To Do List

1. Get my teeth fixed within the next 6 months.
2. Register for school - fall 2009.
4. Become debt free in one year.

Extra Credit:
5. Find a partner who will enjoy collaborating a happy^2 life.

The greatest crime in the world is not developing your potential. When you do what you do best, you are helping not only yourself, but the world.
-Roger Williams

Steps: Skyline Drive

As of 9 AM today, I am unemployed.

I decided to walk most of the way home from work.  My friends W. and R. accompanied me to the Dixie Rock to send me off on the road.

Here are some photos I took as I took the first steps towards my future.  The name of the road is Skyline Drive.  (Click the image to see the slide show & descriptions.)

Malus Malum Mortum - and on from there

The bPod died last night
my place looks like an estate jumbe sale
I spent the morning feeling like a castaway*
in a boat full of panic rats
I got some thins packed but, I felt heavy
worried, sad, and wished
to feel nothing at all.

Amidst the chaos of my picked-to-pieces
place of terminal sanctuary in Zion's Gate,
I won't even go there, now;
I went back to bed with a glass of wine
slept for 5 hours with no dreams,
woke up to heat and light and, damn
I probably won't sleep tonight.

I feel blurry, half-disassembled, wound
too tight, and posted off-center,
tt's dark and hot and the phone
didn't ring all day, of all days
oi vay

---

*

To be a castaway is to be a point perpetually at the center of a circle. However much things may appear to change - the sea may shift from whisper to rage, the sky might go from fresh blue to blinding white to darkest black - the geometry never changes. Your gaze is always a radius. The circumference is ever great. In fact, the circles multiply. To be a castaway is to be caught in a harrowing ballet of circles. You are at the center of one circle, wile above you two opposing circles spin about. The sun distresses you like a crowd, a noisy invasive crowd that makes you cup your ears, that makes you close your eyes, that makes you want to hide. The moon distresses you by silently reminding you of your solitude; you open your eyes wide to escape your loneliness. When you look up, you sometimes wonder if at the centre of a solar storm, if in the middle of the Sea of Tranquility; there isn't another one like you also looking up, also trapped by geometry, also struggling with fear, rage, madness, hopelessness, apathy.

~Yann Martel - Life of Pi

 

Google Form Test - say hi if you see this

State of the union

Lye to Me: A Recipe for Disaster

You will need:

A sink with a garbage disposal on one side.

The ingredients for homemade Szechuan shrimp (be sure to make way too much rice.)

A pot of coffee.

Two plungers (one that is marginally decent in quality, one that just looks like a plunger but doesn't really work.)

A bucket

A saucepan

A pint of Jagermeister

A large black bottle of lye which comes in its own protective plastic bag (that's how you can tell it's really dangerous, ergo, effective.)

A phillips-head screwdriver.

Make the Szechuan shrimp and eat it - Yummy! Be sure you eat dinner shortly before you need to leave for work; busy, busy, busy! Put the leftovers in a dish to take to work for lunch.

While cleaning up, and running late, just run all that leftover rice through the garbage disposal. Go take a shower and get ready for work.

Make a pot of coffee and, during that process you will discover that the sink is BADLY clogged.

Get the two plungers - you'll need to hold one in each hand; one to cover the garbage disposal maw (because some housemate or other has taken the maw-plug for some nefarious purpose or other), and the other to plunge the conduit to the main draain. Plunge vigorously for a long time, and get your shirt all wet.

Give up on the plungers (because by now both of your arms will be sore), and get out the black bottle of lye.

Use the saucepan and bucket to bail all of the standing water out of the sink. A nifty trick is to turn on the garbage disposal for a couple of seconds, which will push all the water out of that side into the sink you are bailing - thus making it easier to get most of the water out of the way.

Punch a hole in the seal on top. Pour about 6 cups of lye into the drain-sink.

NOTE: This is about 6 times the recommended amount of lye to use.

Let stand for fifteen minutes. You should probably let it stand for about a half an hour, or so but, since your ride to work is going to be coming in about 20 minutes, you don't have that luxury. Check out the brown foamy stuff that is sizzling in both sinks now, and be afraid - be very afraid. Plunge a little too vigorously, and splatter some lye on your hands and arms just so you know for sure that the warning about lye burns on the black bottle are correct.

Give up, change your soaking shirt, and go work a 12-hour shift where you end up chasing a runaway heroin addict kid around town for two hours, almost get hit by a 90-year-old woman driving an Escalade way too fast in heavy traffic, and lose your cigarettes in the process.

Go home and get back to business!

Plunge vigorously (using both plungers, of course), and then - EUREKA - here's another nifty trick you can do with your garbage disposal. Take the "good" plunger and block the drain-sink. Then, pressing down on the plunger, turn on the garbage disposal to build up pressure in the pipes - this just MIGHT blow the clog out... But, it won't. You will also find that you won't be able to hold onto the plunger. The resulting jet of lye and pipe-emesis will shoot all over the freaking place. Be sure, when it hits your face, that your EYES ARE CLOSED.

Lye burns, and the only way to get it off is to sluice it with water, which makes it burn more. Spent 20 minutes under the shower making sure that you have removed every molecule of lye from your face and body.

NOTE: Chicks dig burns (it kicks in their mothering instincts) - first (and even second) degree burns are more painful than dangerous, don't be a wimp!!

Call the Roto-Rooter guy, pay him $100, and he'll unclog the sink.

Drink 1/3 - 1/2 of the Jagermeister and go to bed.

Bon appetit!

I have to go put some more aloe on my face, neck, and arms, and clean the kitchen now. The rest of the Jager is for solace, later.

In Wonder of Agony

You may find this silly but, today I forgot to wash the conditioner out of my hair - didn't even notice until I was outside waiting for the bus trying to figure out why my hair was all plastered to my head. Drunk? Not this time...

Those of you who have met me know that I am a walking poster-dog for the effects of bad genetics, drug abuse, and poor dental care - which makes me a veritable dream for any practitioner of the Maxillofacial/Prosthodontic art. What I'm saying is that my teeth are abysmal and, as I age, are in steep decline.

I make too much money to qualify for any insurance that I cannot pay for, but I don't make enough money to pay for it. So, I'm living with the consequences of my parents, the biotechnological history of my birthplace (no treated water until 1970), and my often poor choices.

I am in the midst of riding out an abscessed tooth - helping the nerve die with dignity, and experiencing levels of physical pain that I can only describe as wondrous. I have been through this before, how many times? I don't know - but, this time is different.

This is the only time when I've gone through without a junkie mind - over the past few days I've begun to wonder about many things; if I need to experience all the pain I've put off by ingesting massive amounts of drugs for years on end, if I am experiencing this to learn the truth of what Khalil Gibran wrote concerning pain:

...
And could you keep your heart in wonder at the daily miracles of your life, your pain would not seem less wondrous than your joy;

And you would accept the seasons of your heart, even as you have always accepted the seasons that pass over your fields.

And you would watch with serenity through the winters of your grief.

Much of your pain is self-chosen.

It is the bitter potion by which the physician within you heals your sick self.
...

Or, simply the culmination of events come to fruition.

Whatever the case, I have died a thousand tiny deaths over the last few days - I allow myself a glass of wine to help me sleep, no more. I have learned that hitting the nerve with straight Listerine will do wonders when I need to clear my head enough to communicate or function. I have also learned that having direct discourse with the nerve as it dies, as it pleads for release is helpful - telling it to shut down, to sleep, to let go; that the message that it sends to my cortex is redundant and futile.

And, in the midst of this, I have several times transcended to a place where the pain of this one little nerve is the agony model of a world; confusion, longing, need, desire unrequited, and fear that there is no end to it. I can breathe all of this in, and breathe it back out into the vastness of a universe that I know is big enough to contain it.

The peace that I experience when the pain subsides is awe-inspiring. Though I know it's only a remission, I also know that the blinding silver-hot bubbles of bio-agony that strike like lightning through my face and down into my chest are manifested perceptions that equate to seemingly endless torture the are but momentary pulses that, somehow, I can learn to step between.

Peace.