poukledden

Today was one of those days in which I spent a lot of time doing many things and ended up mostly feeling like the day was completely wasted. I did, however, accomplish the task of updating my computer -- it's now an Intrepid Ibex instead of a Hardy Heron -- which is nice. There is new, minor bling all over the place, and several annoying problems from Hardy are gone, gone, gone. Among the fun little bits is that Totem, the movie player application, now has plugins that let you access BBC content (all their podcasts, streams etc, not the iPlayer thing or whatever) and Youtube videos.  I've encountered a few minor bugs, but nothing major. (in case you're wondering, the next version of Ubuntu will be the Jaunty Jackalope. Which means they're adding imaginary animals to the list of possibilities, which amuses the fantasy lover in me no end).

Here's something amazing and wonderful -- a 109 year old woman, the daughter of a slave, voting for Barack Obama.

I so don't want to go to work tomorrow. But alas, I must. Hopefully I will sleep tonight -- note the time on this entry, it ain't lookin' good. Sleep has been eluding me. My head is on fire or something. Part of it is election anxiety. The last 8 years, this country has been like that friend we all have, you know the one, the one who always has a choice between the Really Amazing Person to date and the physically and emotionally abusive creep, and choses the creep every time. So it's like we know Obama is the man for us, but I have this fear we'll wake up on November 5th to McCain smacking us around and telling us to be a good bitch or else.

Mostly I'm being a moody little twerp today. I'll get over it. Night.

What? The "Oh I was attacked by a BIG MEAN BLACK MAN" McCain campaigner lied her ass off and made the whole thing up?

Color me shocked. Imagine Republicans using race-baiting.

Sigh. I thought they had gone as low as they could go. Silly me. Who wants to bet the DA will be leaning hard on her, trying to see if they can scare up some interesting career-making dirt?

On Joe McCain, I can only say that it is official -- John McCain is screwed. Everything that can go wrong is going wrong, right down to having the Evil Clown version of Billy Carter for a brother.

I think the McCain family holidays are going to be...tense.

Will Ferrell reprises The Shrub, in case you missed it:



In other news, blisters on big toes are bad. Blisters on big toes that get infected are worse. Having to work for 8 hours in shoes that rub and squeeze at said big toe is much, much worse. Luckily, it is improving, the infection seems to be knocked down mostly. But sweet monkey spit, this was a painful day. Said healing thoughts, especially tomorrow from noon until 7:30-8ish pm, MST.

Gregory is:

- currently reading the collected ghost stories of Edith Wharton

- so ready for November 4th to be over and done with

- headachy

- currently, and absurdly, addicted to a silly little Super Mario knockoff called Super Tux 2. Open Source games can be fun, yo. And cute as the dickens. I mean, a little penguin running around stomping on fluffy monsters? Priceless.

- enjoying the new Sarah Jane Adventures series. Even if they did the unforgivable and went for the tired old Evil Clown cliche.

- falling in love with Hannah Fury's music. I have her album The Thing That Feels. "The Vampire Waltz" destroys me every time I hear it.

In other news:

The Hunter's Moon seemed to bring out weirdness and other fun at my apartment complex, with odd conversations drifting through the night air, a shouting match somewhere in the complex, and at least one person having, apparently, a Very Good Time, if you know what I mean. In several bursts throughout the night, the last being somewhere around 5 am.  I say one person because either 1)the woman in question was really into self-love that night, or 2)her partner didn't make concrete penetrating sounds.

I'd never really noticed before, but it can actually be a bit depressing hearing other people have a Very Good Time. It is, however, a good sport to try to guess who it was. This apartment building is rather odd, sound wise, and there are ways that sound can travel through it -- largely, I think, because of the ventilation in the bathrooms.

Otherwise, moody. More soon, when certain parts of my head settle a bit. Peace, y'all.

As part of a plan that involves being money-smarter and food-healthier, I'm really trying to get crackin' again with cooking and generally being a kitchenette diva. This means a bit of planning, and also means Sunday afternoons and evenings are turning into a bit of a cooking fest for me. I made dinner (for today and tomorrow, and hell, probably enough leftovers for a lunch or two also), cooked up a batch of tofu scramble for breakfasts this week, and even have a coffee cake in the oven right now. AND I managed to get out running.

One nice thing about this regimen -- besides a lot of good eatin' -- is that, for instance, I went shopping at Sunflower today and came away with two very stuffed bags of food for less than 20 dollars. This is the wonder of being vegan -- it's almost all veggies and such when you get going with proper cooking and don't rely on premade foods.

So, I've probably eaten healthier in the past week than I have in months. Gotta keep this going so I can be super healthy Gregory, and frugal Gregory to boot (that last one an important part of the Save Up For A Laptop Campaign).

Work. Come home. Fall over. But not as bad as yesterday. I've been fighting something the last few days, a thing of achiness and vague fever, which has mostly meant work and then home and that's it. I'm mostly feeing better though, just very, very tired.

But all that is never mind, because Amazon.com is evil, and has started doing this thing where they offer up mp3 albums for 1.99. Today's? I will let you guess from the title of this post. I'm going to be listening to that song like 8 BILLION TIMES in the next week.

So I'm happy. Now to bed.

Sometimes, you just have to say that: it was a good day. Good shift at work, good people, good people-watching, good thunderstorm this evening. Good.

Yay.

What's this feeling that been possessing me as I write lately? Ever since I started playing with the silly putty of my own life, trying to put it on paper in different ways, see what happens, there's been this burn in my skull, in my heart. An itch, the tingling of limbs long asleep. And tonight, working on what will be a post for Atheist A Go-Go!, I realized.

Now, at last, I feel it. This is my life, this is what I have lived. This is part of me. So many years of always running away, from the Donor and from this and that and so on until that became my life: just running, always running, run from everything.

Somewhere, at some moment, I accepted it: this has been my life. This has been the path that I was on. All those Gregorys were me, and still, in their way, are.

My head is whirling with weird dreams and crazy energy as I try to bring the different parts of myself into a new, crazy dance of...something. Yes, we're strongly aiming for...something, now. Aiming at it like nobody's business.

So much of the internal conflict is simple -- I am imprisoned by other people's words. I've internalized them. My desire for acceptance and group-belonging has made me too willing to accept their definitions, their terms. When you're desperate to be part of the group, you'll be all too willing to accept the Laundry List requirements of membership. Thou shalt believe this and this and that and this other thing.

And I know, deep down, that I keep myself too isolated, and this is a Bad Thing, that it distorts my views of groups. Even the groups I belong to, or self-identify with, are things that I look at from the outside. I see the broad patterns, the loudest voices, but not necessarily the complexity, the range, the differences, the little eddies and streams of human interaction. And the internet is like a farmyard:  that which brays loudest is probably a jackass. The voices you can hear without effort in society are not necessarily representative. You have to step into the silence and hear the whispers, and that means relationship, ending of isolation, stepping fully into the stream of humanity and finding the eddies you can dance in.

But yes, at the end of it, I'm imprisoned by words, or rather by other people's definitions of same. I am trying to free my mind of shackles that I helped impose myself, so I can find the dance in which the atheist and the vegan and the pagan-at-heart and the storygeek and the whathaveyou can meld properly into a messy One, combine to create the only definition that is mine alone -- the definition of Gregory.

I'm an atheist not afraid of using the word spirituality, so let me just say that I re-realized one of those Most Important Things -- that physical activity, exercise, running, this is a mainstay of my spiritual practice.

I was wound up tight, diffusely irritable, lost, whirly headed, and pissed off because the spaghetti I had for dinner sat in my stomach like a big lump of ick, magnifying the general sense of bloated flabbiness I was feeling. I've been so bad about exercise this year, so bad, and it's showing, on my body and in the way I feel, and my moods. I have managed some yoga recently, which is good, but tonight it was out the door, out into the hot night, to huff and puff and sweat under the moon hung in cloudy gauze. Every muscle working, hurting, lungs laboring, sweating through my shirt several times over, to come back wet and body weary and deliriously spent and at peace.

This is the moment we are at, when I have to fully enter into my body, my Damiel soul finally realizing that it is this body, this physical thing, not vapor mind floating in nonphysical space. Mine is not to merely observe, but to descend fully into the physical and get squelchy.

Yes, that wound up feeling is coming from many, many things.

And that spaghetti thing, man, when am I going to start to take to heart what my body tells me, and realize there are certain foods I should do in definite moderation? So many things that just give me that bloated stomach feel, and thus feel not good and cranky, and I know it and do it anyway. Aaaack!

My head is spinning so fast right now that it's a wonder it doesn't snap clean off my neck and spin off into space. Is the world mad, or am I? A man is receiving death threats for taking a cracker from a church; the Vatican is being treated like an institution of serious adults as they spazz out over the Anglican ordination of women bishops; 69 U.S. senators violated their oaths to protect the U.S. Constitution. I feel like I should be out on the streets, setting up barricades, and I officially changed my voter registration to no preference, and wondered if I can vote for Obama in good conscience. And yet, and yet, my head is whirling with stories and writing ideas and a growing impulse to explode all over the place like my sister supernova (yes, Rie, I'll write that poem or whatever, I swear). I look at people and it's like I'm seeing people for the first time. I crave touch like a drug, I want to hug random people and steal kisses. If the world is mad, maybe I'm just trying to find a better madness for myself, a better insanity to live and sing to the world.

I. Tonight

"Hey, pal!"

I stop, garbage bag in hand, my reverie interrupted. Turning, I see a man coming towards me, swaying unsteadily, each step a study in concentration. The happiness I feel vanishes. The cool, humid, monsoon-scented night is forgotten.

( read on... )

So, there's a shiny new 4th Edition of the world's oldest role-playing game, and one might wonder -- if one is bored, and aware of the fact that this new edition is MAJORLY different from D&D's past -- one might wonder, as I was saying, what the Gregory D&D Personality Profile would look like now.

Here's the things to consider -- gnomes are out as a PC race. Druids are out until the Player's Handbook II, due out next year. The alignment system has changed in a way that is both cool and epically Bizarro -- I mean, why mostly simplify to good-unaligned-evil, but also keep lawful good and chaotic evil? EPIC WEIRD.

Anyway. Let us read the D&D tea leaves and see what they say. Here's some choices I'd probably make.

Alignment: good or unaligned. Would depend on mood.

Race: Hmmm. Halfings seem to have settled into something rather fun these days -- it seems official, now, that they've gotten over their Hobbit-envy and settled for being less insane Kender travelling about in caravans. So I think I'd go halfling, or maybe Eladrin (elves that still live in the FeyWild), because, well, I mean, the Twilight Lands of the FeyWild. Duuuude. Regular elves (which are a bit like Wood Elves in older D&D versions) would also be a possibility.

Class: Either a Warlock with a Fey Pact, or a Rogue. But really, the class choice is hard. Rangers still a definite possibility. Wizards also amazingly cool, right from first level. And the killjoy Paladin has been turned into a generic holy warrior who can be dedicated to any god and alignment, and has an array of powers that are pretty damn cool. If I did a Paladin, it would be one dedicated to a suitably interesting god or goddess. Maybe the Raven Queen, the Goddess of Death. Or some Nature god/dess.

Paragon path would depend on the class, so it's hard to say. In general, I'd choose the paths that were less "DESTROY! DESTROY!" and more...subtle. And maybe nice. Or maybe not.

Epic Destiny is easy -- Trickster all the way.

I gotta say, though -- I can't wait to see what they do with Druids. Damn this waiting business. It's discrimination, I tells ya!

Strange feelings, soul a whirling, like Something is about to happen, some next step in the stutter step advancement of the Man Formerly Known As Gregory Hamel. Growth is not a steady thing, but a steady thing with sudden bursts. The Punctuated Equilibrium Theory of Gregory Evolution.

The pause, breath in.

Gather in the bits that need gathering in.

Bluster some courage, emotional sleight-of-hand, don't look at the hands, and

then

dive.

...

...

"Oh, he's missed the pool, and that will cost some points."

My moleskin journal could probably be used, by persons harboring ill intent towards Your Truly, as proof of insanity, not to mention Crimes Against the Art of Handwriting. There is much mixing of metaphors, metaphorical journeys that reveal nothing so much as a mind that has drunk from many, many sources. I am like the Tick, I write to myself, sitting in the padded room, straitjacketed, bored bored bored, ready to break out, must leave this place, done with electroshock therapy and being the Emperor of Greenland. This leads, by processes and connections that can only be understood by the Gregory brain, to an overly elaborate metaphor involving my personality/soul/being and the structure of Gothic novels. Ann Radcliffe as the Mapper of the territory of Gregory, here there be delicate girl, here there be crumbling castle, here there be sinister Italian Count, here there be the mysterious prisoner playing plaintive airs, here there be dragons.

The gathering moment, when the Count Montoni of the Soul is once again told, "Fuck you, you creepy bastard," in ways suitably dramatic, possibly foolhardy, and no doubt involving bandits. And then, of course, bounding across rooftops to fight evil and get a little chubby moth guy as a sidekick.

Day off today, which turned into a steady drizzle of chore-doing and life-cleaning. Restless me, clearing the dead leaves, the physical accumulations that gum up the machinery. Went through the closet and my dresser only to discover that yes, indeed, most of my clothes are either 1)too old, and falling apart; 2)boring me to tears; or 3)too big to look other than ratty on me at this point. Many clothes put in bags to donate, a few tees ripped up for rags. Final result? Gregory needs to do some serious clothes buying in the coming months. Which he did today, incidentally, which netted a pair of shorts, a new pair of black pants for work, and a much needed belt. But seriously, the clothes situation? Fumes.

But yeah. Restless. Resisting the urge to tear in with total earnest, wielding flamethrowers and heavy artillery. The physical environment and trappings don't match the emerging Gregory.

At work today I kept thinking back to that whole issue of the cacophony of images that my brain paints upon the world around me. As a kid, I used to have tons of fun with it, and still do. A game can be played -- try to bring one of the images into focus. See, I know people who say that when they visualize things, they can do it in great detail, bring in all the senses, etc. Really focus in on an image and hold it steady. Me, not so much. Chattering monkey brain, me, and the images tend to morph and dance away. But I can try. Bring it into focus, try to add detail, see how long I can concentrate on it. It's never very long. I just tried, for fun, to picture my sister as her image danced through my head, and then thought of a platypus. I'll let you guess what the results were..

What can I say. My brain = weird.

One odd addendum is the realization that this way my brain visualizes may explain another aspect of my thinking -- I don't tend to think in details. I'm one of those people who may never really notice a person's eye color, say. I've lived with my cat Spud for 11 years now, and could recognize him anywhere, but if you asked me to describe the patterns of his coat I'd be unable to beyond the vaguest detail (ie, I'd probably mention the white spot on his back, but would forget which legs are white and which are gray, which areas there's more black in, etc). How is my sister's hair styled? Errr, it's short. That kind of thing. And yet somewhere my brain has all those details, and keeps them straight, despite the constant dance of imagery.

I've always wanted to find a way into Faery.

One of my favorite Tolkien stories has nothing to do with Middle Earth -- it's "The Smith of Wootton Major," one of the delightful fairy tales he wrote over the years. From the first time I read that story as a kid, I loved it with a mad crazy passion. The idea of a badge, as it were, that gained one entrance into Faery. Damn, that was cool. Beyond cool.

The story had it all -- magic, "accidents" that are anything but, incredible wanderings through a Faery that is beautiful, terrifying, bewildering, always one step past our understanding. It had that sense of loss -- the boy, now a man, comes to a point where he has to pass on the gift, and forever forsake Faery.

In so many ways, I spent my childhood looking for that entrance, that way in, that badge or secret handshake that would get me past the gates. Really, I spent my childhood in my head, in make believe and pretend. On family hikes I'd amuse myself silently imagining that we weren't tracking up another boring trail, towards yet anotther inevitable encounter with a flower/rock/squirrel that the Donor would spend hours and days taking a perfectly precise and perfectly soulless picture of. No, we were hobbits tramping towards Mordor, or a band of adventurers seeking for the Caves of Chaos (the car, way back at whatever parking area/turn off we had left it at, was the Keep on the Borderlands. You know you're old school D&D if you laugh at that). Wait, did I say "we?" I meant, me and my imaginary pals, whoever they were for that adventure. The family didn't figure into it, certainly not the Donor.

I've always had this thing about otherworlds. Whether it's exotic alien worlds or fantasy realms or Faery, I've wanted it to be real, wanted to go there, wanted to step out of this reality and into another. Narnia, Nehwon, Middle Earth, Faery, you name it, I wanted to there. A lot of my favorite stories involve that idea, whether it's stories of people in Newford stepping into otherworlds just down the street, or Jack Flanders finding floating cities of crystal or alternate Montreals.

I think, in part, it has to do with an odd thing that, honestly, I've never shared with many people -- one or two at most, and I'm not sure that anyone in my family is on that list.

I see things.

No, not like that. What I mean is -- I see thoughts. Mine, mind you. And not clearly. But it's always there, like background noise. The best way I can describe it is that it's like a collage of moving images, dimly seen, easily ignored, ghostly images on the periphery of the periphery that I can bring into focus if I want to, just for a few seconds, before they skitter off into something else. As a kid, this entertained me enormously. White walls were a goldmine of entertainment. Always those ghost possibilities playing before me, and so small a step to the desire to jump into those swirling worlds.

Of course, otherworlds, Faery, it's not always wine and roses. Perhaps it's the time of year that has me in an odd, reflective mood -- it's almost a year since the official Break Down that led to this wild year of growth and reborn hope in my life, an artificial but powerful waypoint at which to assess and ponder and wonder. So much good to be proud of, so much more to be done, a continued awareness of the deep wounds I dug into my heart over the years, of the darkness into which I walked and have yet to free myself from completely. And I wonder (Phantastes-inspired, George MacDonald always there to provide the metaphors of my life) about that darkness, and what Faery it might still fate me to see. I know, in large part, that whatever success I've managed in this past year has been because I refused, finally and at last, to believe anything but this: I am not scarred past redemption, whatever it may feel like at times. Maybe, just maybe, that means that I'll be able to look on the vistas of Faery, free of terror and horror and darkness, if only for a moment, before it is my turn to pass the Star on with a bittersweet smile.

After a long day at work, a happy hour or so writing. Exhausted, bleary-eyed (as much from allergies as sleepiness), but typing. Right now it is strictly For Me, wandering stream of consciousness stuff. Explore, get my feet wet, rediscover a joy in words.

Odd, the thought storms that erupt. A pondering on the smell of the Volvo leads to a series of memories that lead, in turn, to the realization that there's a suite of machine smells that signify, to me, death. And remembering sitting in the car before it came to life, and the silence inside was so deep, it was like you were in a void outside of the universe, only  a few car creaks and pops to break the voidness. Sounds from outside muffled and dull, the silence humming in your ears until you wanted to scratch at your skin to get it out.  And then the low roar of the engine would break in, and the radio would turn on, and the universe was human once more.

The Root of All Evil -- if I were to succumb to the desire to simplify such a complex question into a simplistic answer -- might be our desperate need for certainty. We don't deal with Not Knowing very well. We don't deal well with Doubt.

Jacob Bronowski once warned us about that, and showed us the example of where that desperate need to be certain can lead:


But that is the stuff of the large movements of peoples and civilizations. It works on a personal level, too. As I look at myself, I see that every fear I have is founded in just that desire -- to know, to be certain. Labels are useful for that, because they give the illusion of Knowing. I am This, or I am That, and it all becomes easy to understand. Labels encourage ingredients-list membership*, and suppress the difficult act of thinking and questioning. Labels are, of course, useful, and often necessary. But they carry a danger of becoming the object of devotion, rather than the thing they point to.

In the modern age, we know more than ever how little we know. It takes a definite courage to face up to that, embrace it, and run with it, content to know that there is much you will never know, much you'll never be certain about. I'm tired of searching for certainty, and increasingly aware of the madness that quest can engender.

(*it strikes me that there's an entire metaphor to be had with cooking -- there's folks who follow recipes religiously, always using exact amounts and never experimenting or deviating. Cooking is Following Directions. And then there's the mad scientists of the kitchen, who mix and experiment and wing it, and sure they sometimes create something inedible or accidentally set fire to the blender, but then again, they also create wonders. Certainly, we all know whose dinner parties we most look forward to.)

The only semi-decent story that I've ever written was, not surprisingly, one of the few times that I opened a part of my life and looked at it, not to dwell but to acknowledge, understand and transform it.

I find it remarkably hard to talk about my life. There's a host of reasons -- shame is one, because for years it seemed I did nothing but hide and collapse slowly, so that I see it as an emptiness that has no fertile ground for imaginative work. Ray Bradbury had his childhood and his later, active life to work with and build from, to create all those amazing stories. I had, what exactly? Which is, of course, bullshit, something I've been slowly gloming onto lately as I think over the broad strokes of my Life So Far. If I want to play the Ray Bradbury game of nouns that have powerful associations for me, I can think of a bunch. The Mall, the House on Twilight, The Campfire, The Empty Desert Lot, I could throw them out by the dozen if I really got going. I have lived, whatever the mishaps along the way. And boy oh boy, let me tell you, I have felt.

But I still deal with the secret despising of my life, and all those missteps and ugliness and you name its. And on top of  that, there was a simple act of hiding, not acknowledging it, pretending it wasn't there. Denial as survival strategy. I got good at that in high school, for values of good equal to near brushes with self-destruction. I got, frankly, good at lying, to myself as well as others. Honesty, when it comes to my life, is hard.

I've been thinking a lot about my life lately. Not nostalgically, not with self-pity, but just thinking about it. And all those Bradbury nouns are tumbling out, things that invoke hurt and pain and joy and fun and silliness and hope and sadness and disillusionment and you name it. And I'm aching to tell it all, sing it all to you folks, and to the world. I want to tell you about why I really hate malls, about what Cheech and Chong have to do with Wilderness Survival Badges. I want to tell you about the Donor, and not just the bad bits, but the good bits, too, his awkward attempts to reach out to me (driving to IBM post-thunder storm evening, the mountains around Tucson a ring of fire; him taking me home after getting my wisdom teeth out). I want to tell you about The Volvo, and about my friend Joey, and the empty desert lot we played in, and how much it hurt, years later, when they put up houses there. And the Creek, and the coyotes on cold winter nights, and poor, lost Smudge, whose short life seemed to be the tragic acting out of the House on Twilight.

And it's so close, I can feel it, it's churning inside me, so many feelings and thoughts, so many random memories of my life suddenly suggesting stories and ideas wanting to burst forth, and still that block there, so strong that the simple act of trying to write a livejournal entry about my hatred of malls turned, tonight,  into a spinning in circles as words fled the scene in panic. That old defense, that old self-hatred, still trying to strangle the poetry in its crib.

It's making me dizzy, let me tell you. And it's a thing I Have To Do, because if I can't write as Gregory, I can't write. That's the lesson of the One Sorta Good Story.

Ever since that ugly brush with evil sickness/food poisoning/whatever it was back in, oh, late February or so, my stomach and digestive system has been, shall we say, touchie. Which manifested again yesterday in some major stomach pain, cramps, and general ickness that ended up keeping me up most of the night and out of work today (mostly, by that point, because of simple, total exhaustion, the Worst having passed). Tonight, I'm happy to say, I'm feeling much better, and firmly resolved to maintain, for the forseeable future, a dietary simplicity that will hopefully give my system a chance to settle down a bit.

Despite still being tired after sleeping a good chunk of the day, I was a bit restless tonight, and ended up going for a walk -- not feeling up to running by a long shot. Took along my little Sansa and ended up walking for over an hour, listening to Lord Byron's Don Juan and enjoying the cool night air.

There are definitely worse ways to spend an hour on an eve, let me tell you. Brain and soul worked and fed, body worked, a few poisons discharged from body and spirit. Simple goodness.

And Byron describing scenes of war? Priceless.

But never mind; -- "God save the King!" and Kings!

For if he don't, I doubt if men will longer --

    -- from Canto the Eighth