Posts from — November 2005

The problem with having writing on a computer - more specifically, writing a blog, is that it is way too easy to start tinkering. 

There, at the top of the screen as I write, is a tab shouting "Design".  Writing is hard, I’m easily distracted, and this tab holds out a promising invitation - yea, life would be so much better if I could just get that shade of blue for my banner - you know, the one that happens in the evening sky that makes everything so clear and your heart ache.  Now that, I think, would communicate something meaningful. 

Next to this tab is one shouting "configure", calling to my nerd soul, a promise of some as-of-yet unfound setting that will make this the coolest blog ever (though I am way past the age where anything I do could, or should, be labeled ‘cool’).  And off I go, techman on the loose, wandering through tip pages and tracking down obscure template tags.

Or that tab with my bookmarks, promising something inspiring.  Off I go visiting my haunts to see what’s up, maybe write about something aside from my self here, practice commentary, I think, become a respected … well, something grandiose here.  And, hours later it is past time for lunch, past time for bed, and my brain is too fogged from this aimless journey to write anything at all. 

Good writing stems from honest connection, I believe, and after traipsing about for hours, well, I’ve read a lot of interesting stuff, but don’t feel connected to anything.  Lease of all my own life, which is where all good connection starts.

Thinking about this mind fog today, why I never get to writing, I realized it felt familiar.  It felt like the fog that seems to settle over me when I go to the video store.  When I am walking down the street with Carl, and I say "You hungry" and he says "Yea, where do you want to go?"

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I hear the freight, whistle blowing, headed up to Canada.  Live near enough to the tracks that sometimes the heavy ones, loaded with lumber, headed back south, shake the house.  The sound, rolling off into the distance takes me with it for a moment, far to the north.  I can sense the distance, see my little house, my little life a dot of light in the dark among the trees from up high looking back as I am carried along in it’s slipstream.

Fainter now, leaving me back here, only sound the ticking of the clock. 

Seems no matter how settled into a place I get, a part of me is on those tracks, rootless, rolling of to no particular destination, looking in windows flashing by, the comforts of ordinary homes silhouetted for a brief moment. 

Last year at this time I was writing, clipping along at several hundred words a day, a thousand on a good one.  NaNoWriMo!  Sometimes it actually felt like I was writing a novel.  I had a room up on the rim of the Grand Canyon for a week in there, and I would hike around and think about people I knew and then sit down and write.

Not much difference between thinking about these people I knew that actually existed, you know, friends, acquaintances and such, and these people I knew that didn’t exist, really, except in this thing that was growing somehow out of my keyboard.

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What are the three most important things in pricing real estate? Location, Location, Location.

Moved this to typepad. Got tired of fussing around with Radio UserLand. While I think it is more powerful software, I got tired of wandering around in the templates, trying to remember what went where. I expect this will be more constrained, in terms of design and programing.

And I am going to miss the outlines.

But, I get in from work at 10:00 PM, and I’ve been in front of computers all day, getting things to run, looking up this, tweaking that, thinking about implementation, … I just want to get something out there, make a little change while I eat dinner, got about an hour before I ought go to bed if I am to have any brain left for tomorrow’s two hour meeting about tech staff-management relationships …

Guess I don’t have much patience left for the getting into the guts of something. Just want to get to it.

Enough. Swore this wouldn’t be one of those awful geek-ey self-referential blogs disecting the ever so cool tricks that make up the blog. Hard not to, though, being a geek from way back.

Mobile Posting.  As if I will be traveling.  Soon taking a house with a caretaker position.  Or maybe the position comes with the house, I dunno.

Gonna be like being a dairy farmer.  Chores twice a day, morning and evening.  Open the Gate, Close the Gate.

Or, maybe like some zen thing, coming round to the same spot on the earth twice a day, some absolute physical commitment.

Mobile Posting.  Traveling.  Huh!  Guess I’ll have to go into the piles of photos taken over the last couple of years, dress ‘em up and fake a couple of travelogs.

So outside the 6:30 Friday night meeting, Tom is telling me about this therapist he had, kept saying to him “Stop Fighting, You’ve Already Won The War!” Hard to believe it may be true.

What the hell am I struggling so hard against anyway? Well the two jobs leave me pretty tired, I can riff on that a while, and then there are two ex-wives to match. Everyone understands a good x-wife story. Lots of stories that will get a nod, some understanding.

But the donkey track struggle, going round and round pushing that stone, well, is is my hooves that have worn that circular track so smooth, so deep. And I get the feeling I could go round that particular circle forever, telling the same stories. Fighting the same fights. Sometimes more work to create the ‘enemy’ than the fight itself.

But, if life is not a struggle, then what the hell am I going to do with myself, here, alone in the apartment on a Friday night?