to pursue plagiarists, but those laws were written out by Congress in 1976. The Washington Post's article cites the Justice Department as saying such laws “gave media organizations a 'boundless monopoly' over the news of the day.” I'm not entirely sure that is true, working in this newsroom I know that our competition can go out and cover any of the stories we do, and if we get a scoop on them, there is nothing keeping them from talking to the same people getting the same information, or maybe even getting a better story than we had. And certainly we are capable of covering any story our competition does, and most often we do a better job.

Twenty: Part 4

2009-08-06T21:49:00.000-05:00

One of the many reasons I enjoy working in journalism is that I have an intense curiosity about almost everything. But there are topics that the media, and the public, just don't talk that about, most recently in my life that untouchable subject has been the horrors of war.

I was talking with friends about people that we knew who were serving in Iraq and Afghanistan. We were talking about the mundane and monotonous, and with out really thinking about it first, I commented that it was amazing how varied soldier's experiences could be. One of my friends jumped in and said that obviously, the soldiers we were talking about had seen, and participated in things that they just didn't talk about. I've been thinking about it since that conversation and, it has been eating at me, I've known soldiers and police officers, firefighters and EMTs, and they all have been close to tragedy, but I still think that everyone's experience is different, and that taken over the whole of those groups, the experiences vary considerably.

In the newsroom we have a set of guidelines about which subjects we don't give our audience. Of course there are the standards and practices that every television show has to abide by, no swearing, gore, sex, that sort of thing, but we also withhold information to protect witnesses and victims of crimes and so forth. In spite of these restriction many people seem to view the media as aggressive, inhumane, and exploitive, and while certainly there are members of the media that do act that way, pretty much everyone that I have worked with has been caring, compassionate, and careful when handling sensitive subjects. While I certainly do not want to victimize people, I am very curious about what people think about the events of their lives, whether those events are tragic or ordinary.

As someone connected to the media, I think that sometimes we have a view of the world that may not be in focus with how the world really is. Part of my curiosity is to understand all those other view points, to understand those experiences, and to join all those disparate viewpoints and create an accurate understanding of what the world is, and how it works.

Twenty: Part 3

2009-08-05T21:23:00.000-05:00

Sometimes breaking news turns out to be rather “blah”, or what sounds like a big deal turns out not to be. Usually when we get a report of “shots fired” or “man with a gun” it is a big deal, especially in area of the country that doesn't have a high crime rate. A few weeks ago a man pulled, what turned out to be, a gun shaped cigarette lighter on some people. There were conflicting reports about whether the people were scared or not, or even knew that it was a lighter or not. Law enforcement was particularly worried about it, so a story that could have been big turns out not to be.

Sometimes the reverse is true, a reporter will go out on a story that was intended to be a little VoSot, and find a great angle that turns the story into an award winning piece. Really we never know exactly what we are going to get, which is fun when we get something better than we hoped, and frustrating with it goes the other way.

What's most frustrating though, is when a story completely fails. Nobody wants to be interviewed about it, is the most common cause of story flame out. Either people are too busy, or just don't want to go on record. Reporters have called half a dozen sources looking for someone to talk to, and wasted hours tracking down a story that just evaporates.

Poker players have a saying, “You don't remember many of your biggest wins, but you remember in excruciating detail every bad loss.” For journalists, the frustrations of stories that go nowhere, tend to fade away amongst a sea of stories that came together perfectly. We live with the frustration, but live for the great stories.

Twenty: Part 2

2009-08-04T21:02:00.001-05:00

Today was crazy busy, but fun. With summer vacations we are short a reporter on day side, and a producer at night. Plus another producer is reporting so we lose another producer, which means a lot of work, but I love it. It’s busy, but not hectic, stress, “oh my god” breaking news intense. I edited 20 scripts in two hours, for the Five and Six newscasts I don’t think that is a record, but it is close. I usually have a dozen or so, less on a day when we have a lot of reporter pieces.

It is always interesting to watch the ebb and flow from day to day. To see what stories come together and what stories just don’t work. And I love editing, I see video from all over the world, and the producers put all the stories together in just one show. Trying to form order and cohesion from the chaos of events, and then present the news to the views.

Twenty: Part 1

2009-08-03T20:11:00.000-05:00

I’m sitting in an empty newsroom between the six and ten newscasts, I am ostensibly on break, but I’m here so there is a presence in the news room. It’s nice, sort of a quiet time, I can play some David Garrett from iTunes, and relax.

Today hasn’t been especially hard, there was a bit more to edit today but that’s ok. I managed to get everything done in time for the early shows and I’ve finished editing for ten. I still have to build some graphics for sports, but other than that hopefully it will remain a quiet night.

This is the first day of twenty straight days of work for me, with everyone taking summer vacations, I get tapped to work weekends in addition to my regular hours. It’s nice, I’ll get quite a bit of over-time. Especially considering so many in television news are taking mandatory furloughs, and newsrooms are cutting staff, we have been very strong.

There has been a lot of news in the past few weeks, we’ve had a good July sweeps period, but I’m looking forward to some slower, less hectic days, even if it means an increase in my work load, there will still be less stress.

I’m not sure what I’m going to do with this space in the next twenty days, but everything has a beginning and this is one, just like so many others, that start off rather aimlessly and don’t really find a direction until it picks up steam. I guess we’ll just see what we’ll see.

Hiatus Explained… Kind of…

2009-07-12T20:19:00.000-05:00

I have had much to say, and much to think about and hash out, but nothing that I feel comfortable saying, thinking, or rehashing in public. I have always been cautious hiding behind the anonymity of the internet, in many ways saying something publicly demands a certain respect for the listener, or in this case the reader, and for me part of that respect demands that I don’t hide behind a mask, or moniker.

The long and short is this, for the time being I will restrict my more personal musings to the privacy of anonymity. I still have many things to say that I won’t have any problems saying publicly, and some things for which for which, standing on top of the Sears tower with a Stratocaster would be appropriate.

Now I’m off to draw lines in the sand…

Pale Half Moon

2009-05-27T00:42:00.001-05:00

The other night as I was driving home from work I noticed the moon had not risen yet, and I had realized that I hadn’t seen the moon during the day in a long time. I don’t remember the last time. When I was a kid I remember looking up at the pale half moon in the blue afternoon sky and just staring at it for the longest time. I don’t remember what I was thinking, perhaps just musing over the raw possibilities of that moon in that sky.

In the early days of intelligent life I can imagine primordial man looking up at that moon must have wondered what it was all about. I wonder if the first person that realized the possibility of it being another planet wondered if other people were living on it. I wonder if they pondered the idea that there was somebody out there looking back at them. I wonder if that thought made them uncomfortable or if they were happy that there might be someone up there.

Today we have evidence of other planets orbiting distant stars, we even have pictures of large planets around distant stars. I can stand in the field at night, and look up at the stars and ask the same questions, ponder the same things, wonder what it all means.

I can look to the heavens, to the world around me, to my friends, my family, and the people I love. I ask all manner of questions, some I’ll find answers too, some not. Some questions are so complex, finding answers in a single lifetime is nearly impossible. And finally some answers I can’t find “out there,” some I can only find inside me.

But I can still look up at the night sky, and feel, with almost absolute certainty, that there is someone out there looking back at me, and I’m not sure how I feel about that.

Bridge

2009-05-20T20:52:00.000-05:00

Since this space does not provide a source of income for me, and I’m not under any external pressure to produce content, blogging is primarily an emotional, intellectual, and spiritual outlet for the debris of my consciousness. Occasionally, this means that when I temporarily find safe harbor in some other venture, I will vanish from this place for a period of days, weeks, and even months.

During this away time I’ll often be engaged in some other task and have a thought that I want to expand and flush out. In the moment I don’t often have the capacity to write down what I’m thinking, so I don’t often return to those lines of thought. But sometimes the kernel of the idea sticks with me and I have to sit down and reprocess the kernel to find the truth that I stumbled upon.

This week’s kernel was about healing, but I can’t remember where I went when I originally processed the idea. I need to get better at taking notes, or maybe not have so many thoughts…

See You Later Alligator

2009-05-09T04:57:00.001-05:00

What happens to our dreams? When we are children we dream of becoming, we dream of things we do not know, and we dream about who we’re going to be. But somewhere along the way those dreams fade away. Some times they are replaced, sometimes rewritten, sometimes just forgotten like a toy dropped behind the couch.

And then there are those dreams that are so beautiful we can’t wake up from them. They trap us at a point in time where we spin our wheels in the mud sliding sideways but never moving forward. My dreamer is a 5-year-old boy, from a quarter century ago, and the dream is a girl named Karen. Facts are few and far between, just the memories of a five-year-old, which are as ephemeral as a scent on the wind. I remember a classroom, and a poster we made as a get-well gift because she had an eye infection. I don’t remember her face, or the sound of her voice, or anything that would physically define her. I remember a catchphrase that we would say on parting, one of us would say, “see ya later alligator,” and the other would respond, “after while crocodile.” I don’t remember why she’s stuck in my head these last 25 years.

Other people, even friends and family, from before that time and after, are thought about rarely, or forgotten entirely, but she resurfaces every couple of weeks. Sometimes it’s just a passing thought, sometimes I stop and think about the mystery. Perhaps one day the mystery will be solved, perhaps I’ll wake up from that dream. I know that when I do wake up, I’ll smile and whisper, “after while crocodile.”

Second Star

2009-05-05T02:48:00.001-05:00

It seems that the simplest questions may have the most profoundly deep answers. My own private journey started with a simple question, “If you could have anything, what would you want?” The instinctual, perpetually 17-year-old, part of my brain started running through a list of names before I said “Ein minuten bitte!” All those women, they’re fine and all, but there must be some deeper reason for the list, a truer answer to the question. Companionship maybe, or perhaps something more basic, like love.

I don’t think it’s quite that simple though, I don’t feel like I’m missing something major in the “love” department. Sure no girlfriend to speak of, but that is more of a work in progress, journey through life sort of thing. There are no glaring neon signs pointing to that particular void.

“If you could have anything, what would you want?” Sure, there are physical things, cars, houses, money, and the intangible, fame, prestige, power, but there is a root desire that took me quite a while to puzzle out. Freedom. Not freedom from responsibility, because in the end I set my own responsible standards, but freedom from social constraints. Freedom to me is, contributing to society, in a way that fulfils me. I want, and mostly have, a job that I love, working with people that I love, that challenges me, but doesn’t frustrate me all the time, and provides for life’s necessities. But more than that I want to be able to express myself without the social trappings of a politically correct world, instead we are all judged against what is considered “normal”.

The problem is, I don’t think a society that accepts ideas without prejudice would work, at least not for the current state of human evolution. To much of our idea intake has to be filtered by personal experience, otherwise we would just be flooded with sensation. If you think TV, radio, the internet, and everything provides too much information flow now, think about not being able to filter out what doesn’t interest you. Think about having to consider every idea before moving on to the next. The world would grind to a halt while we all process everything that comes our way. What I would like is to be free of the more visceral responses, the near over-reactions to stimuli we disagree with. I think that’s a much more manageable goal, a simpler freedom. The freedom to choose without worrying about what the rest of the world will think, to be inquisitive, without prejudice. A sort of Neverland utopia.

Rules Boundaries Limitations

2009-05-03T20:59:00.001-05:00

I was called into work tonight to fix a problem with one of the graphics computers, and since it was a quick fix, and it is such a beautiful evening I thought I’d go for a drive. I ended up turning north out of the station parking lot and just kept going. I’ve had in mind for some time that I should head out to the county line, because I haven’t been outside this county for more than half a year. In fact, if the world was 20 square mile chunk of land, I could have been living happily in it for the past six months. So I drove north today, right up to the county line, and stopped short.

In a few weeks I’m going to Green Bay to visit friends, which means I’ll definitely be leaving the county. Crossing the border will involve no fanfare, and I probably won’t even think about it. But today, for whatever reason, that imaginary line in the dirt had significance. There were no repercussions for crossing it, or not crossing it, but in my mind the self imposed limitation made me pause. Walking right up and touching that boundary, but choosing not to cross it freed me in some small way. The drive up was slow, aimless, and whimsical. The drive back was energetic, exuberant, and reckless. In a few weeks I’ll cross that line without a second thought, today I’m at home in a box of my own making.

Heads Up

2009-04-22T04:46:00.000-05:00

I’ve been toying around with the idea of corruption through power. In popular media we often see story lines where a person is gifted power, or money, and through the course of the story line the person alienates friends and is “changed”. But I’ve been thinking that the idea is wrong, that power frees people up to be the person they always were, frees them from responsibility for their actions, and frees them from consequences. The only true saints in this world are those that are good when there are no consequences for acting bad, and responsibility is the only thing that truly changes people.

This line of thinking almost always leads me to one of two walls, the first exists only in the fictional part of my brain, and the second exists where I breathe. For about 15 years I’ve had a character in my head that hasn’t made a successful transition to print. He’s just a guy that is gifted with ultimate power, and I’ve been wrestling with how he deals with the world once he realizes that his life no longer has limits. I am close to nailing his path down, or at least the major stops along the way, but I’m not sure what the final destination will be, I’m stuck not knowing how to become wise.

The second log jam occurs at the junction of teacher and pupil. A student studies for a period of time, and the teacher for a while can hold a students hand, can be a reliable fall back, but eventually the student has to learn to stand on their own, to be responsible on their own, to own their actions. Mostly, the teacher has to provide confidence to the pupil, until the student is confident enough to step out on their own. Using the metaphor of teaching a child how to ride a bike, the child has to be confident that they can stay up without their parents hand on the seat holding them up. But if the situation is modified, instead of teacher and pupil, think more along the line of two friends.

Say I have a friend who is bright and capable, someone who could lead, and lead in the right direction. But my friend doesn’t want the responsibility, or more accurately, is afraid they will mishandle the power, they are afraid of making mistakes. How does a person push an equal, or even a superior, to step up? Especially if the friend has been given the power but they have thus far abdicated, sat on the sidelines, trying not to be noticed, kept their head down?

Say Uncle

2009-04-21T02:16:00.000-05:00

He slouches against the bar
small talking the ‘tender
he’s been alone, so alone
but he makes excuses
not to be with her
it’s too noisy
too busy
too smoky
but the truth is
he is too comfortable
too unwilling to take a chance
too scared to fail
so he slouches against the bar
and cries in his head
and sighs in his beer
and misses her

Questions Overheard

2009-04-18T19:10:00.000-05:00

“You still love me don’t you?”

“Yes”

“Why?”

“Hmmm. That’s a hard question to answer. I don’t think love can be quantified in that way, it’s perhaps, too instinctual. I suppose I could list all the reasons I like you, although it would be time consuming, but even a comprehensive list wouldn’t satisfy the question of why I love you.”

“So you don’t have an answer for me?”

“I suppose not. Look I could sit down and right out all the reasons why I like or dislike all of the people I know, and I suspect if I did I would find that my dislike for people is influenced far more by emotion than why I like people, but even with that set of data in hand, I wouldn’t be able to put you next to someone else and answer why I love you but not them. I just know that I do.”

“Sounds supernatural.”

“I don’t need to know why, to perceive love. Just like I don’t need to know why the wind blows, to perceive it caressing my face. I don’t need to know why the sun shines, to feel its warming embrace.”

“And it doesn’t bother you that I don’t love you?”

“A little sadness maybe, a sense of something missing, but I think of it this way, the sun is not bothered that most of it’s energy falls on empty space, instead it rejoices that some of it’s energy falls on the Earth where it created something truly beautiful.”

Images Formed by Music

2009-04-14T04:02:00.001-05:00

Sometimes when I sit and listen to music, my brain flashes with imagery, building a self made montage with scattered meaning. Sometimes the images are mine, sometimes they are borrowed, and sometimes they are fiction. Today there is a strange sweet loss, like the montage of a missing lover, but my fiction is unconnected to anything in my life. It’s just a song passing time in my brain. The song ends, and the next begins, the dance changes and life moves on.

The Blower’s Daughter by Damien Rice
Teaching a child to ride a bike is a striking metaphor for growing up, as they gain confidence, they find their center of balance, and start to pull away from your steadying hand. And as they speed off, free, they leave you standing alone.

What You Got (featuring Akon) by Colby O’Donis
Cruisin’ around with the windows down and the sunroof open, hot summer air blowing through my hair, I have no particular place to be. I loop around and drive past the same stores, the same clubs, the same town, over and over again, and yet I drive with purpose. This road is gonna take me somewhere, to someone. This drive is gonna make my life worthwhile, it’s gonna give me meaning. I put the accelerator down to the floor and speed off, to find the world.

My Friend Of Misery by Metallica
A middle-aged man in a bad suit is walking through his slate grey world, he carries his lunch in his briefcase because his work isn’t important enough to take home. He hates his job, his boss, his coworkers his life. And yet every day on his walk home he passes a church, he can hear a lone voice singing out, a plangent song of hope. He stops to listen as the world moves around him, but he never goes in to see the person who sings his heart song. He pauses for a moment, guffaws the singer’s vulnerabilities, and walks home to his empty house.

Right Now by Van Halen
A young boy sits at the piano in the rectory, he plays carefully through the lessons as his teacher looks on. She gets up to answer the phone, and his fingers stray from the notes written on the page. He finds a new riff to explore, changing the notes subtly, repeating the phrase and throwing around bold chords. He can’t see the angels dancing behind him, but the smile on his face is the light of heaven.

The Sun by Maroon 5
The couple lies languidly on the bed, bodies pleasantly sore, they soak in the pleasure of the moment. The mid-afternoon sun shines intermittently through the curtains as they sway in the breeze. The sound of a distant lawn mower waxes and wanes, the neighborhood children laugh as they play tag between the houses. The couple’s eyes meet, and they start laughing, she hits him with a pillow, and they begin again.

The songs string on, and on, and on. My life is blurred by the fiction, but the fiction completes me in some strange way. My feelings have not changed, but I am happy.

Who Are You?

2009-04-12T04:51:00.000-05:00

Probably the most fundamental question of identification, and self-identification, “who are you?” has more depth and breadth than just three little words. Most of the time it is asked on first meetings,

“Who are you?”
”I’m Sweet Chuck.”
“Nice to meet you Sweet Chuck, I’m Simon Ta’kerand.”
“Simon, it’s nice to meet you, but who are you?”
“…”

I still have trouble coming up with a suitable answer to the question. Who am I? My Facebook page has snippets of me carefully organized into categories, but I doubt that I am merely the sum of those parts. And considering I’ve lived with myself for 29 years, and I don’t have a suitable answer, I’m not sure anyone else can provide a comprehensive assessment of who I am. Certainly other people have insights, and they may even be more accurate than my own assessments, but no one really has a complete picture of anybody.

I love discovering people, pealing back the layers and seeing the beautiful mess that lies beneath. We are all so complicated in our person and in our ways, tracing the zigzags, and subtle curves, exploring the unexplored, seeing the unseen, those are the relationship moments I live for. They don’t have to be mind-altering, or even unexpected or grand, the littlest speck of insight can still be valuable.

I have a CD of Simon & Garfunkel playing live, and they start playing “The 59th Street Bridge Song” and there is a collective, “awwww” from the audience. That moment of identification and connection, is what I’m talking about. We ascribe so much intimacy with the physical, but there is so much value in the intellectual, emotional and spiritual connections, that I think a greater intimacy can develop through those aspects.

Winning the War

2009-04-09T03:05:00.000-05:00

I don’t know how to win the war. I don’t know how to fix the world so everyone is happy. I don’t know how to win all the battles, but I have a thought. It seems like we have taken religion and government, and twisted them into a spiral swirling us down, down, down. Government and religion were supposed to be these grand establishments built for doing great things, and instead we use them to do mediocre things sprinkled with the occasional very bad, and very good. I still have hope for government, I still have faith that together we can do great things, but my faith in religion has long since been abandoned.

Religion started to die when it could no longer give me answers to the questions I had, but the death blow came when I was in high school. I would go to church and see all the people that didn’t want to be there, but felt obligated to go. For them religion had become an obligation instead of a great beacon of hope and love. But if asked, these people who never smiled at church, these people that half sang, and mumbled through prayers, if asked they would vehemently deny that they had lost faith.

I suppose there are people that feel the same way about government, and if voter turnout stats are indication there are quite a few that just don’t care. What is interesting, is that they don’t feel obligated to participate, even if they don’t care. And I’m sure there are people that have lost faith in government that still do participate, they vote, they may even volunteer, or donate money, but they believe the system is broken.

It seems too many people have taken the idea, and the belief, in something greater than themselves, and turned it into a reason to disapprove, distrust, and dislike. We have used religion and government to make people fearful. If we want to turn the tide, we have to fundamentally change the way we think about everything. We can’t be blinded by blind hope, but we also can’t cower from the fearful unknown. If we want to win all of our battles, we have to be better people.

Losing the Battle

2009-04-07T03:22:00.002-05:00

Hello, my name is Sweet Chuck, and I’m a Thinkaholic. I haven’t had a thought in about .3 nanoseconds. At the last meeting I attended we talked about giving ourselves over to a higher power and letting them do the thinking for us. At first I was dubious, how can someone else’s thoughts be as good as mine, but then I realized that I’m just one guy. I mean, there are hundreds, if not thousands of other people out there that have way more education and experience than I do.

After all, I go to the doctor when I get sick right, so there’s probably a person out there for every problem I have. And you know what’s great we have the internet and TV now so it makes finding that person even easier. There are entire cable television networks devoted to whole sections of my life. If I want an expert on food, I’ll watch food network. If I want an expert on blowing shit up, I’ll watch the Military network, or maybe TruTV. They even have entire 24 hour a day financial news networks to make investing my money a thoughtless process. A penny stock here, a Treasury bond there, pretty soon I’ll be rich.

I’ve found the mother of all higher power dyads, government and organized religion. If I want someone to do all the thinking about how to live my life, they are my peeps. Now I’m not talking about God when I say organized religion, God is a busy deity, and he gave me free will so I wouldn’t bother him with my pesky, “why don’t you just do all the thinking for me” talk. But organized religions, they are all about doing the thinking for me, don’t drink this, don’t smoke that, don’t inject things directly into your bloodstream, don’t eat meat on Fridays during the spring, they have all sorts of great ideas that are already pre-thought.

Now government is a little bit more lax on the rules, but they’ve just thought differently about things. Don’t smoke this plant, but here try some of this other one (it’s great when hand-rolled by Cuban’s). Feel free to have sex with whomever you want, but don’t bother trying to commit your life to them (I mean free sex, who can argue with that thought?). Here, hold on to this gun, it’s a .50 caliber semi-automatic pistol with a grip that won’t hold fingerprints, and here’s a clip that’ll hold 18 bullets, but you can’t have the clip that holds 24, 18 is enough. See that’s what I love about government, they’ve gone through all the trouble of thinking about the minutia. Now I don’t have to worry that my neighbor has a bigger clip than me.

And what’s great about both organized religion and government, is I don’t have to think about who is running either. The religions have been around along time, they’ve got their system down, the leaders can only lead if they have already led for a while. The government, they haven’t been around as long, so their process is a little less streamlined. The “common” people still election governmental leaders, but the clever bastards have rigged it so that each district votes a certain way, and then they limit the candidates by making them be part of a nationally organized party. Each party of course, elects those who are running from among its own members, so really the leaders select the leaders here too.

I can’t wait to free myself from the hassle of having to think for myself, pretty soon I can just go about my business, and not have to worry about anything. Man, letting other people do my thinking for me is going to turn out great, I can just tell.

3 Takes

2009-04-06T12:42:00.000-05:00

One
I passed a girl on the street today
she was maybe 18
her phone whistled at her
and as she read the text message
a smile flirted across her face

Two
I saw a woman today
as I passed her on the street
her phone sang to her
she studied the text message
a smile flirted unconsciously across her face

Three
she strolled along the walk
absently thinking about work
her phone sang to her
she contemplated the text message
a smile flirted unconsciously across her face

500 – Thousand Pounds

2009-04-04T04:28:00.001-05:00

Today started out with conflict in my head, one part of myself waging war on the other. I can’t pinpoint the proximate cause of the anger, my only guess is fear. I really did want to lash out, like a little kid who doesn’t want to wake up in the morning, I didn’t want to face reality on this particular day. I had nothing planned for today, no reason to be apprehensive, no reason to be sad or mad. It’s just how I woke up.

I would like to say that I spent the day in a contemplative state, but the roiling turbulence was just under the surface, venting steam scented with all manner of doubt and fear. Then I witnessed something truly beautiful, a moment of clarity that has struck, and imbedded in my head. I recoiled from the shock, and dove away. The beauty was completely separate from my observation of it, I had no hand in the moment, I was just a silent witness, but I want so badly to be the impetus for that moment of perfection.

Several hours passed before I stole a glance behind me and saw that nothing was chasing me, only then could I ease up and take stock, give some consideration to what I saw and how I reacted. Looking at the event is like looking at the sun, to see the really interesting things the core has to be blocked out. Otherwise all you ever see is a bright blinding light. Even with tinted lenses it’s still painful to look at, but I need to stop feeling left out, so look I must. I’ll just stare into the sun and let it burn all the feelings of unworthiness away, I’ve been carrying that weight around for far too long.

Socratic Method

2009-04-02T02:39:00.000-05:00

Someone once said that the Socratic Method was the best way to teach anything, short of juggling chainsaws. For me, self discovery has always been the best way to discover, but the shortfall of the Socratic Method is there generally has to be a wise questioner, which makes using the method somewhat problematic for internal self discovery, where I am both the questioner and the answerer.

So I create in my head a set of dialogues, cast myself as the answerer and cast someone else as the questioner, I still provide all the words, but splitting my consciousness helps provide some semblance of a real discussion. I still worry about whether I am asking the right questions. I know it’s difficult to ask leading questions when I don’t know in which direction to lead.

There was an episode of the sit-com Frasier, where Niles and Frasier were drinking coffee together at the beginning of the episode and Niles asked if Frasier was happy, and although he couldn’t answer right away, through the course of the episode Frasier discovered that, yes, he was happy. I imagine my dialogue would be something like this:

Niles: Are you happy?

Chuck: I think so. Yeah I think I’m pretty happy.

N: You think so? You aren’t sure?

C: Well there are some things that I want that I don’t have, and there may even be things I need that I don’t have. But I’m not destitute, I have a job that I enjoy going to everyday. I have friends, even if I don’t get to hang out with them often enough, they still enrich my life. I have family that I love dearly. So those things are not lacking. But being happy is about more than having food, shelter, clothing, employment, friends, and family, it’s also a state of mind, a sort of positive outlook on life. And even though at the moment I feel like I’m on the cusp of a downward swing in my mood, I still find myself seeing the sunny side. Even though there are situations that I’m not thrilled about, maybe even a little sad about, I’m not worried about them. I am confident in where I stand, and confident in how I feel, and with that I can move forward, happily.

Of course me being me, the questions just go on and on, until I’m interrupted by the world spinning rapidly on its axis. I’m sure time will bring me back for more questions.

“The sky is yours…”

2009-04-01T01:33:00.000-05:00

A poet that runs out of subjects isn’t trying hard enough, to be imaginative enough, to write enough. The funny thing is, I can come up with a lot of ideas, but I’ve written about so many of them before. I was going to write about the Perfect Moments we experience everyday, those moments when the world strikes us slightly out of the time stream and we can enjoy the immediacy of the world. I’m not sure that I should worry about repeating myself or covering the same ground, these are after all my musings, maybe walking the same path can take me to a different place. On the other hand AA’s definition of insanity is doing the same thing over and over again expecting a different result. Thinkaholics Anonymous’ definition of insanity is strangely similar, thinking. And strangely, thinking the same thing over and over again can eventually lead to thinking something new. I’ve seen it happen.

A different result may just occur when persistence meets opportunity. Of course sometimes I have to manufacture opportunity, I think that’s called hard work. I could be wrong though. For right now I’m just going to sing along for a while, smile and feel warmed by one more perfect moment, occurring quietly in a little room somewhere in Central Wisconsin.

Anniversary…

2009-03-29T21:54:00.001-05:00

Six years ago tonight I started writing here. Although I have slowed down, and even stopped for a while, I am happy to have contributed something unique to the world. Here’s to six more years of pondering life, and thank you to all who read and comment and inspire, especially Nea, Joe, and Langly. You were there at the start and, universe willing, you’ll be there for the next six years. Cheers!

What do you show?

2009-03-28T05:42:00.000-05:00

One of my duties as Associate Producer is to edit most of the state and national stories for the newscasts, and I frequently encounter video that just shouldn’t air. When the tsunami hit Indonesia in 2004 there were quite a few clips from national sources that showed bodies lying in fields and on the sides of roads. Many of the bodies had the clothing ripped off by the force of the flooding. The more problematic video rests on the line between acceptable and not.

This week we had a story from our in-state sister station, about a car accident with multiple fatalities. The video was the usual accident footage with shots of the wrecked vehicle, fire trucks and ambulances, and emergency crews working. There was also a shot of the firemen loading body-bags into the ME’s vehicles. I opted at the time to not include the body-bag shots in the story that I was editing. Today we had a short national story about the funeral for four Police officers killed in Oakland, and I had no problem including the flag draped coffin. We also used video of the video of the FedEx crash in Japan, which basically showed two people dieing, and we’ve used local dash-cam video of a police chase where the fleeing suspect ran into another vehicle and killed the passenger.

Even some of the more mundane video is not used, we’ve done multiple blood donation stories and we don’t use any video of the needle going into the arm, but when hunting season comes along there is usually a shot of a bloody deer lying in the back of a pickup truck with its tongue sticking out. And there’s all the 9/11 and war video. We still don’t show anybody jumping out of the Twin Towers, but in the last year we have used the buildings collapsing and the airplanes flying into the towers. The war footage, especially of suicide bombings, is always carefully scrutinized to make sure there are no body parts or pools of blood in among the debris.

Mostly deciding to use, or not to use, video is a judgment call for the editor. Occasionally we’ll get input from the News Director, producers, or reporters, especially if the video was used when it shouldn’t have been. There are a few rules that everybody follows, never show a dead body or body parts, no blood (unless it’s medical, and then only in donor bags and so forth), we also don’t generally show the victims of crimes especially the victims of sexual assaults.

495 and counting…

2009-03-26T03:25:00.001-05:00

This post will mark 495 since I started this blog on March 29, 2003. I have just decided I’m going to try to hit 500 at the anniversary.

A ton of stuff has happened in the last 6 years, I’ve been fired and rehired, finished my physics degree and spent some time in grad school, worked in law enforcement and security, and as a teaching assistant. The world has changed, but my place in the world hasn’t changed all that much. The people are different, but a lot of the situations are similar. I think I’m happier in this moment than I was years ago, although looking back I was pretty giddy then too.

Now though, as I look out at the world, I feel more at home with the concept that I too am an inhabitant, rather than just an observer. I think I have a better understanding of the space I occupy, and I definitely enjoy playing with that space a whole lot more than I used to. Now as the 500th approaches, I can sit and wonder, what’s next? Where are we going? Where have we been? Time to go outside and play…

Set Them Straight

2009-03-25T12:00:00.002-05:00

There have been quite a few plane crashes in the news recently, I guess starting with the Hudson River crash it seems like there has been one after the other. Most recently a FedEx cargo jet in Japan and a charter plane in Montana. So I suppose it isn’t unusual that I would have the occasional thought about what those last moments might be like.

The thing about a plane crash is that a plane is generally high enough up in the air that there will be time between the “Oh Shit” moment and the crash into the ground. I’ve had a pretty safe life so far, there have really only been two “Oh Shit” moments where I was in serious danger.

The first was in high school, driving to a basketball game I almost lost control of my car on a tight corner at the top of a hill. There was a second when the car lost contact with the ground and started moving sideways before smoothly reengaging with the asphalt. It was all over before I even had a chance to realize how close I had come to being another statistical headline, “Teenager killed in car crash, speed considered a factor.”

The second moment was just a few years ago, huddled in the entry way to a parking ramp I watched a tornado pass just blocks away. There was an hour or so of build up to that event, but I do remember coldly thinking about strategies, where would be the best place to hide in the ramp's stairwell and so forth, all the while the adrenaline raced through me. My heart was beating hard in my chest, and I’m sure I looked quite deranged to the other people seeking shelter as I stood in the door way looking around, silently assessing my options, before returning to the mouth of the entry way to watch events unfold.

There was no thought about dying. I didn’t think about family or friends, I didn’t think about all the stuff I hadn’t done, I was all about “how am I going to survive this?” I suppose it never reached the point where I had to consider those things, the tornado passed by and it was all over.

So I guess if I’m hit by a bus tomorrow there won’t be time for me to think about all the things I’m supposed to think about, the regrets and what not. Maybe that’s what life is for, to give us time to figure out our regrets, and time to set them straight.

Waiting

2009-03-24T02:23:00.000-05:00

When the words fire like lightning from my fingertips, often I do not know what they are going to say. I don’t know which shadowy thoughts those words will illuminate, or which overgrown paths the words will try to take me down. Sometimes my ego casts shadows or sidetracks the id, and when that happens I have to stop and retrace my steps to find where my world has gone wrong.

Sometimes I like to stand in the rain, watching the drops coalesce on the brim of my hat before they gain enough mass to fall free, where they are obliterated. I wonder about that metaphor, I wonder who the drops are speaking for. It seems lately that I am in the coalescent stage, waiting to fall once again, waiting to be obliterated by the cold hard ground. The exhilaration, acceleration, is worth the price of destruction. One of these days I’m going to fall from a high enough altitude that I’ll reach terminal velocity and float at the edge of chaos. One of these days that fall will last the rest of my life. One of these days…

Comets have very elongated orbits. They spend a long time out in the dark, and periodically get close to the Sun for a short, but dramatic, time. As they get closer they start to warm and outgas, creating the tell-tale tail, otherwise they are just chunks of dirty ice. Waiting, but not quite coalescing. Occasionally the orbit will be perturbed by another celestial object, and instead of orbiting the Sun they fly right into it, or right out of the system. To travel quietly in the dark until the next Sun catches the comet in gravity’s web.

Complications Abound

2009-03-21T16:00:00.000-05:00

When in school were we taught that complications are a vice? I can’t remember. I have some vague notion of a teacher telling me to keep “things” simple. I suppose when you are teaching kids Mathematics, it’s better to start off with counting rather than Vector Calculus. When teaching Social Studies it’s probably easier to explain “separation of church and state,” than antidisestablishmentarianism. But somewhere along the way I started believing that simplicity was virtuous.

I see a lot of criticism that politicians talk to voters like we are children, and at work I’ve heard people say that we have to write like our audience is just sixth graders. I understand the reasoning, in order to reach the greatest number of people we have to not talk over our viewer’s heads, but I worry that there are stories we don’t cover because they are “too complicated.” Some of the problem is caused by the time constraints of a 30 minute newscast, the only occasions when we can run an eight minute story are for those stories that are so big they demand the time. I’ve worked in television for six years, and there has been only one story that demanded that length, both because of its complexity, and the impact the story had on our viewers. But I honestly can’t think of any story that we have sloughed off, or not covered because it was too complex, and I can’t think of any story, that is especially complex, that we should cover.

A larger issue is interpersonal complexity. Sometimes I just want relationships, platonic romantic or otherwise, to be simple. “I work with you,” that’s it, no overhead with prejudices or disagreements, just “I work with you.” Life isn’t that simple, instead we get, “I work with you, plus I identify with you on subject 1, 2, and 3. Also we disagree about x, y, and z” plus a laundry list of minor points that all play into the complexity of life. And when emotions are involved the complexity goes up even further.

I wonder if I would like the complexities as much if I didn’t think of them as taboo. Puzzles, “[I] hate them, but [I’m] fascinated by them. Tell me you can’t relate to that.” Sometimes I look at the people around me and I am astounded by the measures I take to make things simple. I suppose it starts off simply, ignore a comment here, censor myself there, don’t do anything to complicate, play along, tag along, don’t get lost, try to keep up, don’t ask questions, Billy put your hand down… but it all leads up to distancing myself, ignoring my true self, and going to extreme measures to keep things simple. I once didn’t ask a girl out because I thought the relationship would “be too much work” to be worth it. Imagine that, I thought love wasn’t worth the complexity, and sometimes, I get nostalgic for those days.

Give A Little

2009-03-20T02:41:00.000-05:00

Nothing makes me happier than giving, especially if I can give well. Christmas, birthdays, special occasions, I try really hard to find the right gifts for each person. But the moments I really live for, or those unexpected opportunities to give just a little bit that makes a big difference. And the moments I agonize over, are when I feel like I could do something, but I can’t figure out what that something is. Thinking good thoughts…

Meaningful Emotional Contact Redux

2009-03-19T03:21:00.004-05:00

I build and maintain a complex web of connections throughout the day. Some are trivial, like talking to the barista at the local coffee shop. Some are consequential, like interacting with my good friends and coworkers. Occasionally though I am reminded how tenuous those connections, and my understanding of them, can be.

I frequent a local grocer about once a week, usually after I get done with work. Usually the same group of guys is working when I do my shopping, and for a while a few months ago, one of the guys was missing. He usually is behind the register, and so I noticed when for a series of weeks he was absent. I thought he may have moved, gotten a new job, or change shifts, but when I saw him again a few weeks later I found out that his wife had died, and he was off for a while taking care of his kids. Here was a guy, whose name I couldn’t remember, who was at best a casual acquaintance, and in that moment the world twisted and our connection became more complex.

I read Wil Wheaton’s blog and his books, I’ve listened to his podcasts and his audio books, I have watched him on TV and in theaters, I’ve even played poker with him online, where I had the chance to chat with him for a while (and steal his blinds.) I am a fan, and I like him, but I don’t think I would ever presume to be his friend, or even an acquaintance. I don’t even exist in his world, and yet strangely he’s an important figure in mine. That dichotomy is a bizarre consequence of celebrity, a consequence I didn’t think I would ever get to experience from anything close to his viewpoint. Until today.

Today a random guy showed up at the TV station where I work, bearing flowers for one of our anchors. When he was told to go away, he sat down on the ground, and appeared to start crying. I can’t imagine being in a state where I had that much emotionally invested in someone I never met. There is something so invasive about getting that twisted up inside, it’s disturbing, and a little frightening to think that he’s capable of that level of grief for something seemingly so trivial. The best metaphor I can think of is a bed of nails, collectively each individual nail becomes trivial because they act together to support the person lying on them, but if one nail is taller, its presence becomes more consequential, then that nail will be invasive, and if it’s significantly so, it can do serious damage.

I once read a quote that said in essence, “to be a good friend don’t make yourself indispensable, good friends are redundant.” I’m not sure about the wisdom of that statement, but I can kind of understand the sentiment. Meaningful emotional contact is important, but it can’t be everything. Because the emotional, intellectual, and spiritual investment is higher for marriage, a monogamous relationship makes sense, so I could see myself as the only husband a person has. The parental relationship is very imbalanced, so I can definitely see myself as the only father a person has. I can’t ever see a situation where I would be the only friend someone would have, it just seems like such a strange proposition, friendship is too balanced for that. So I guess the more emotional, intellectual, and spiritual energy I have invested in a relationship, the less populated those relationships are, and the more imbalanced that investment is, the less likely it is that my understanding of the relationship is accurate.

P.S. The original “Meaningful Emotional Contact” can be found here.

Weasel

2009-03-19T00:56:00.000-05:00

I was called a weasel tonight by a guy I work with. I’ve been called all sorts of names throughout my life, and especially in my childhood, after a while I just became immune. Most of the time the people trying to get under my skin are idiots and assholes, and this time is no exception. The larger picture is, I was called a weasel because I went behind this guy’s back to do the right thing. I haven’t always been good at doing the right thing, and even now I have problems with it, but I take it seriously.

Now I’m a sneaky son-of-a-bitch, and I’ll go behind someone’s back if it’s the right thing to do, but I’ll be damned if I’m going to be called names for doing the right thing. I’ll probably have forgotten about this by the end of this week, and really there is nothing that needs to be remembered, but right now in this moment, I’m thinking pretty seriously about doing the right thing.

Crappy Adventures

2009-03-17T04:46:00.001-05:00

Questions beget insight, beget questions. The wheels on the bus go round and round, I try so hard to find real wisdom in random thoughts, like trying to find patterns in chaos. I am pretty sure that trying to “brute force” answers out of life will just make me crazy. The spurts of insight that arrive, do so without any indication of the path they traveled to get here.

The questions that keep coming back around are simple. Why am I happy? I don’t really know. Nothing substantial has changed from the time when I felt sad, but now I’m not sad, and I don’t have a good reason why that should be. I do have a couple bad reasons, and maybe one so-so reason. The bad reasons are all about self delusion, which I hate, because it means I’m not really all that happy, and this certainly feels like happy. The so-so reason involves a change of perspective geared towards hope for the future, which is close to self delusion, but with some statistical analysis thrown in.

Now you may ask, why question the good? Why waste time worrying about why you feel good? Because, I know one day I’m going to fall into a hole, and it would be nice to know the way out. Which would make falling into said hole, more of an adventure, and less like a catastrophe, and really who doesn’t like an adventure?

The First Time

2009-03-15T18:00:00.000-05:00

I realized I had a problem with thinking when I was in elementary school. Now I know that seems a bit young to have a thinking problem, but I have a big brain and my parents liked it when I used it. I went to a small Catholic grade school in the suburbs of Minneapolis. Our parish was small but growing quickly (from 300 families in 1981 to 2900 families in 2003) under the administration of Father Arnold Weber O.S.B. Of all the teachers I have had, I regret that I didn’t get to learn more from Father Arnold, I suspect he was quite wise on a number of topics.

It was in the third or fourth grade when I started to question the teachings of the bible, and by the sixth grade I was certain that I could no longer accept the book as the word of God. I got pretty good at hiding my lack of faith. During our religion classes I stopped actively participating. I gave the answers that were expected when I was forced to answer. I spoke the words each week at service, even volunteered to read and be an alter boy at the weekend services, but I was faking it. It’s actually surprisingly easy to feign faith when there really isn’t anything to test you. I can say “shibboleth” and everything.

I don’t remember the moment when I figured out that thinking something different than my classmates and teachers could get me into trouble, but I must have learned early because I was always cautious about what I shared. So when I was in the seventh grade I started to ditch church and hide in various rooms around the school. I would sit in silence and watch the sun move across the walls and floors for an hour, and then rejoin my family for the drive home. I suppose I could have just sat in church and carried on my charade, but I was getting to the point where I wanted to tell people what I thought.

When we moved and I started attending a public school, and going to CCD after school, I continued to avoid sitting in church, but I was participating in the religious classes, because that was at least interactive. I didn’t realize until much later that there was an imbalance in my catechism. I realized that listening to someone, even an expert, lecture could only take me so far, just like discussions among non-experts, the only way to gain wisdom is by merging the two. Only when you merge expertise with discussion can you find a true path.

I mentioned before that I have been listening to poets and philosophers, I realize now that I’ve been looking for some expertise. I’m not sure that I’ve found that expertise, but something has changed, some piece of the larger puzzle has shifted slightly and fallen partially into place. The overall picture is still obscured, but I have more hope now that a solution will eventually be found, and smaller parts of the picture are more clear now than they were even hours ago. And I know, this will not be The Last Time.

Nightly Day Dream

2009-03-15T06:50:00.000-05:00

The occasional image flitters through my consciousness
instigated by a sound
my brain chooses remembered sensations
and applies them to the moment
I float in a day dream of warm summer nights
lying on the cool grass under the painted sky
awed by heaven’s lights
the universe spins ever onward
gravity dancing
but the dream is unfinished
incomplete
the ground is alone without the sky
the Moon does not shine without the Sun
and I am not whole without a companion
an as yet unidentified soul
without whom
the occasional image just flitters away

Where Everybody Knows My Name

2009-03-13T04:15:00.000-05:00

When I’m sitting in front of an empty space waiting to be filled with words or images, I often look into myself for something meaningful. Usually I go to the same places where I store my hopes, loves, lusts, sad and happiness. It’s usually not to difficult to find some new corner of those familiar places, if you think of them as well worn pubs, there is a lot of character carved into the tables and staining the floor.

Walking in the first thing I notice is even though the walls and floors are cast in shadows the faces all seem warm, bright and familiar. The bartender mixes the drinks with pipettes, Erlenmeyer and volumetric flasks. The room feels energetic and full, but there are plenty of empty seats available at the bar, in one of the booths along the wall, or at the tables arranged haphazardly around the middle of the room.

I like to sit at the bar and talk to the bartender, he is dark and sullen and far too easily distracted by the girls, but he always has something interesting to say. Usually I avoid the tables, I feel too exposed sitting in the middle of the room. If I’m feeling contemplative I’ll sit in one of the corner booths and just watch the people, picking up snippets of conversation, or observing intimate moments between the other patrons. Or if I’m really stuck I’ll just trace the scars of the table top and stare into my drink, because being lost is a binary state, I either am or not, and if I follow the wrong scar I’m not exactly going to become any more lost.

I sometimes get a glass of Single Malt, or a bottle of beer, but mostly I drink soda. I don’t like to get to drunk because I tend to get either nostalgic or angry. If I want to feel those feelings there are much more efficient ways to find those emotions, it’s just a matter of hitting the right bars. I like something sugary to give me just enough edge to push past the hardest part, which is the starting, of creatively building something from nothing.

Rarely someone new will come into the bar, all the regulars will look up when they enter, but quickly return to their conversations and drinks. I try to greet the newcomers, and listen to their stories, because their stories are really my stories, but when someone else tells it I often find bits nuance that I wouldn’t have noticed on my own. Once we’ve talked a few times, they become fixtures, regulars, and I can visit with them any time I want.

Tonight I just came to enjoy the music, this bar has a really great jukebox with all of my favorite songs on it. Tonight the songs are helping me answer some questions that have been going around, but it’s starting to get late, and there are some dreams I would like to finish, so I’ll be heading home soon. One more game of darts before I go though…

Dangerous

2009-03-12T17:00:00.000-05:00

There is this thought, which periodically imprints itself on my brain, a thought that somehow my calling in life has been interrupted so many times, and taken in so many directions that I no longer know where I am, or in which direction I am traveling. I’ve written before about walking on a vast empty plane, it doesn’t matter in which direction you step because when the destination is anywhere not here each step is one step closer. But sometimes I think, “Man this really sucks. It’s always the same view, the weather doesn’t really change, it is just varying oscillations of torpor.”

“Man this really sucks.” has been a familiar refrain in my recent past, not so much for what was misplaced or deformed, but because it has been a while since I just went about my day happy to be happy. I am not particularly troubled, just slightly amiss in the head.

I miss the warm summer wind. Sometimes if you leave an empty bottle out on the deck, the wind will brush across the mouth of the bottle, causing that empty vessel to sing. Every once in a while a similar thing will happen to me. A warm breeze rushes over me, and my soul resonates. Those moments arrive sporadically, sometimes I see them way off and I can raise my hand and wave to them, greet them as old friends and welcome them in, and when they leave I softly sigh and say, “Wasn’t that nice, I look forward to seeing them again.” Sometimes those restless winds arrive unannounced, strong, and dangerous, they twirl me about twisting around my most personal dreams, and then they rush out leaving me gasping, frayed, and disoriented. I long for those tempests, those bouts of insanity, those sweet moments of honesty. When they have gone and I am calming down, gathering my thoughts, and finding my way, I miss the furor, and I think, “Man this really sucks.”

Past Due

2009-03-12T04:38:00.000-05:00

I was pretty numb all day Wednesday. Without going into specifics, I had a series of dreams that really kicked me in the junk emotionally, basically other people in my dreams were enjoying my… worthlessness, for lack of a better word. Which I suppose is appropriate given how ineffectual I felt at the end of Tuesday.

Quite a few people had a rough day on Tuesday, and although I wanted to be a comfort to my friends, and wanted to cheer them up, I just couldn’t find a way to do so. Those are the hardest days, when I feel that I just can’t find the key to making life happy. “Fake it ‘till you make it” is ok for me for a while, I guess I can just exist until the sky clears, but fake crappy happy optimism… I don’t want to try to pass that off on my friends. It’s too easy to fall into the trap of faking through life, even with a subconscious that likes to kick me in the junk.

I guess my subconscious has been pretty actively commenting about my thoughts and activities these last couple of weeks. My dreams have been fairly obviously tied to what I’m thinking about during the day. The problem, as always, is trying to figure out if my subconscious is providing a warning, or is just sympathetic to my worries. Or if it’s handing me the ass kicking I so richly deserve. One can only ignore the world for so long before it comes knocking, looking for the rent that’s way past due…

Context Part III

2009-03-11T12:00:00.000-05:00

For most of January, and the first part of February, I spent a lot of time trying to find a coherent and consistent definition for love. I read Plato and Emerson, listened to power ballads and folk melodies, read Shakespeare and Pablo Neruda, and I found some really great sentiments and ideas, but no real clues to give me a definition.

There are multiple Greek words for love, some are common like Eros, which is passionate, sensual longing, Philia which is friendship in Modern Greek, and some that are less common, Storge is almost entirely used in relation to family, Thelema which is desire and was used to describe sexual intercourse in John 1:13, and Agape which is the modern usage for love, s’agapo is “I love you.”

I have always had trouble sorting out the stuff from the STUFF. So figuring what the difference is between loving a friend, loving a sibling or parent, and loving romantically, is pretty important to me. Mostly the way life works out, things are defined by the limits we set. It’s alright to say “I love you” to a family member or someone I am romantically involved with, but it wouldn’t be appropriate to say it to a friend, especially a female friend. I can speak honestly and candidly with a friend, but not necessarily with family. Life is about learning where those boundaries lie, and not straining against them to much.

Unfortunately though, all too often the lines get blurry, distorted, or deliberately obfuscated. I lose sight of the context that frames friendships and interactions, I lose my place in the world, and I have to find my way back to stable ground. It gets tiring, and I’m tired.

Context Part II

2009-03-10T12:00:00.000-05:00

We sometimes give objects meaning based on the context of what is around them, or in them, a pilsner glass is a good example of this phenomena. Empty it could either be a glass for drinking or a vase for flowers, or maybe something else. Fill the glass with beer and it’s purpose becomes clear, fill it with waters and stick a rose in, and the meaning changes but is still equally clear.

Our language is also contextualized, sometimes heavily, especially when it comes to words that deal with emotions. Think about saying, “I am sad.” Without context I can sympathize with you being sad, but I have no way of knowing how sad you are. Are you just a little blue, maybe you had a disappointment at work, or your friends decided not to go out. But perhaps you are morning the death of a friend or family member. If you and I were talking face to face, I could glean some of the context by reading your body language, your facial expressions, but if you were texting, e-mailing, or IMing me, I would have no way of knowing the context, which of course leads to misunderstandings.

I have had several text conversations where the context was lost between me and the other person because when I typed one thing and the other person read it differently than I meant, and vise versa, and the conversation has to go through several iterations before the confusion can be worked out.

Now a side note, originally this post, and series of posts, was meant to be written and posted before Valentines Day. So in the next part I’m going to jump off the deep end and talk about the contexts of love.

Context Part I

2009-03-09T00:52:00.001-05:00

When I was in college I took several psychology classes, Psychopharmacology, Perception, and Cognitive Psychology. I don’t remember a lot of the specifics, except for one class in Cognitive Psych. We were studying theories related to how we identify objects, and the Professor had the class perform a demonstration.

The theory is, basically, that parts of our brain are wired to identify specific features, a part that recognizes a straight line, or a circle, or an angle. When those areas of our brain see something they recognize, they fire, and another part of our brain looks at which nerves are firing, and they put them together to form meaning. So if you are looking at the letter “d”, the parts of your brain the react to a straight line, and a circle, might light up while the parts that recognize an angle would be silent. The symphony of cells that light up then inform our consciousness about what we are seeing.

The Professor pulled several students to the front of the room, and had each of us hold cards with a simple line shape on it. He then told each of us, privately to say “me, me, me” at various volumes thus indicating the strength our individual shapes conformed to what the “group” was seeing. My card was a half circle, and I was told to yell. What I didn’t know, was that the rest of the card holders were told to whisper. So there I am in front of 30 or so students and I’m yelling “ME! ME! ME!” at the top of my lungs. Except I wasn’t exactly yelling ME! Somehow between getting the instructions and being told to start, my brain had somehow gotten the idea that what was on the card was the letter “c”, and that I should be yelling “C! C! C!”

My brain had processed the idea behind the demonstration, and in combination with how close “me” sounds to “c”, and ran with the ball. Now, if you had been walking past the classroom that day, to see me standing at the front of the room proudly yelling “C! C! C!” while the rest of the class was laughing at me, you would have had a fundamentally different idea of what was going on, than if you had been in the class. The context would be different for each observer.

Swearing: or how to teach your kid to tell you to fuck all the way off

2009-03-05T05:02:00.001-06:00

When my nephew was born, my sister explained to me that it was the uncle’s responsibility to teach him how to curse. I told her I would do my best, but Voodoo and Witchcraft were a little outside of my area of expertise. She laughed and clarified that she wanted me to teach the kid how to swear, when he was old enough. I said, “Fuckin’ a right I will.”

Of course me being me, it’s not going to be as simple as, “hey kid come’ere. You know the other day when your dad hit his thumb with the hammer and you wanted to know what that word meant. Well it’s what we adults call a swear word. Doesn’t really have any specific meaning, it’s just something we say when no other words will do. Here’s some other ones you should feel free to try out at school, or at church, or you know when ever the impulse strikes you.” And then I would give him the list. I would, that is, if I wasn’t me.

What is far more likely to happen is that I’m going to give the little guy a ten to fifteen minute prepared speech about language and how words sometimes have different meanings to different people, and that sometimes the words we use can hurt other people, just like we can use words to make people feel better, and while he shouldn’t be afraid to use the words he wants, he should always be aware of the impact they will have. Really the whole speech is going to an obscurantist policy tract lost in a cul-de-sac of its own internal self-righteousness and groaning from the weight of statistics. So I figure when I’m done he’ll want to use his new vocabulary on me, and thus the student becomes the master.

Sad Truth

2009-03-04T12:00:00.000-06:00

There is, inside of me, a deep sadness that ebbs and flows against the joys of life. When the joy recedes, the sadness wells up and fills the void, and when the great exuberant joy rushes through me, the sadness dwindles to a pinpoint. I don’t know the source, some long forgotten injury perhaps, but there is the sense that something is missing or has been removed, and I am forever looking for what has been cut away.

When I wake in the morning my head will be swarmed by ideas and half-remembered dreams, and I will struggle to make sense of the chaos in the first few minutes of my day. Sometimes the order takes the form of an argument, a push for a specific viewpoint, and in the process of getting ready for the day I will argue with myself. Those days are usually full of strife, the rest of the day becomes about the argument. Other days the order is enforced by righteous plan, I will decide the course of my actions, and I will carry the certainty of being right throughout the day. Then there are the days when order never forms. Those days I drift, open to the whims and random fluctuations of my brain. Whatever memory or feeling that turns up will be analyzed and magnified, discarded or applied, and I am unsettled and unsure, silent and observing. Lastly are the days when order is formed by the absence of everything. The day loses meaning because there is no context, so the sadness becomes pretext to think, to meditate with morbid persistence on that which is missing.

The details of people and emotions, actions and events, things and thoughts, are chaotic, the details obscure the landscape. The details are obscured by the shattered delusions and illusions of my imagined soul, reflected in the world around me. I worry that those delusions and illusions are constructed to protect myself from the absence of joy, which I suspect is the only thing that is truly missing.

I can walk through my world and pick up the smile, a conversation, or an intimacy with a close friend and feel joy, and when they are not near, their absence is noticed. They are missed, some of them are greatly missed, but I can remember the love I have for them. Sometimes, on the right day, I can feel the love of nature and life, the love of existing, and all these loves bring me joy. It is not enough to quell sadness by merely noticing the absence of joy, I must create the joy I wish to experience, no one else can do it for me.

Anonymous/Eponymous

2009-03-03T03:44:00.001-06:00

A few weeks ago, when this story broke, a group of people were sitting around talking about it, and one of the women in the group made a comment that she didn’t think she would be comfortable sharing her nudity even when she was 18 and had the best body she was ever going to have. (Her sentiment, not mine) I’m of two minds on nude photos, on the one hand it’s a pretty personal thing to share the imperfections of a body with the world at large. It is empowering to say, “Here I am, in all my glory and ugliness. Here are my faults, I know what they are so you can’t hurt me with them anymore.” But I doubt that very many people can really say that they understand their own faults. So the act of even taking said photos is risky, sending them to people you don’t know is an even greater gamble. Displaying them for the world to see…

But there is another side, if you look around on the internet, and you don’t have to look very long, you’ll see all sorts of people have taken photos and videos of themselves and posted them for the world to see. When you consider the vast tapestry of human nudes, is one more really going to make a difference? Does anybody really care about some random photo of some anonymous person? I sure don’t. So that excludes most of the world, and leaves just the people I already know. Of the people that I am close to, the people that I care about, I only have to think about how they would react. And they can choose to look or not, to respond or not, to make fun of me or admire me, ignore me or deplore me.

Now, I’m not going to post nude pictures of myself, but what I write, and have written here, is of the same personal ilk. For a long time I have contemplate the value of posting anonymously and eponymously, on the one hand hiding amongst the hoard of bloggers I can express what I want without the fear of backlash from the people I care about, but then I lose the perspective of the people I care about. I also don’t care to be among the nameless masses that hide behind their namelessness and throw insults, or just cause trouble. I don’t care to be painted with that brush. So I have to live with preconceived notions and whatever prejudices readers bring with them, and I have to live with the consequences of what I write, which I think is a good thing. Nobody should live without consequences.

There’s Life Down Below Me Though…

2009-03-02T14:00:00.000-06:00

I never had to walk home from school. Living in the suburbs meant that the school bus could drop me off at the end of my driveway. My memories of riding the bus are pretty hit and miss. I remember feelings mostly, smells and sensations. The occasional face lit by an early morning sun. Girls faces, strangely enough.

When I was in kindergarten a group of, I guess 6 or 8 of us would ride one big bus all by ourselves. The driver would alternately choose which kid to drop off first. One day Kathleen, one day Brian, one day Tim, it was always a game between us and the driver to convince him who to let off, I can’t remember though, whether the goal was to be first or last.

As I got older, I remember moody afternoons where I would try to drown out the sounds of the other kids by listening to my Walkman. I guess that would have been 3rd or 4th grade. When the 6th graders, who were supposed to help control the younger kids, would yell at me for kneeling on the seat instead of sitting on it properly, I would just ignore them. They don’t teach 6th graders how to deal with civil disobedience.

By the time I got to the 6th grade I had stopped caring about what the younger kids did. We got to sit in the back and talk about important, sixth grade things, like girls. Mostly I remember the cold mornings, the excitement of the new day mixed with the quiet of not being quite awake. Looking for the faces of friends and feeling comfortable with being me. I’ve sort of carried that feeling with me since, although 7th grade was a vacation from clear comfort, I went to a new school where the 7th and 8th graders where in the same building with high school kids. I didn’t ride the bus because my mom worked three blocks from the school and she dropped us off. There wasn’t much socialization between the middle scholars and the high scholars, although I do remember eating lunch sitting at the same table as my older sister, who was a senior, it only happened one time.

Eighth grade was again at a new school, but reversed, my parents and I moved to central Wisconsin, and I was attending a middle/elementary school, where I was once again at the top of the food chain, but in a room full of strangers. I think, riding the bus that first day in eighth grade was the most intimidated I ever felt. There were just nameless faces, I can’t remember specifics, but I’m pretty sure I sat towards the front of the bus away from the kids my own age. I recall everyone being nice though, when I got to school I was able to talk to people and not feel that out of place, and I made friends that carried through high school.

Now, sometimes on my way to work, I’ll pass kids walking home from a shortened day of school. I look at them, and I think, those really were good days, sure we had worries, but compared to the worries of adult hood they seem trivial. I watch these kids talking excitedly about what ever, and I think about my current group of friends. We laugh at work, sometimes we are sad, or frustrated, or angry, but mostly we laugh, and there is, somewhere inside me, a 12 year old boy standing in the back of the bus, with the window down and the late spring air rushing in, smiling, because he’s the king of the hill.

Thinkaholics Anonymous

2009-03-01T17:03:00.000-06:00

Hi my name is Sweet Chuck and I’m a Thinkaholic. I started thinking soon after I was born, there were so many new things to experience and think about. It was fun at first, but then I started thinking about girls, and then calculus, and then quantum mechanics. Now I have to think to get out of bed in the morning, and before I fall asleep. It’s gotten to be a distraction at work, all this thinking.

Mostly it’s harmless, but sometimes I over think things, or try to find hidden meaning, that’s usually where I get into trouble. Usually if I’m bothering someone with my thinking, they can just tell me to knock it off and that’ll sober me up, but sometimes I get into a rut and I have to stop thinking cold turkey in order to go about my daily tasks. But then after a while, I really begin to miss thinking about things, and finding new things to think about. Sometimes I’ll hang out with dangerous people, just to find something new to think about.

Really though, I don’t think I have a problem… well maybe just a small problem… It doesn’t control my life though, I can stop thinking about things anytime I want. I just don’t want to most times.

Comparing Sunsets

2009-01-18T00:39:00.000-06:00

I have always thought that a prerequisite of finding love was finding friendship. The problem is figuring out how to separate the friendship from the expectation of romance or Eros. There is a story line from the TV show “Sports Night” where one of the main characters meets a woman in a bar, and has a long discussion with her that touches on his relationship with his parents. At the end of the conversation, when she is leaving, she hands him her business card, and says he should call her. Turns out she’s a psychotherapist. As the story line progresses she ends up becoming his therapist, and she is forced to treat him as a patient instead of a romantic interest.

I wondered for a long time how someone could make that kind of choice, and how to make the choice into reality. I’ve seen enough relationships that couldn’t go anywhere because for one or the other person the relationship was an all or nothing proposal. Mostly these were young people, not emotionally mature people, who couldn’t sort out their feelings, and couldn’t accept that the spectrum of possible relationships is continuous. I used to be that way too.

I have learned that friendships are what they are. Each one is a sunset that only happens once, and while I might wish the sunset was a little redder, or a tad brighter, there is nothing I can do to make the wish reality. So I might as well accept the friendship as it is, because the only other alternative is to turn my back on it and walk away.

Doldrums

2009-01-08T02:36:00.001-06:00

I used to think of the Ides of March as something akin to doldrums. Somehow “beware the Ides of March” became a warning to not be listless, instead of a warning to Caesar about his impending death. Sort of like misconstruing “Eli’s Coming” to be a portent of bad things rather than Eli being an inveterate womanizer.

It’s the New Year and it should be great, we are on the eve of a new decade, but instead of going out and making things happen I sit here waiting for something to happen. For example a magical bolt of lighting that will change my world, I’m looking to the sky but nothing is brewing. My excitement and thirst for life have been tempered a bit by reality. A lot of people around me have been sick the last few days, a friend is leaving, and I can’t help but feel a sense of loss, and the listlessness that goes with not being able to bend the world to make things work out the way I want.

I’m thinking of a song lyric, “I’m just a man with a stick in my hand, and I helplessly jab at the sky. It’s my nature to try.” I need to get back to jabbing at the sky… I just looked up the lyrics; I had forgotten the line after the quoted part is “helps the time pass by.”

I know that in time this malaise will pass, but for now, well, here I am.

Balance

2009-01-07T00:09:00.002-06:00

I started off today feeling great, the best part of the day seems to have been the nine minutes between when I hit the snooze button for the first time and when the alarm went off for the second time. I was rested, relaxed and happy, but in the course of the day my ch’i has slowly drained. Driving home from work I scanned through the channels on the radio, listening or singing along with songs I usually like, but after a verse I just got tired of them and changed the channel. I was a third of the way home before I turned off the radio and drove the rest of the way in silence.

I have noticed, at several times in my life, that I get into self repeating patterns of thought or behavior, which manage to become part of my personality. The sneak unnoticed into the cracks of the masks I wear and they increasingly change the way I interact with the world until I notice them and pull them out by their roots, or they become so ingrained that they have destroyed the person I was.

As an example I give the following fictional account:

Jack was an ordinary boy, with everyday friends and everyday activities. Billy lived down the road from Jack, and they boys never really got along. For some good reasons, and some not so good reasons, Jack didn’t like Billy. Over the years Jack’s dislike became so ingrained, so much a part of life that it became outright hatred, and Jack stopped seeing Billy as a person and began to think of him as an animal, a monster, a thing. Because Jack and Billy were kids, Jack didn’t have the maturity to change his mindset when he should have seen that it was taking him to a dark, evil place, and so when they boys became teenagers Jack became the bully, the animal, the monster.

As an adult I have to recognize those opportunities to make myself a better person. I have to work to prevent dislike from turning into hatred. But it doesn’t have to be an emotion as dark as hatred that leads me into dark places. Simple actions, like the way I talk, the way I interact, can gradually lead to dead ends. I can get into a pattern of only perceiving things through a certain lens, and lose sight of the real world. I can become so isolated from life that life loses meaning.

“The most important human endeavor is the striving for morality in our actions. Our inner balance and even our very existence depend on it. Only morality in our actions can give beauty and dignity to life.” – Albert Einstein

You don’t always get what you want

2009-01-01T23:54:00.000-06:00

I’ve left 2008 asking a lot of the same questions that I had a year ago. But along the way I have stumbled upon answers to questions I hadn’t been aware I was asking. Like realizing there is a difference between what is needed and what is wanted, and finding three simply complex things that are needed. I have met some great people and made some new friends. I have found a little more faith, and become a little less extreme. But I have also become slightly crazier, in a controlled chaos kind of way.

My mom is leaving tomorrow morning, she’s headed back to Colorado to pursue a new career in animal care. Before I left for work this noon, I said goodbye and she became unexpectedly emotional. I do not know what is churning in her soul, but I suppose this transition is more permanent, or at least perceived to be more permanent, then when she was going to school. Now she’s going out there to make her dreams a reality, which I suppose is both thrilling and frightening. She is in a large way saying goodbye to her life here and building on the foundations of a new life in Colorado.

When I moved to Iowa three and a half years ago I was in a very similar situation, except I was more than happy to leave this place and try to start something new. My success in college made me overconfident, and after a year of grad school I realized that I still had a great deal to learn. So when I moved back home for the third time in the summer of 2007. I wasn’t really sure what the future would hold for 2008 and beyond. I wasn’t sure what I wanted, and I didn’t know enough to question what I needed.

Now I’m sitting here in my new room at the close of the first day of 2009, and I’m looking up at the wall above my desk and there is a Christmas card sitting on the top of a framed picture from my senior year of high school. Near the bottom of the card, positioned so I can read the handwritten inscription, is a picture from June of 2008, and I’m thinking of all my friends, and I’m thinking, man, “if you try sometimes, you might find, you get what you need.”

Frustration

2008-11-20T19:05:00.002-06:00

I’m pretty cavalier about planning things, I am usually one to go-with-the-flow, but lately it seems that the powers-that-be have lost all sense of the nature of planning. Just this week there have been three instances when better planning could have led to better results.

The first occurred on Monday, when I got to work at 2:00, I was told I needed to build two full screen graphics for a book giveaway that we were starting that day. In addition to my regular duties I have to come up with a template from scratch that we can use to display the information regarding the contest, and then display the winner’s name. I have no problem doing that in twenty minutes, but if I had been told the week before that this contest was starting on Monday I could have worked on the templates for an hour or more and done a much better job.

Tuesday I came in to find we were starting a sweeps piece a full week ahead of when we had originally planned, so I had to create a graphic for that on short notice. Again, had I been given days to work on the project instead of hours I would have been able to do more, as it is I did a pretty good job of capturing the feel I wanted. It turns out that the reporter producing the piece also found out on Tuesday that her series was starting the following day. Thankfully she had it mostly written, but that left the editor a day to edit two pretty complex packages, and he was editing all day Wednesday.

Wednesday we, the newsroom, were told that we were producing an extra 30 minute show to air after our 6:00 PM newscast on Thursday. As I write this, at 12:30 Thursday morning, maybe half the show is written and there is a lot of editing to do before The Special can be taped Thursday afternoon. Had this been planned out better, there would have been more time to write and edit the show, and everyone working on the show would be under much less stress. And as an added weight, the 30 minute special is on a local group that is just waiting for a reason to file a suit against the station, so the producers have to make absolutely certain they are correct with the stories they write.

I am fully expecting to get a phone call tomorrow morning asking me to come in and help with graphics or editing to get The Special ready to air. And aside from all the frustration that has been piled on this week, it really is a tribute to the professionalism and talent of the news room that we have been able to consistently produce top quality television with the time and resource constraints that have been imposed. I am happy to do things at the last minute, I understand that in TV news things happen and I’m fine with breaking news. But when everyone is already stressed because we have been given artificial time constraints, it creates a lot more problems when news breaks. If the things that can be planned are well planned, it is much easier to adjust to the ebb and flow of uncontrollable events. If however, we just have shit thrown at us, it is much more likely that when news breaks, so will we.

A Growth Industry

2008-11-11T02:19:00.002-06:00

I didn’t realize how tired I was until I laid down with my laptop and my body went, “hmmmm sleeeeeeepy…” So I will try to write this post, and maintain consciousness. If it doesn’t get posted till tomorrow afternoon, now you know why.

I view life as a purposeful experience, I believe we are here to learn, and in many cases learning requires taking risks. I learned to walk by pulling myself up on furniture and taking measured steps, knowing that I could fall down, but striving to learn none-the-less. Which leads me to the following quote:

“The most difficult program to break is viewing change as something frightening, difficult, painful, or a lot of hard work. If you want to make life hard on yourself, this is your choice. … There is an eternity to learn that living is joyous and effortless. You create your life daily. You can choose to change it at any time. When you tire of running from lessons, you can make joyful progress very quickly.” - Betty Bethards “The Dream Book: Symbols for Self Understanding”

It has taken me almost 29 years to get where I am today, and I can honestly say I don’t know where I will be in a month or in another 29 years… really it could turnout that I am surprised at where I am tomorrow. So as I raise my glass of Oban in a toast to progress, my nervous hand only shakes a little bit.

P.S. I need to work on speaking plainly.

Fire

2008-09-16T23:17:00.003-05:00

Some days go pretty smoothly everything is planned out and goes as planned. The worst thing about those days is when they come crashing to an end. We just finished the 10PM news cast, and were having the post show meeting in the newsroom when the scanner went off. There was a structure fire with children trapped inside. The anchors went to the fire, and I stayed behind to listen to the scanner and man the phones.

It sounds like they pulled three children out of the house around 20 min after the first call, I am listening to the scanner, and from the sound of the traffic there will likely be fatalities. The air ambulance is meeting one of the ambulances at the hospital, where they will likely transport the patient to Madison’s burn unit.

Anytime children are involved the story becomes that much more difficult to cover. I can only hope for the best.

Update: 2008-09-17 0220

After listening to the scanner and talking to our people back from the scene it sounds like maybe a little girl died and her 10-year-old brother is in critical condition on a respirator with burns to a significant part of his body.

Update: 2008-09-17 1640

Three children have now died as a result of the fire last night. Four others and the mother and her boyfriend escaped with minor injuries. From the time the first fire call went out to when the children were rescued was around 20 minutes, all the hope in the world does not change reality.

All the News…

2008-09-15T21:49:00.000-05:00

It seems that when people rip apart the media one of the complaints most often expressed is that the media, and journalists, are becoming more and more sensationalized. Working in a small market TV newsroom, I have found that it is hard enough to get local stories, it is mostly impossible to sensationalize them.

Which leads me to today, there is a Mobile Home park in our area that is a consistent trouble spot for local law enforcement, and there are around a hundred 911 calls a month from the park. The park management owes thousands in back taxes and utility bills, and the trailers in the park are frequently sited for code violations. Today the Chief of Police and the City Inspector filed a formal complaint requesting that the licenses to operate be revoked, thus closing the park.

In the past we have covered stories about troubles in the park, and during a live shot last year our crew was essentially assaulted, our photographer let the camera run so we have video of the incident. Today during our discussions of this story in our newsroom the producer for our 6:00 PM show suggested that we bring out that archived video and use it, just because it’s “good video,” even though there was little relevance to the story we ran today. I suspect that his true glee about using the video is casting the inhabitants of the park as criminals, it wouldn’t really be out of character for him. While the rest of the newsroom shut him down, I do worry about the influence that this producer has on our newsroom.

A Beautiful Tragedy…

2008-08-20T01:21:00.000-05:00

Occasionally a dream comes along that is so beautiful and so tragic that all my attempts to quantify it in words fall short.

The core of the story is that a prince, on his way to the capital from the war front, is set upon by a demon witch sent by a competitor to the throne. While they fight, the witch and the prince converse and consequently fall in love. When the witch realizes she loves the prince she attempts to get out of her “contract” to kill the prince by transmogrifying herself into a human female and casting off her powers. Thus transformed she is transported back to the man the hired her where she is tortured. The prince comes to rescue her and in the process they both learn that she will not survive very long as a human, (for some reason the time frame was two years). Because as a witch she was immortal and her soul is different from a human’s soul, where human souls either exist in a universe or are reincarnated, when she took on her human form her soul is in conflict with her humanness and when she dies her soul will cease to exist.

This story will be written down in much more detail at some later date, perhaps after my writing muscles have developed more. Every once in a while something grabs me so subtly and so powerfully it envelopes my soul and thumps my head until I do something about it. I remember waking up and feeling so impressed with what I had witnessed, even if I capture just a small part of that sensation in the writing I will be happy.

Extended Supervision

2008-08-12T16:04:00.001-05:00

One of the problems with working 13 straight days and then only having Sundays off is that I am left with very little time to do anything else. So my writing muscles have atrophied somewhat and I'll have to restart my creative engine. The late summer scheduling is holding steady with increased hours and overtime. It seams every year towards the end of summer personal issues become strained. Also there are things at the periphery of my existence that are tickling me in a weird sort of distracting way. So life goes on here in the world.

The Woods

2008-08-02T03:41:00.001-05:00

Sometimes I worry that I want to be a writer, so I can express my emotions and thoughts through fictional characters, and therefore avoid the turmoil of expressing them myself.

When I was asked whether I was angry, or tired, or frustrated, or bored, I couldn’t answer because I couldn’t lie. I think that I wanted to be angry, tired, frustrated, and bored. I wanted to set myself up on the edge, so at the slightest agitation I could throw myself over and feel justified. If I feel like crap, I can justify staying in bed all day, I can justify that Double Whopper with cheese, and I can justify what ever lusts appear in my head. If I feel like crap I don’t ever have to make the extra effort, or think long term, or try to deal with complex emotions. But the big scary truth is, sometimes I want to feel like crap so I have a reason to not feel good.

My father once told me that a person can only walk halfway into the woods before he starts walking out again. So, if you’re at the center of a shit storm, you might as well take a step, because in which ever direction you step, you’ll be one step closer to being outside.

Writing Again

2008-07-28T03:10:00.001-05:00

I am working on a couple of longish posts with some deep philosophical dilemmas, so I’m probably going to be posting more than usual. That’s right, as soon I have some project in the works I’ll need a reason to procrastinate, usually that means I’ll have more random posts here. But before the randomness starts, here’s a little preview of the meat.

“Confidence Game” is about the nature of love, or at least one man’s jilted perception of it. (Is that a joke or not?)

“The Right” is about morality, or at least one man’s jilted perception of it. (Wait, was that a call back?)

I don’t think I can write either independently, because they are somewhat intertwined. Also I’m writing this so I’ll feel some pressure to actually finish the two pieces, rather than stare at them sitting open on my desktop, not writing themselves.

The I That Is Me

2008-07-22T01:58:00.001-05:00

I identify with winter. I am a big hairy guy, who prefers to be bundled up against the cold, rather than a sleek powerful man, glistening in August’s sweaty hotness. I am hooded sweatshirts and long pants, rather than board shorts and a six pack. I am a mad scientist romantic, rather than a grounded literalist.

Sometimes it’s good that I remind myself of who I am, and to clarify the point I offer the juxtaposition.

I got the chance to do something I love today. I got to troubleshoot a problem in the newsroom. The software package we use to organize the shows is a powerful and complex tool that combines database and media management. Someone apparently changed some settings that control how the software calculates the timing of the shows. Our shows have a hard in and hard out. We come out of network programming at a specific time, and have to hit network at a specific time, giving us a window in which to air local news.

We have show skeletons with the in and out times preset, and the producers then organize the news stories, commercial breaks, sports, weather and so on, into the time allotted. To do their job they have to have a fairly accurate idea of how much time they have already used, and how much time they have left. It used to be that the column that displayed the show time was calculated from the top down. For example if the show started at 16:59:50, the time for each item in the rundown would be added cumulatively. So the Show Open would start at 16:59:50 and run for 15 seconds, the first story would then start at 17:00:05, and run 1:45, the second story would then start at 17:01:50, and so on till the end of the show is reached.

Somehow the way the times are calculated was changed so that the show would be timed backwards from the end of the show. So if the show ended at 17:29:30, the credits which run 10 seconds would hit at 17:29:20, the last story if it ran 45 seconds would then start at 17:28:35, and the show would be back timed that way. Although I can’t come up with a good example to use, there are reasons for timing a show in this manner.

Our producers, who are used to timing the show from the top down, where miffed about having to “backtime” the show, and the added work that would have to go into timing the show correctly. So I dove into our news software and started digging around trying to figure out how the timing got changed. I ended up going into the Forms used to control the database and adding a new column specifically to time the show from the top down. I am guessing that I may have to just change the old “backtime” column to time from the top down, depending on what the News Director wants to do.

Back in the Day

2008-07-19T02:41:00.000-05:00

AA’s definition of insanity is doing the same things over and over, and expecting a different result. Maybe the biggest problem with my insanity is that I know that I’m doing the same things over and over again, but I can’t bring myself to believe there is a better way to do them. Except the names, the following is a true and a rather metaphorical retelling.

Many years ago I had two great friends in Lysander and Hermia. In addition to being a great friend, I had romantically chased Hermia for quite a while, chased her until I couldn’t anymore. I finally realized that while we have a great friendship we would never have romance, great or otherwise. Lysander and I shared many interests, computers, physics, music… we could talk for hours. Months after Hermia and I had settled into our friendship, and the chase was over, Lysander approached me and told me that he and Hermia were dating. My first, and I think genuine, response was surprise and acceptance. They were both good friends, and for them to be happy together was great. But after I spoke with Lysander, I dove into myself and found a great well of anger. I felt betrayed, foolish, and afraid. As the day continued my mood grew darker, and I pulled the anger around me like a protective cloak. I embraced the dark emotions, and eventually they subsided, and I was left with an empty place in my soul. With the help of my great friends, I was able to fill that hole with the idea of Lysander and Hermia as a couple. And when they eventually married I stood up with them, happily.

Now while the beginning and ending are good. I am worried about the middle. I am worried about the anger. I don’t think that I could have reached the conclusion had I not embraced that darkness, and let it suck itself out, but I hate that anger. I hate that it had to control part of me in order for me to get rid of it. And I fear that someday I will fail to control it.

So now I ask, is my insanity that I have great close friends, or that I feel betrayed, foolish and afraid, when those friends aren’t exactly who I think they are? What’s worse, I can’t even begin to find the question for what result I expect. I know that I am doing different things, especially with regard to women, but I can’t tell what intermediate steps will be, or what the destination is.

On a somewhat parallel note, recently I’ve been writing more. I think it’s because I’ve started feeling again. Seems like I haven’t been feeling much since maybe October of 2005, or perhaps the following January. I should really try to figure that puzzle out in its entirety.

“There was a time when it was easy to find a
hangout that you knew was yours by name
And mine or not I could find the same spot but
it's never gonna be the same
I've been away and I've seen too much
Looks like I've been moving on as well
And when I started to not really belong
I supoose I was unable to tell
But I ain't sad and no it isn't bad
It's just onemore thing I'm coming to know
If you're alive you didn't finish the ride
No telling where it's going to go”
- Blues Traveler

Deception

2008-07-16T04:35:00.001-05:00

I’ve been thinking for a few hours now about what to say, and I still haven’t come up with anything really useful, or even really poetic. Pathetic maybe…

Trust is a big thing for us humans. We probably lie and are the subjects, and victims, of lies more often than we would like to admit, but when someone close to you gets royally deceived it brings home how vulnerable we all are. So much of our daily interactions with people depend on trust, we couldn’t exist if we suspected everyone. We would all be agoraphobes locked in our houses. Instead we try desperately to build connections with the people around us, and are successful to varying degrees, but in the end we are still alone in our minds, and that makes us cautious. To trust is also to make vulnerable, and some of us are just not good at being vulnerable, and some of us soak up the vulnerability of others. I have a lot of internal confusion about where I exist on that spectrum.

“Everybody lies.” It’s something to keep in mind but not something to live by. I prefer the much softer, “question everything.”

The Third Muse

2008-07-08T04:29:00.002-05:00

It’s 3:44 in the morning and I’m sitting here staring at a blank page while “Scenes from an Italian Restaurant” run through my head. My brain departs on flights of fancy, leaving my hands to stroll randomly amongst the soft and supple curves of my dark haired muse. She’s kind of a bitch sometimes, leaving me standing at the threshold, mouth agape as she glides across the floor furtively casting sultry considerations back over her shoulder, before the bouncers push me back. I am far to crude to be allowed inside.

And then she shows up randomly at my door, begging to come in from the cold rain. I lead her inside, to the linen closet for a towel. Following me she silently sheds the trappings and pretext of the outside world. Turning with towel in hand, I find her exposed, shivering, beads of water trickling down her body, each drop carrying the unexplored realities of a thousand ideas. She extends her hand to me, a single finger, with a single orb suspended, waiting. I cup my hand and the droplet slips free. Both our gazes follow the orb as it falls faster, further, it hits my palm and explodes into my mind.

Here I sit with my muse, trying to get more from her than she’s willing to give. I am too frantic, too worried, too inexperienced to be truly open.

My brain returns from the fanciful flight, it has brought back courage, faith, and wisdom. With a renewed sense of being, my hands stroll again with purpose.

The Plangent Torrent

2008-07-07T03:23:00.000-05:00

Sultry confidence
mysterious vulnerability
sweating singing

I have been thinking for a long time about the need to self identify. I don’t really know what that means, but it’s what I’m thinking about. In moments of confusion I often swing about looking for something solid to grasp on to. An idea or an object, either will do. I try to rationalize action and emotion in a way that ultimately hides my true self from my present self. My road to self actualization is muddied and confused by twists and turns, roundabouts and cul-de-sacs, parallels and intersections.

Lest you think I am babbling drunk, allow me to reassure you that I am quite insane. My insides are messed up, mixed up, like puzzle pieces tossed in the air, the wind catches my ideas and prints them on the screen. As the shattered pieces lay on the ground, take the time to walk around them, to view them from every vantage point. Perhaps where they don’t make sense from here, they will make sense from there.

I strongly suspect that as time marches on, as our grasp reaches out to the stars we will continually find that no matter how much we explore we will grow unsatisfied. We may explore the length and width of the known universe and still not be satisfied. Only when we grasp the limitless possibilities of existence will we begin to be sated. And only when we become the very gods we seek to please, will we fully understand what it is to be human.

Bartender

2008-07-03T02:48:00.002-05:00

Not having anything to say is no excuse for not writing, especially because I rarely have “nothing” to say. The problem, I think, is one of motivation. I’m in a sort of happy malaise where I’m not perfectly content, but my unease is weak enough to not bother me enough to stir the waters enough to break out of whatever this is that’s keeping me just happy enough.

Back in the day when the physics, or the women, or the adrenalin, gave me the drive to discover, I hardly ever lacked for something to put in this space. Knowing that the space would never be full gave me license to write whatever came to mind and bury it amongst the petabytes of internet data. Now I sit in my life with the cracked contentedness shimmering like a glass prison, and I’m giving semi-serious consideration to not trying to break out.

“Bartender, please
Fill my glass for me
With the wine you gave Jesus that set him free
After three days in the ground

I'm on bended knees, I pray
Bartender, please

When I was young, I didn't think about it
Now I can't get it out of my mind”
- Dave Matthews Band

Deep Dark Truthful Mirror

2008-06-10T03:48:00.001-05:00

Through our experiences we develop expectations of the people in our lives. From friends and family to colleagues and lovers, our image of them is shaped by our existential lens. Problems develop when our lens distorts or omits portions of reality, we develop false expectations that eventually clash with the true nature of a person.

I once had a mentor who seemed very wise. He was sort of an intermediary between my status as a pawn, and the powers-that-be. He seemed to deal effortlessly with power, purposefully losing certain battles to be in a better position to win the battles that mattered. When he was finally, rightfully, raised to the peerage, I was thrilled. I thought that he would now be in a much better position to lead us to glory, but my exhilaration was short lived. While he was not ineffectual I soon learned that our Marquis lacked the leadership skills I expected him to have.

Had I come to know him as le Marquis I would have accepted him as he was, but having built up my false perceptions I felt betrayed, misled, and more than a little angry.

“One day you're going to have to face
A deep dark truthful mirror
And it's going to tell you things
that I still love you too much to say”
- Elvis Costello

New Soul

2008-06-04T03:27:00.001-05:00

This is the third attempt at this post. In the first I found I was lying to myself because I didn’t want to deal with the issue I was trying to confront. The second attempt was much closer to the truth, but came off as very creepy. Strangely, even as I write this my brain is desperately attempting to come up with phrases that say what I want to say, without saying what I want to say, a double talking jive that misses the mark entirely. Let’s try again…

Most people seem to have a “happy place” they flee to when they need a little relief from the real world. For example, say you’re sitting in the dentist’s chair getting your teeth drilled, you really don’t want to be there, so in your head you go someplace else, a beach, a mountain top, a comfortable chair near a warm fire, whatever. For me, those places have always been people. Usually they are people that I am close to, like my sister or few of my close friends. Occasionally the people are just friends, like the guys I played cards with at U-Iowa, and they exist only as an ensemble. The most puzzling to me though, are the acquaintances that somehow become large features on the landscape of happy places, so large that I continually bump into them. They are women who I only meet a handful of times, and while they may occupy a large expanse of the landscape they are also ephemeral. And when I haven’t thought of them in a long time, they suddenly explode into my consciousness bringing great joy and contentment, like the smell of summer suddenly bringing back some long forgotten childhood memory. Only I can’t figure out what the impetus is. A smell, sound, taste…? It is probably not something concrete. It is probably something much more subtle, like a state of mind.

This is all just an explanation for what I’m going to say next: there is a new figure on the landscape, one who has suddenly become very significant. She is a tertiary figure in the real world, a friend of a friend, a distant acquaintance, and yet there she is large as life with that interminable smile she taps on my brain just to remind me she’s there. I suppose, if she were someone I interact with regularly, this could be the initial stages of romance, instead it is a flight of fancy, a delusion of grandeur, a foolish notion. I don’t think it’s intended to stay that way. One day I may get to post some lyrics by Etta James.

“This is a happy end
Come and give me your hand
I'll take you far away

I'm a new soul
I came to this strange world
Hoping I could learn a bit bout how to give and take.”
- Yael Naim

Just a Cog in The Machine

2008-06-02T19:37:00.000-05:00

I was going to bring the snark in this post, but I'm just not in the mood. I started working at my current employer last August. I started off as a part time employee, and in March I was given official full time status. As a part time employee I was eligible for holiday pay, after my 90 probationary period, which was twice the regular rate. After many months of being led around with a carrot, working full time hours with part time pay, I was very frustrated with work, and my frustration made me unpleasant to work with. Eventually I convinced the powers that be that I needed to be an official full time employee, and was finally given that status on the 10th of March fully four months after I was told I would be going full time. In addition I still had to wait 90 days for my full time benefits to start.

Last Monday was a holiday, we are required to work at least two holidays during the year, Memorial Day was one I signed up for. I found out today that I will be getting no holiday pay for working Monday because I am in my 90 full-time probationary period. Never mind that I received holiday pay as a part time employee for working Thanksgiving and Christmas. Never mind that nobody told me I wouldn't get that benefit during my full-time probationary period. Never mind that I wouldn't have signed up to work Memorial Day if I had known that I was not going be compensated for it. I just get a big old fuck you from the corporate overlords.

Found

2008-04-10T02:19:00.000-05:00

The problem with greatness is that its absence is horrible. I walk around wearing my made up skins, acting in my delusional dramas, filling the spaces between one great moment and the next. And I have to live this way, because I cannot live without greatness.

While I am walking in my skins and acting in my dramas, some small part of me is searching for the next great thing. For some it’s a search for a great sound, for others a great taste, a great high, a great moment, a great ecstasy, and for some of us a great love.

I am not a great musician, or a great poet, a great physicist, a great lover. I’ve been trying for far to long to fill the spaces in between, I don’t know what else to do.

Right Now

2008-02-19T04:14:00.001-06:00

I removed the music from my life, not by choice, and my life became hell. I let the music back in, and the sun rose on a new day.

I awake to find water over my head, I swim and struggle for the light of the sun refracted through the shimmering waves. My chest burns, my heart claws desperately fighting my lungs for a fresh breath of air. I get nearer the light and the darkness starts to seep into the edges of perception. The world slowly shrinks to Zeno’s pinhole, I break the surface and the light explodes into my lungs. The roar of death slowly recedes from my ears to be replaced by a lilting laughter. She’s standing there laughing at me.

The world shifts.
The mind shifts.

The quiet scenery passes by in a midsummer blur muted by the tinted window inches from my nose. Although the trip is not tiring, it is exhausting. Running away is never as easy as it sounds, what they don’t tell you is that you are always leaving something behind. When my brother wrote from Iraq he always ended each letter with six words, “I miss home, I love you.” Fourteen is too young to understand those words, to young to keep them in mind, to young to become wise.

The last image of home I have is a picture placed carefully in my breast pocket. It’s faded and worn around the edges, but the smile on my mother’s face still shines, and the pride in my father’s eyes still carries the weight of the world.

The train jerks and my face slams into the window. The lights flicker on overhead, a tired voice announces that we are nearing the outskirts of Berlin, and we’ll arrive at the encampment shortly. I tighten the shoulder straps of my pack and flip the safety off on my rifle. Close as we are to the front American snipers have been known to pick off soldiers in the moments between exiting the train and entering the encampment.

The last push to clear the Americans from Europe will begin in a few weeks, just enough time for the Brits to mangle the Atlantic supply lines, and the Muslims to secure their footholds in the south of France. On last push, and the hope that this war will finally be over.

A bright light envelopes the interior of the car and I instinctively pull my visor over my eyes. Even with the tinted windows the nuclear flash can cause blindness in the unprotected eyes. Turning to look at the mushroom cloud beginning to form behind us I can see the shockwave catching up with us. Estimating the impact I begin the countdown. Seven, six, five, four, three, two and a half, two, one and three quarters, nine eighths, two fifths, Zeno.

The world shifts.
The mind shifts.

The sun light rains through the window onto my eyelids. Shielding my face with my hand I roll over and grab my phone of the nightstand while it softly plays Mario’s Underworld. Flipping the phone open I deftly disable the alarm with my eyes closed. A face floats through the post sleep haze. Smiling I sit up and dangle my feet off the edge of the bed. I may have to go to work, but at least I have she’ll be there to brighten my day.

“Dont wanna wait til tomorrow,
Why put it off another day?
One more walk through problems,
Built up, and stand in our way ,ah
One step ahead, one step behind me
Now you gotta run to get even
Make future plans, dont dream about yesterday, hey
Cmon turn, turn this thing around
Right now, hey
Its your tomorrow
Right now,
Cmon,its everything
Right now,
Catch a magic moment, do it
Right here and now
It means everything”
-Van Halen

World Falls

2008-01-05T19:49:00.000-06:00

The perception of color is familiar stomping ground for philosophers, poets, and song writers riffing on how we experience the universe. As I sit here listening to Blackhawk sing, “your blue might be grey, your less might be more, your window to the world may be your own front door,” I wonder about my own perceptions. I wonder if they are clouded or clear, or shaped by the lens of my experience. And if I am circumscribed to view existence with the slant of my past experiences, is there any way I can develop the tools required to break free of those vitiated perceptions.

I recently overheard an acquaintance of mine complain about the unwillingness of friends to communicate and maintain relationships. I was saddened to here that she was considering not seeing an old friend because he had not made enough of an effort to communicate with her. In my own friendships I am often split between initiating communication and waiting for communication to be initiated. When I was growing up I was often told it was rude and inappropriate to ask to be included in other people’s activities.

For example, my child hood fried Eric lived next door to me, they had a nice boat and would take it out several times during the summer. I was encouraged by my parents to wait for an invitation to go out boating with them, rather than ask if I could go along. This standard was reinforced so often throughout my youth, that as an adult I sometimes have difficulty joining group activities with friends. When I was in grad school there was a group of guys who would regularly play cards on Friday afternoon, and it was, for the most part, just assumed that these guys would get together. There was no formality to the arrangement, and no one really thought to ask if I wanted to join them. I think it was just assumed that if I wanted to, I would show up. As a result of my upbringing and the lack of formality it took a long time for me to become a regular member of the group, which eventually became one of the things I looked forward too every week.

On the other side of the equation is my own ability to encourage and include friends in activities. Aside from two or three people, whom I know very well, I have difficulty engaging friends in activities that I enjoy. I think my primary cause for concern is that I don’t think that my friends will appreciate or enjoy the activities that I enjoy. Add to that any fear of rejection, lethargy, or whatever, pulse it in the blender a couple times and what you get is a guy with a few very good friends, and then a wide empty area between them and the general acquaintances.

What I find most interesting, is that at this very moment, I find myself living that reality without animosity. I am more content with that situation now than I was as little as four or five years ago.

“I’m coming home with a stone
Strapped onto my back
I’m coming home with a burning hope
Turning all my blues to black
I’m looking for a sacred hand
To carve into my stone
A ghost of comfort
Angels breath
To keep this life inside my chest

This world falls on me
Hopes of immortality
Everywhere I turn
All the beauty just keeps shaking me

Now I woke up in the middle of a dream
Scared the world was too much for me
Sejarez said, don’t let go
Just plant the seeds and watch them grow
I’ve slept in rainy canyon lands
Cold drenched to my skin
I always wake to find a face
To calm these troubled lands

Ah this world falls on me
With dreams of immortality
Everywhere I turn
All the beauty just keeps shaking me

Now I’m running
To the end of the earth
And I’m swimming
To the edge of the sea
And I’m laughing
I’m under a starry sky
This world was meant for me
Don’t bury me
Carry me” -- Indigo Girls

Freedom

2008-01-03T19:43:00.000-06:00

For me, the hardest part of writing is sitting with a blank page. It’s easier if I am writing something “newsy:”

“There was an armed robbery last night about twenty minutes before the 10PM news. All the photogs had gone for the day and I volunteered/was asked to go. It was cold…”

“The Poker Room at Riverside was quiet for a Thursday night. The seniors were slowly trickling out as their tour busses departed. My table was down to three plus myself. To my right sat Sorority Sister in a mint green halter top, her red hair pulled back into a pony-tail sticking out the back of a baseball cap that was pulled low over her eyes…”

It’s easier if Muse has walked in the room and hit me over the head with a water-balloon. Ideas trickle down my arms and fall of my fingers like beads of sweat in August’s sweaty hotness.

And it’s easier if there is a strong emotion tied to the words. Lust, anger, love, and hatred are the strongest, but other more subtle emotions can be intertwined to create a torrent of words.

Lately confusion and angst have been dancing around the “work” part of my brain, and they have been the only thing motivating me to write. As a result my writing has been a disproportional representation of distrust and anger. The under-representation of love, and yes lust, has confined me to a psychological box, created out of self censorship and genuine lethargy. I miss that part of my psyche, and I’m thinking about taking it out of the box.

Same old song and dance…

2008-01-02T15:25:00.000-06:00

It’s the new year, but the same old song and dance. I forced my employer to give me two days off over the new year. While I was gone the weekend graphics guy was scheduled to work for the weekday graphics guy, but he didn’t show up for two days. And because I was gone the morning graphics woman had to work all the shows on the 31st, the night shows on the 1st and then turn around and work the morning show on the 2nd. The weekend guy is still an employee of this company.

Meanwhile, the production department has been short a couple of people since the beginning of November, and we lost another employee to news. So our GM approved the “emergency hiring” of someone to take over for the guy who went to news. We still can’t hire to fill the two vacancies, and we need special permission to hire someone to replace the guy that was stolen by another department. All the while, news hired a weekend reporter to take over for someone that is leaving, a weekend photog (the guy from production), fired the current weekend photog, and they made the part time weather guy full time. So my question is, why can news hire/promote people, but production can’t?

It’s been a while…

2007-12-08T02:54:00.000-06:00

I’ve had 11 days off since the first of September, none of them consecutive. I’ve worked at least three, 13 day weeks. Starting Monday I’ll be working another one. So I haven’t had much time to do anything but the essential functions, hence the lack of any sort of updates on any of my blogs.

We’ve been short staffed at work for a couple of months, and we are in a “hiring freeze” until the first of the year, which means that I have been performing a lot of different jobs. My normal week starts on Monday running cameras in the studio. Tuesday I’m the Associate Producer (AP) for the night shows which means I edit video and run the teleprompter during the shows. Editing video is fun, most of the video is straight voice over (VO), with the occasional VO-SOT which includes Sound On Tape, usually just some talking head. We also have feature packages that come to us pre-edited. Wednesday through Friday I produce graphics, over-the-shoulder (OTS) and full-screen graphics are all custom produced (which is soon to change and I’ll get into how much that sucks in a minute). Saturday I AP and run audio for the newscasts, on the weekend the anchor runs her own prompter so the AP can double over as an audio tech. Sundays I do laundry….

Currently we have two full-time graphic artists and two part-time. We do custom graphics for every news show. The current head of the graphics department is one hell of an artist, but he’s jaded. He’s been at the station long enough that he isn’t very motivated. On any given day we have an hour to an hour and half to build the graphics for the show. We get a list from the producers and build accordingly, sometimes the lists come in late and its crunch time, and while our guy is a great artist he doesn’t do well under the crunch. He also has a very shallow learning curve for new technology and new tools. As a result of this there is friction between him and the newsroom regarding how soon he gets the graphics list.

Our news director I think is sick of dealing with him. She wants to automate the graphics process so that the producers can create the graphics directly. This isn’t a totally bad idea, allowing producers to create the simple graphics would free up the graphics department to focus on the major pieces. It is a bad idea in the sense that if the graphic database isn’t large enough, the graphics will come off looking canned. When I raised this suggestion the new director said, “I don’t care.” I’m not sure I believe her.

So I’ve been tasked with creating a database of graphical elements that can be used to convey a wide variety of ideas. This job pleases the scientist in me, its taxonomy, plus a creative act, and I’ve been chosen for this job because of my experience in the systems that we use. The problem is that my arguments for organizing the project a specific way are, I won’t say ignored because I don’t know what weight they are given, I’ll say they are trodden over. There is a dichotomy with the news director, she wants me to do the job because of my expertise, but doesn’t listen to my arguments for why it should be done a certain way.

The other problem is that there is a push to have the database up and running by January first. I’m completely in the dark as to why the new year presents a deadline. My best guess is that the budget for the graphics department it going to be substantially cut and we are going to lose people from the graphics department, or transfer them to other areas of production. I’m not worried about my job, I’m skilled enough to do most of the technical jobs around the station, and management seems to like me. I am worried that if we start cutting people from the technical side of the newscasts we will lose one of the major advantages we have over our competition. I know that in the television industry it is becoming more difficult to turn profits, and with the forced change-over to HD smaller stations are spending a lot of money on equipment. Television news is losing viewers to other news sources, and while that affects national news more than local I think it still hurts us. I don’t know, maybe the business model needs to change.

Things seem to be tough all over, all I can do is my job.

A Little On The Nose

2007-11-26T20:57:00.000-06:00

From the “Fire Prevention Checklist” at the TV station where I work:

Know what can cause a fire: electricity, flammable liquids, smoking, space heaters, spontaneous combustion, welding and cutting flames and sparks, and reactive chemicals

Keep anything that can cause a fire away from anything that can burn.

Don’t smoke around anything that could burn.

Immediately remove any clothing that has absorbed a flammable liquid.

Eli's Coming

2007-10-04T00:01:00.000-05:00

I sat down tonight, in my spare time in the graphics department, and worked through the rundowns and timed out the show. The results where not totally surprising, in fact they get to the heart of what may be wrong with professional news in this country. The short version is thus, roughly a third of the news cast is news, and the rest goes to advertising, weather and sports, in that order.

The break down is as follows:

The 5:00 PM show is 31:30. 10:47 for commercials, 5:20 for weather, and 2:10 for teases and recap, for a total of 18:17 of non-news time, leaving 13:13 for news.

The 6:00 PM show is 28:48. 11:01 for commercials, 5:27 for weather, 3:42 for sports, and 40 seconds for teases, for a total of 20:50 of non-news time, leaving 7:58 for the news.

The 10:00 PM show is 35 minutes. 13:37 for commercials, 5:12 for weather, 4:29 for sports, 55 seconds for teases, for a total of 24:13 of non-news time, leaving 10:47 for news.

To be completely fair, the 13:37 break time for the ten o’clock show, includes a minute and a half end break, but that still factors into the 35 minutes we get from our network. It is interesting to me that while we try to sell time in our newscasts for commercials, there has to be a point of diminished returns when we sell too much time, and the value of that time is decreased. As evidence to that point look at ABC’s evening news, they now broadcast with “limited commercial interruption,” and while I haven’t ran the numbers I’m guessing the commercial time is less than a sixth of their total show time.

The problem is, I’m not really sure there is anything to be done to fix the problem. In a small market there are only so many resources our reporters can tap to produce stories that have a local interest, as a result we occasionally have difficulty filling the time we have.

As for the title of this post, it seems there may be a shake up in our management structure in the not to distant future. Reference “Sports Night.”

Blogging From Work

2007-10-02T21:31:00.000-05:00

It’s been a long time since I’ve blogged from work, around a year since I was teaching undergraduate physics labs at U-Iowa, even longer since I’ve blogged from the television station. Last time I was sitting in the graphics department waiting for the 10 o’clock news to start. Now I’m sitting in the newsroom waiting for the 10 o’clock news to start. I’ve been back at work for a month and a half, and I’ve had maybe 6 days off in that time, hence the lack of blogging time.

Since I’ve been back I found many things have changed, and many things have stayed the same. I’ve been working in graphics, production and the news room, which is almost identical to the job I was doing before. The station has undergone some upheaval, we have a new News Director, a new Production Manager, and the news room and production staff has been almost completely turned over. As a result we have employees who lack experience in several key positions, and as a result our product has suffered. We are also in the process of integrating some new equipment to become HD compliant, and this has resulted in added pressure.

But with all these problems/challenges there is still a lack of good communication across the board. I read an interesting comment the other day on one of those demotivation sites, “Consulting, if you’re not a part of the solution, there’s good money to be made in prolonging the problem.” That seems to be the mentality here. Last week I talked to our News Director about things that could be improved upon, and was basically told that a meeting would be called sometime in the near future to go over these and other changes, now I’m waiting to see if an when that meeting will be, and whether I’ll be asked to attend.

Against all these problems and the torrent of discontent that slides my way, I am still glad to be here doing a job that I excel at. Even though the pay and the hours suck, I think that the time spent here will be valuable, but not invaluable.

The Qual

2007-08-21T07:18:00.000-05:00

While I go back to work today, friends at U-Iowa will be pulling their hair out while taking the PhD qualifier. I have mixed emotions about not taking the qual, on one hand I’m very glad not to have the stress, on the other hand I’m disappointed that I didn’t succeed in my PhD quest. I still have the option of trying again, and I do plan to continue my education, but for now I’m taking a slight detour.

Anyway, to all my friends taking the qual today, I’ll be thinking of you.

Moving On

2007-08-10T03:13:00.000-05:00

I am parsing my life down to little boxes, to be sorted and stored. I find bits of forgotten lives I’ve led, and wrap them up tight to keep them safe. Two years and some flames burned out, some rekindled, and in the center on the outside is one that keeps burning. Ever present, never changing, it mocks me and guides me, and never leaves me alone. Adrift in a galaxy of stars, I make my way.

Purgatory

2007-07-26T06:49:00.000-05:00

Writing has been like pulling teeth lately. I’ve gone an entire month without writing anything of substance. This limbo that I’m in is ….. I don’t even know, depressing maybe. Nothing quite like feeling rejected to help raise a good mood. I guess I should just get over it eh?

Be Afraid Very Afraid

2007-07-12T12:57:00.000-05:00

Of getting struck by lightning while listening to your iPod…

Not because the iPod attracts lightning but because the metallic parts can exacerbate the damage. In another absurd, fear mongering, article on CNN.com “Experts warn of lightning-strike injuries with iPods.” Not like getting struck by lightning is bad enough all by itself, you really should be terrified if you happen to be listening to an iPod at the same time.

The article describes wishbone shaped burns across the chest and ruptured eardrums as the result of getting struck by lightning while listening to an iPod, but if you read all the way down to the last paragraph you’ll see the “eardrum ruptures are considered the most common ear injury in lightning-strike victims…whether or not an electronic devise is involved.” Looking at www.emedicine.com you’ll see that burns are a common effect of lighting strikes.

This is the worst kind of bullshit journalism. I wonder, if they are willing to post this level of blatant bullshit, what other stories are bullshit, and to what degree are they bullshitting us?

In response to the article I sent CNN.com the following feedback:

Why is this newsworthy? Eardrum ruptures and burns are the most common injuries for lightning strike victims, regardless of whether or not an electronic device is being used. YOUR OWN ARTICLE SAYS THIS! So why write the article? There maybe an increased risk of injury if an electronic device is being used by someone who is struck by lightning, but the only way to avoid those injuries is to never use electronic devices so that if you do get struck the increased risk is not there. And I am sure the fact that they were not using an electronic device is a comfort to the families of the hundreds of people that are killed by lightning every year, yeah they may be dead, but it could have been worse, they could have been listening to an iPod.

Around the Block

2007-07-03T09:52:00.001-05:00

I’ve been traveling recently. Since the beginning of May I’ve been to Nevada, Colorado, Pennsylvania, and Wisconsin via Minnesota, Nebraska, Illinois, Indiana, and Ohio.

I flew out to Las Vegas in early May to test for the Las Vegas Metro Police Department. Becoming a police officer is something I’ve had in the back of my mind for quite a while. Before I worked at UWSP Protective Services I had thought about going into law enforcement, and my experiences at UWSP helped to develop that specific desire. But the long hiring process, combined with my, less then stellar, physical fitness level, have led me to look elsewhere for employment.

At the end of May I drove out to Denver to visit my sister’s family. On the way I hit a deer in Lincoln and nearly totaled my car. But the trip went well otherwise, I got to see my new nephew as well as my cousin and mom. We took a couple of day trips up into the mountains and went to my sister’s father-in-law’s birthday party.

Three weekends ago I drove out to Pennsylvania to visit with my aunt and uncle who had their 50^th wedding anniversary. Every few years we have a family gathering where we get to see them and their children. I also got to see my eldest sister who flew in from California, and her daughter whom I had never met before.

And then this last week I drove up to Wisconsin to visit with my various relatives that live up there. It’s been a busy couple of weeks for family traveling, but now I expect that the rest of the summer will calm down.

But the most interesting part of the last few weeks is the job search. Last Monday I was cruising around on the internet looking at various jobs, and I noticed that a local TV station was looking for a full time Operations/Production Assistant. So I called them up and talked to the General Manager who said I should send my resume in. I honestly didn’t think that I would even be considered, but after talking to the GM and the guy that does the hiring for the production department (I would call him the Production Manager, but I don’t think that is his title. I’m guessing it’s something between production coordinator and manager) I definitely get the feeling I am being considered as any other applicant would be.

I have also applied for a position at a Green Bay station, but I haven’t heard anything back from them. I wouldn’t mind living in Green Bay, I have good friends their, but they will have to offer me significantly more than (excised). It’ll be a lot less expensive to live in the Wausau area, and hopefully that less expensive lifestyle will allow me to pay off my student loans very quickly.

Also in the time between traveling I have set up a couple of other blogs. The first is “Sadly a Fiction” at http://fictionofsweetchuck.blogspot.com, where I will be posting snippets of fiction and poetry that have written. Mostly these are going to be rough drafts and first additions, so they might be a little rough, but I hope to develop one or two ideas in to a series of posts that will have an evolving story arch. I can’t promise much, because this is the first time I’ve ever attempted to write fiction on a regular basis, but I have high hopes.

The second blog is “Photos by Sweet Chuck” at http://photosofsweetchuck.blogspot.com, where I will be posting photos I have taken. Again, these are probably not going to be the great, there are some gems, but mostly I’m a novice photographer with professional/consumer equipment.

Death Mark

2007-06-06T05:30:00.000-05:00

I wonder sometimes about the things people do to prepare themselves to die. About 2:15 this morning I heard a call for an ambulance to a mid-sixties male with stage IV colon cancer who has been feeling weak since Sunday and now is not strong enough to get out of bed. I wonder if, as they were carrying him out on the stretcher, he looked around and thought this would be the last time he is in his house. As he passed his dog did he scratch him behind the ears one last time for good measure? Did he look at the pictures on his walls, the one of his parents, or the one of his younger brother who died in Vietnam, and feel comforted that he will soon see them? Did he worry about his kids? His youngest daughter got married last summer and her first child is due this fall, will he meet it coming the other way?

If I were to get hit by a bus tomorrow, would I have any regrets? Sure there are things I would like to do, opportunities that I haven’t followed through to fruition, and there are friends and family to whom I wouldn’t get to say goodbye or thank you or I love you. But I’m really not leaving much behind, no girlfriend or wife, no children, I’m insured enough not to leave any debt. I’m not sure whether I over or underestimate the mark I’ve made on the world.

Robert Jordan’s “Wheel of Time” series has an interesting, and I find compelling, notion of how we make our mark on the world. If you imagine that each person is a thread and as time progresses the thread is woven into a tapestry, a ta’veren is a person who pulls on other peoples threads. Mostly that pulling is done without any effort by the ta’veren. For instance a ta’veren could be walking down the street and as he walks past a construction site a worker falls ten stories and receives not even a scratch. Then the ta’veren could walk another block and a man walking down the street might trip over a cobblestone and break his neck. In a sense a ta’veren makes things at the edges of possibility more likely to happen. But it’s also more complicated than that. The pattern that the tapestry is being woven into also uses the ta’veren to make sure the pattern goes where it is supposed to go, and in some senses the pattern needs the ta’veren to maintain a proper balance of things. Like a yin and yang.

For anything like a ta’veren to exist in our reality, it would imply that to a certain extent our lives are written out ahead of time, and that just doesn’t fit with my general ideas about the nature of our existence. But the balancing aspects of the ta’veren nature do appeal to me. We have lots of evidence that our local existence requires a great deal of balance, perhaps there are people in our society who help maintain similar sociological balances. In the movie “Unbreakable” Samuel Jackson’s character believes that there is a balance, he believes that for everyone born like him, fragile and easily injured as well as sociopathic, there is a person born with great strength and durability that has a deep moral commitment.

Perhaps that balance is maintained in our world. For every Adolf Hitler there is a Mahatma Gandhi, or a Martin Luther King Jr. for every Pol Pot. The balancing act may not be as dramatic as that… For some reason the juxtaposition of River Phoenix and Wil Wheaton keeps coming to the front of my mind. They both started out in similar places, but over the course of a summer went in different directions.^† From my personal life the analogy would be a Bill Huebsch for every Matt Volhard.

I think in writing this I’ve found that the mark that various people have left on me is more important to me than the mark I have left on them. I wonder if that’s good or bad.

† From Wil Wheaton’s book “Just a Geek” my understanding is that River Phoenix and Cory Feldman started experimenting with drugs during the summer “Stand By Me” was filming in Oregon.

Shorts

2007-05-12T11:33:00.000-05:00

Over the past year or so I have given thought to starting a new blog specifically to deal with my fictional writing. In the past I’ve posted poetry, excerpts from short stories, and complete stories here. But I think I want to take this particular blog in a specific direction relating to current events and musings related to the real world. The “vox populi” posts were and are my musings into social commentary and how our society is organized in general. I will probably continue to write on those themes, but I will also include personal musings of a limited scope. Relationships and my thoughts about them will probably be relegated to an anonymous blog where I can continue to feed my inner exhibitionist without dangerously exposing myself. I will probably cross post some of my poetry here and to a blog devoted to fiction and poetry.

A great part of my reasoning for dividing my writing up is my new allocation of free time. Since I’m done with school for a while, and I’m no longer tied to an eight hour shift at the casino, I’ll hopefully be doing more writing and I want to present it in a way that makes sense. Anyway, when I get the “Shorts” blog up and running I’ll post a link here.

Also, I’ve been noticing a lot of hits to the lightning photos I took last year, which leads me to the idea that I will restarting/recreating my photo-blog. So that’s four blogs I’ll have going. Hopefully by the end of this summer I’ll be able to organize them all under one domain www.sweetchuck.net with Langly’s help I hope to have a web server up that will provide me with my own space to work, as apposed to the current arrangement of using Langly’s server

The a-b-c-d-e-f-g… Word

2007-04-24T15:37:00.000-05:00

While skimming the headlines over at CNN.com today, I noticed an editorial titled, “The hypocrisy of repeating the ‘w-word.’” My first thought was, “what the hell is the w-word,” and when I clicked on the link and started reading the first subject mentioned was Don Imus. Could he mean “whore?” No, it turns out if you read to the second paragraph he’s talking about Mexican-Americans and the term “wetback.”

Ruben Navarrette Jr. starts the second paragraph of his commentary about the hypocrisy of repeating the w-word, “It’s time for a national dialogue on the ‘w-word.’” But instead of talking about the etymology of the term, and how it is offensive, he spends column inches talking about all the people that repeated the word when they were talking about how much of an ass (a-word) Bill O’Reilly is.

The truth is, this is just another editorial about the slight injustices of American vernacular that’s taking time away from the great social and cultural injustices that Mexican Immigrants face everyday. Our language is a conduit for how we think, not the cause of what we think. We use language to express ideas, we don’t generally form ideas just to fit a specific word. Think about it, when you use “fuck” (f-word unless the f-word means faggot), you use it because it is closely related to the emotion or thought you want to express. Do you sit around trying to think of emotions or thoughts to tie to the word just so you can use the word?

When I was in high school someone started using the word “jew” to describe anybody that does something in a non-conventional way, the usage caught on, and by senior year it was not uncommon to hear the following conversation.

“Why the hell d’he do it that way?”
“I don’t know, he’s a fucking jew.”

I don’t know why the person that started the trend used the word jew. Perhaps he had a personal grudge against Jews, or was familiar with that usage from his family. Or perhaps it was just a short word, that had the right combination of onomatopoeia and offensiveness that he just picked it up and associated it with that usage. It wasn’t until I was out of high school, and in a group of new friends that didn’t understand the use of the word, that I realized how offensive the term could be. I really wasn’t as concerned with offending people as I was about offending people with such a throw-away term that I used without even thinking. If I’m going to offend someone I want to do it on purpose with forethought, not because I’m in the habit of using a word.

So if we want to fix the problem with our language, we have to change the way we think. However, if we can’t even bring ourselves to honestly approach the words that we use how can we expect to tackle the ideas those words represent?

Update: While doing a little more research on Navarrette I discovered he wrote a book “A Darker Shade of Crimson: Odyssey of a Harvard Chicano” about his years as a Mexican-American undergrad at Harvard. Chicano is a slur, the term connotes a Mexican-American person of low class and poor morals. Maybe his title should read, “A Darker Shade of Crimson: Odyssey of a Harvard C-word.”

32 Part 2

2007-04-22T19:32:00.000-05:00

The second article from CNN.com is written by Ted Nugent. His article is divided into three major themes. The first is that allowing good-guys, average citizens with good intentions, to carry firearms can help stop massacres like the one at Virginia Tech. He lists about half a dozen examples where citizens did put an end to shootings by getting directly involved.

I have two points of contention with his idea that armed citizens can stop shootings before they reach the level of Virginia Tech. The first is Columbine. There was an armed guard at the school who traded shots with the shooters and then fled without stopping them. The second point is that there may be a high price to pay for having more armed citizens in situations like Virginia Tech. Say one of the students was carrying a concealed weapon and opened fire at Cho killing him early in the rampage, that would be a good outcome, but if in the process of stopping Cho our hero shot and killed an innocent student, would the hero still be justified in acting.

What if the hero shot many students, say five or six? What if the police, upon entering the building, saw our hero and thought he was the bad guy, say they shot him or our hero shot at the police in the confusion, is that worth it? Now these are just speculative questions, but I am reminded of the shooting at a mall in Salt Lake City. An off-duty officer attempted to intervene, and when the responding officers made contact with the off-duty officer there was confusion over whether he was the shooter or not. Trained officers couldn’t make the distinction between friend and foe in the moments that a foe could have used to kill the officer. Now add into the mix an untrained civilian and the potential for chaos increases dramatically.

The second and third acts of Nugent’s editorial dissolve into name calling:

“Already spineless gun control advocates are squawking like chickens with their tiny-brained heads chopped off, making political hay over this most recent devastating Virginia Tech massacre, when in fact it is their own forced gun-free zone policy that enabled the unchallenged methodical murder of 32 people.”

I am pretty sure that name calling is not going to be constructive, but I think that he is probably right. Knowing what we do about Cho, I think if there had been somebody there to shoot back, the death toll may not have been as high. If Cho had been stopped early, if he had been surprised and shot without much of a battle, the death toll would have been lower, but if there was any kind of a pitched battle, I suspect he would have dove into the nearest class room and shot everyone inside before killing himself.

My overall feeling is that the availability of guns does contribute to the homicide rate. Guns make it easier to kill. But I think the problems that we have with guns can be closely linked to other social problems, the break up of the family, social inequality across racial, ethnic and monetary strata, a large group of undiagnosed and untreated mentally ill that include drug addicts, and many more problems. I have no idea what the solution is, but the greatest minds of our time are trying to find one.

32 Part 1

2007-04-20T18:24:00.000-05:00

“Every once in a while there is a day with an absolute right and an absolute wrong, but those days almost always include body counts…” -- The West Wing

The problem is, I’m not sure there are absolutes in the Virginia Tech shooting. As many news reporters and talking heads indicated there is certainly going to be a lot of talk about gun control, I also think there will be some discussion about mental health and psychological evaluations, but answers are going to be hard to find.

CNN had two articles on their website about gun control, the first was for gun control, the second against.

Tom Plate is a former editor of the editorial page at the Los Angeles Times, and is a current professor of communications at UCLA, ^[1] his stance is that there are too many guns floating around in our country. He starts off his article saying that it is hard to have pride in America on days when gun violence is at the forefront. He talks about the students at UCLA feel vulnerable because they live in “High Noon America.” He explains his reference to the movie “High Noon” then says that “the use of guns is often the American technique of choice for all kinds of conflict resolution.”

Plate jumps back to not having pride in America by saying that the constitutional protections of speech, press, religion and assembly are apples to the oranges of the right to bear arms. He says, “The right to free speech, press, religion and assembly and so on seem to be working well, but the gun part, not so much.” So when members of the Westboro Baptist Church attend funerals for military service men and women, and say things like “God hates your tears, god hates fag enablers, and thank god for dead soldiers,”^[2] that’s our freedom of speech, religion, and assembly working well?

Plate then talks for a paragraph and a half about why Cho’s Korean ethnicity is irrelevant ending with, “these students were not killed by a Korean, they were killed by a 9 mm handgun and .22-caliber handgun.” I don’t think Cho’s ethnicity is relevant, and neither does Plate, but that doesn’t stop him from bringing it up.

Plate points out that in the 90’s the Los Angeles Times endorsed a ban on private gun owner ship, and the paper received “more angry letters and fiery faxes from the well-armed U.S. gun lobby than” at any other time during Plate’s tenure as editor, but the paper also received a large amount of supportive mail. Plate chalks this up to the common sense of the ordinary citizen saying “that whatever Americans were and are good for, carrying around guns like costume jewelry was not on our Mature List of Notable Cultural Accomplishments.” What it says to me is that gun ownership is a very decisive issue, and when you threaten to take away a person’s rights, the people that most strongly believe in that right are going to be the ones most vehemently protesting.

Plate makes the assertion that the massacre at Virginia Tech probably would not have happened if guns were not so easily available. I don’t believe that is true. Cho seemed intent on killing people, he purchased the guns more than a month before his assault, and from the accounts I’ve heard he has been angry for a long time. I don’t think that the availability of guns was a major factor in allowing this type of crime to happen, he could easily have filled a Ryder truck full of fertilizer and fuel oil, or just hit and run over people with a car. It doesn’t take a lot of intelligence to find a way to kill people.

The second to last point that Plate makes is that we have too many guns in America. He attempts to make this point by saying that foreigners sometimes think that celebrities are more often victims of gun crime than regular people. He notes that John Lennon’s death caused many in the foreign press to believe in a “war on celebrities,” and that the press today will inevitably declare a “war on students or some-such.” But Plate knows better, “the correct target of our concern needs to be guns.” Again, I’m not convinced. I think that the media is part of the problem when it comes to Americans feeling vulnerable. While it is true that guns are a responsible for a large portion of the homicides in this country, ^[3] guns are used in less then a tenth of violent rapes and sexual assaults, robberies, and aggravated and simple assaults. ^[4]

The last part of Plate’s article relates his own experience of being robbed at gunpoint. While he was carrying groceries into his house a man approached and pointed a gun at Plate’s head. Plate complied with the thief’s requests, and the thief didn’t shoot him. In this situation I don’t think Plate could have acted any differently if he was armed. If the bad guy gets the drop on you, you are pretty much screwed. But I wonder, if the thief had put a knife to his throat, would Plate be in favor of banning knives?

1. Plate, Tom “Let’s lay down our right to bear arms” Editorial on CNN.com
http://www.cnn.com/2007/US/04/18/commentary.plate/index.html

2. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Westboro_Baptist_Church

3. Bureau of Justice Statistics: Homicides by Weapon Type
http://www.ojp.usdoj.gov/bjs/homicide/tables/weaponstab.htm

4. Bureau of Justice Statistics: Firearms and Crime Statistics
http://www.ojp.usdoj.gov/bjs/guns.htm

Getting Paid

2007-04-08T02:53:00.000-05:00

We get a bi-weekly company bulletin with our paychecks. The most recent issue contained news of pay raises. It seems the management has been meeting with “front line” workers to discuss what improvements could be made to make our lives better. The result of those meetings is the news that front line workers will be eligible for a performance based raise after their first year of employment with the casino. This performance based raise will be from 0% to 3% of our current hourly wage and will be based on the results of our annual review. I make $8 an hour, every security officer makes $8 an hour, and if I get the best possible raise after my first year of employment I will be making $8.24 an hour. I’ve done the math and figured out that I will be making about the same money working full time at the casino as I did working half time as a teaching assistant, with comparable benefits.

When I started this job I knew two things, first that it was a temporary job to pay bills while I get on the career path. Second considering that I would be bringing in $8 an hour, I expected some flexibility with the scheduling. I expect that most people would be working two jobs, and our management would allow us some latitude in picking which shifts and which days we would work. I was given the chance to tell them which shift I preferred to work, they asked me to rank my preference between the three shifts, but they would decide which shift I would work. I got lucky and was given the shift I wanted most, but newer hires haven’t been so lucky. One woman who started this week was put on third shift, which was her lowest choice. The other side of this equation is choosing which days we get off during the week. I was taking two evening classes this semester in the hope that I could push through my criminal justice program in a year. When I started at the casino I asked them if I could have off on the nights those classes met. I was told point blank that wasn’t going to be possible, I would have off on Tuesdays and Wednesdays, no room for negotiation.

Another item in our newsletter was that starting April 26th, employees that show up on time and work their full shifts for an entire pay period will receive an additional $0.25 an hour for every hour they worked in that period. Showing up on time is a basic job requirement, we already get punished if we come in late so why set up a reward system for something we are supposed to do anyway, and looking at it from the security department, we will get a bigger raise for doing something we are supposed to be doing anyway then the biggest possible raise we could get for doing our job well.

I can live cheep and survive until I find a real job, but there are people in our department that have families, kids to feed, mortgage payments, car payments, credit-card debt, and so on. The value that our casino puts on the security department is killing the department. Since I started on February 28th, eight people have quit, a full fifth of our department, mostly from third shift. The management is trying to get people to move to third shift, but they don’t offer any incentive to do so, instead they just assign new hires to work third and wonder why moral is so low.

The Management Still Sucks

2007-04-01T04:04:00.000-05:00

Currently I am working at a casino in eastern Iowa, a typical day starts at five minutes to three with a shift briefing in the security office. Our shift supervisor talks about any events that will be happening during our shift, news about policy changes, and our duty stations for the first two hours. We have an eight hour shift split into two hour duty assignments. We spend most of our day on the casino floor, either checking ID’s at the entrances, or just roving around. Occasionally the rovers will get small assignments, taking chips from the cage to the table games, escorting money to or from various points on the floor, watching a slot machine while a patron goes to the pisser, or filling in at the entrances so that other officers can have a break. But supposedly the primary function, or at least a very important one, is to watch for drunk people. In Iowa it is against the law to be intoxicated while you are gambling, but if we do find someone who we think is intoxicated our only course of action is to inform our supervisor.

I’ve worked at the casino since March 1st, and I’ve had a couple opportunities to report intoxicated patrons on the gaming floor. (At this point it should be noted that my last year of college I was an officer on the university police force so I’ve had some experience with drunk people.) The first incident started off right at the end of my shift while I was stationed at one of the entrances to the gaming floor. I witnessed a male in his mid-twenties walking into the bathroom directly across from my post. The way he walked was… different, he walked at a brisk pace, and sort of bow-legged, like he really had to use the bathroom. I noticed it because I thought it was kind of funny. When he exited the bathroom he approached my entrance and I noticed he was walking better, but still not like a normal person. When he got to me he showed me the stamp on his hand, indicating that he had been carded previously and he was of age. I let him through, but when he passed me I could detect a slight smell of alcohol. As I watched him walk amongst the slot machines my replacement arrived and I started towards the back of the casino. On my way back to the security office I caught site of the guy and watched as he filled a cup with soda at one of our self serve fountains, he fumbled around with the cup and had a little trouble getting the ice into the cup. I decided to call my supervisor, and I continued to follow the guy, with his odd little walk, around to the opposite side of the gaming floor. Our gaming floor is an octagon with a bar in the center, there is an open space around the bar, and the black jack and other table games are arranged in a circle around that open space, then around the outside of the table games is the slot machines. I was on the east side of the bar watching our guy when I noticed my manager approaching from the north. (Actually this guy is the secondary manager for my shift, he fills in on the days when my primary manager has off.) I keyed the radio, gave a description of the guy and when I saw that my manager was looking at me I pointed the guy out while he was standing by one of the black jack tables. When my manager got to me I told him what I had witnessed and again pointed they guy out. My manager watched him for a minute then told me that he recognized the guy and that he had a mental disability, but my manager said he would watch the guy just to make sure.

As I had nothing else to do I started to head back to the security office to punch out, when I turned my manager said, “Oh, by the way, watch your pointing.”

I asked him what he meant and he explained that when I pointed something out it caused patrons of the casino to wonder if something was up. I was dumbfounded, the casino can get fined $10,000 if they let someone who is intoxicated gamble, but my supervisor was worried that by pointing the possible drunk out I could cause other customers to wonder what was going on.

The second incident occurred a day or two later. I was between the Feature Bar, the one in the center of the gaming floor, and the table games when a customer hobbled up to me and asked if he there was anyplace besides the cashier where he could redeem his chips for cash. When he opened his mouth to speak I took a step back, the alcohol on his breath was over powering. When he spoke his speech was slurred and his sentences were poorly formed or incomplete. I directed him to the cashier and as soon as he started walking away I radioed my supervisor (the head supervisor for 2nd shift) and started following. When my supervisor caught up to me I indicated the guy at the cashier’s window and told him about our interaction. When the drunk started walking away from the cashier my manager said that “it looked like he has a handicap and that is probably why he is walking so funny, it may be that his handicap also affects his speech, but I’ll watch him anyway.” He dismissed me and started off after the drunk. A few minutes later he radioed to surveillance that he was making contact with the drunk, and he ended up escorting the drunk off property. I’ve since learned that it’s pretty common for supervisors, or possibly only the 2nd shift supervisor, to pass off our suspicions of intoxicated patrons by saying that the person is probably handicapped.

I’ve got more stories, and I’m eager to tell them, but its four o’clock in the morning and I have to go to bed.