Ishmael & Me

The premise for dystopia

2008-12-29T19:03:00.000-08:00

Whats between the inside and the outside becomes immaculate.

But all that crap has to go

somewhere...

right?

2/16/07

2008-12-12T16:20:00.000-08:00

Where do you come from? When I look for you you're gone, but there's always some reason why you're not here. When you're here I'm happy, but I have no control... or so I believe. Lets walk upon the proverbial beach: There are your footsteps, they swing in and out of line with mine in sharp curves of urgency, though I have trouble following the lines off to wherever they may go.

I wonder sometimes: Am I a bad host? Our conversations seem so forced these days... more so because I want you back. Is it ever as easy as saying "I want you back. What can I do to convince you to stay?" Or is it as I feel: that it requires more finesse? I'm not asking you back, I'm speaking in hypotheticals. Please: I made this coffee for us, lets enjoy its earthtone ritual.

I used to look at the stars a lot more when I was a kid. I'd wait in my driveway for my friends to come and I'd look up at that vast spread of nothing and so much of everything. The tangible sigh: these things will never be for me except as images behind glass. I'm born too early. My mind stretched to contain it all- a token to be put under my pillow. A dream to come back to again and again.

You were with me then. You were born out of the swelling of my heart- my heart, pregnant with you, and I speculate that you were born with my heart's first breaking. The dreams that come and go, but so often are forgotten at the table when the glut comes upon me.

I don't want no more of this rotten food. I want to push aside the plates and have a long hard talk with you. I want to pass the night into morning discussing what is to be done. The candles burn down into scabs. I'm talking too directly again. I will change the subject.

Where were you when you went on vacation? I know I've asked you this before. I know you've answered me as well... as best you can as is your fashion. Lets stare up at the sky and think of music... think of places we want to go to. I've never been to the Amazon. You know they call it the green hell? I want to smell the dirt after a storm, have the rain drip onto me, into me- become a plant, listen to the sussurus of a jungles mad logic- the jungle is talking to itself again... trying to remember where it put the car keys... if it had car keys at all.

"Perhaps its under my wallet... now where is my wallet? My wallet, if I had one, would contain my driver's license as well, provided that I drive... but how else did I get here. Hush now! There's a panther coming, black as my eyes! I am surely lost, though I'm everywhere. I must find my keys and go at once. The Panther! The panther..."

There's a click of stones and the game is moved forward a step. I am one.

Shameless Promotion (panhandling)

2008-09-06T06:38:00.000-07:00

I've been fiddling around with web design all summer. If you (as a reader, friend, or both) have been wondering where I've been, its been right here in front of the computer, but mentally distant from my phone, email, blog, etc.

I have a professional(ish) home page up now (it still looks like shit in I.E. but all other browsers support my (web standard) code) and you can reach it by using

{MyfirstName}.{MyLastName}.name

Anyways, I spent quite a bit of time fiddling with the graphics for the site and ended up learning quite a bit about Seashore, a free drawing program for Macs... and now I'm kinda hooked on using it.

...and I can never find a shirt design that I like...

...and I've been wanting to make some beer money...

So I created my first design last night (rather than study Heat Transfer). I've put it up on CafePress.com, and now I'm sharing it with all of you. My way of rattling some coins in a coffee cup...

My store is here.

...and the weird thing is that I'm not even a trekkie. If you look closely, the camo consists of an SS Enterprise, a Vulcan hand sign and the Enterprise logo.

...Wwwhooops! I first posted this on Friday night, its now (very) early Monday morning... and I've been shut down by Roddenberry.com . I guess I'm infringing on a copyright or two. So, like, don't go reaching for your piggybanks yet. I'll have to see if the Roddenberrys sell stuff on commission... and/or make up a new design.

A bit about Ben

2008-08-10T16:24:00.000-07:00

...when I think of Ben now, the term 'natural scholar' comes to mind. He was, and is, just endlessly curious. Whereas I might be satisfied with whatever conclusion I come to regarding a particular subject, for him theres always another question that follows each answer. Sometimes it makes me tired, but generally I've always enjoyed our protracted discussions regarding life's minutiae. This general affinity of his for entertaining even the craziest of ideas down to the last detail, always meant that I, with my own natural attraction for the ridiculous, had at least one person that I could share my own absurd thoughts with and not have to suffer blank looks and uncomfortable smiles.

For example; one summer after a lot of serious discussion, we hatched a plan to sneak into an all day Reggae festival that was to be held at the Greek Theater. We were going to find a place to hide inside the venue the night before and wait there 'till the music started the next day. Without any more preamble, we spent several hours poking around the darkened amphitheater looking for a suitable spot to hide... maybe in a clump of bushes, or in a bathroom... hiding for ten hours in any spot that we found didn't seem to justify the rewards, so we called it a night and went home.

A few months later, I was riding a bus down Haight St. in San Francisco when I overheard a conversation that set quite a few gears spinning in my young mind: some hipster was telling his friends about how he knew these people that rode freight trains. He planned on making a how-to video on the ins and outs of train hopping.
Wow! Riding trains! I'd tackled hitch-hiking with moderate success, and now here was a whole new world of adventures waiting to be had. So of course, the next time I saw Ben I told him all about what I'd heard. He seemed game to give it a try and we started making plans to hit the rails.

I went out and bought my first French army backpack, it had the name 'Conrad' stenciled on it. I believe we were planning on only making a long weekend out of the adventure, so there wasn't much need to pack a lot. I carried a sleeping bag, some canteens and four or five peanut butter and jelly sandwiches. I might have packed some additional socks. One of us had the foresight to carry a flashlight.

I'd seen some train tracks in Marin. I don't know why we decided to go to Marin; there were plenty of train tracks running through Oakland and Berkeley... maybe Marin seemed like a nice place to ride a train. We started our train hopping adventure by boarding the BART. From San Francisco we took a bus across the Golden Gate Bridge and into San Rafael.

Theres a refreshing naiveté to first attempts at the illegal, dangerous or taboo. Nobody talks about these things, so the best way to learn is to just go out there and attempt to do it in the simplest way possible. Sometimes you're surprised by your successes, but more often than not, you learn volumes from your mistakes.
Jack Kerouac started walking along the highway in cheap sandals with his thumb out. Ishmael booked passage on a whaling boat. Ben and I got off the bus and walked in the direction of the train tracks.

It was, as I recall, a crystal clear night in Marin. My memory, in its rosy sentimentality, even gives it a full moon. The tracks caught the moonlight and shone like silver ribbons disappearing off into the hills. We trudged, laden down with our packs, from tie to tie. We didn't have any type of train schedule, so we didn't know when to expect our ride. Then again, we didn't really know what we'd do if a train did come thundering by. The whole scene reminded us of Stand By Me- we may have even tried the trick where we walked on the rails holding a stick between us for balance... and if we did that, then there's no doubt that we would have crooned the song of the same name out into the darkness for a laugh.

An hour or two into our journey, we came upon a tunnel...that was boarded up. Later investigation confirmed what we then surmised: this train was no longer in service. We turned around and headed back the way we came.
We arrived back at the bus depot long after San Rafael had shut down for the evening. The next bus back to S.F. wasn't going to run for at least six hours. The security guard at the depot wouldn't let us sleep in the station, so we ended up sleeping under the 101 'till dawn.

After a somewhat disappointing homecoming, we decided that second attempt was in order, and we surmised that the best plan of action would be to try to catch one of the trains that ran along the shore of the East Bay. We consulted maps and saw that there seemed to be a small rail yard in Richmond, so the next Friday we made several more peanut butter and jelly sandwiches and took the BART north four stops.
Richmond was a bit of a dodgy neighborhood for two white kids to be wandering around in at night. We didn't let this deter us though, and made a brisk walk over to where we'd seen the tracks. We snuck in through a fence and found what looked to be more promising prospects. We were in some kind of rail yard, where the tracks curved gently from the south to the northeast. We found a spot where it looked like we would be able to run along side the train and hoist ourselves up onto one of the cars. Satisfied that we were in better hunting grounds, we took off our packs, unwrapped a couple of PB&Js and waited.

It didn't take long for a train to come rumbling through. We watched from the bushes as the engine glided by; then we threw on our packs, ran up the embankment and... were confronted by this massive rolling steel behemoth of industry. We made a few attempts to run along side it and grab one of the ladders... but maybe it was moving too fast... or maybe we were just cowed by the dangerous and imposing reality of what had been 'till then an abstraction... we ended up standing there on the embankment watching the creaking rumbling monster lumber on by.

"HEY YOU KIDS!"

We jumped to see who had caught us, and then we heard a cackle- it was coming from the train. A gutter punk was hanging off of one of the cars. "Ha ha! See ya in Roseville, suckers!"

This required more thought. Feeling somewhat defeated, we walked back to the BART. Just before we hit the turnstiles a group of black kids pushed past us going the other way. After they passed, one tapped Ben on the back and sucker-punched him when he turned around.

Christ. Ben was down. The puncher had taken his one shot and ran back to his friends. I was convinced that Ben couldn't possibly be hurt because I hadn't heard a smack when the kids fist made contact with Ben's eye. I think I was expecting a sound more in line with what I'd heard in movies and television all those years prior. I wanted to just get up to the train platform and call it a night. Ben, on the other hand, was hurt, pissed off and tired. He wanted to take a cab home. After some bickering, we pooled our money and asked a cabbie if he could get us back to Berkeley for eight bucks.

I can only assume that the driver had seen Ben get socked; and saw two kids, out of their element and more than ready to make a bee-line back to the comforts of their own environment. He said he reckoned eight dollars would get us back to our Co-op and drove us back home, off the meter.

That pretty much did it for Ben: way too much bullshit for an idea that didn't look like it would see any fruition. I kept at it, but all that is fodder for another story...

Summer viewed from the opposite end of the elipse

2008-02-07T16:28:00.000-08:00

Poor poor neglected blog...

I feel like explanations are in order, details to be dumped here by the truckload and turned over and over in inquisitive hands...

...but between work and school and a mystifying bout of some kind of low grade but nagging depression, I haven't had time to really sit down and dump out the contents of my humid interior. I feel like I'm getting somewhere with something though... there may be a write-a-thon on the horizon...

Anyways, I was just cleaning up my flash drive in anticipation of a new semester and I found this slice of pre-fiction lying next to a half-eaten bag of virtual potato chips. I started a second chapter off of it, but I rapidly found myself losing inspiration.

It starts with a rant, then falls into a rhythm.

*** BUILDING NOTES ***

When I die, let it not be said that the blaze of glory that I went out 'in' was by shooting the loudspeakers off of ice cream trucks. Please God, though I fervently entertain this fantasy with the advent of every new summer, let it not be the way I choose to make my exit:

“Man Shoots Several Ice Cream Trucks, Self.”

Its a hot day. A muggy day. I'm sitting at my desk entertaining the idea of being someone else. I start out with what comes to mind first, an opposite... in this case, a woman.

I wake up in a bed with way too many pillows, but being who I am (in this case, a woman who buys a lot of pillows) I don't notice the excess. My sheets are appropriate for the weather... light cotton for summer. A light duvet sits in a pile besides me- cast off while the day was starting to gather heat around my sleeping self.

The predominant color of the room is off white - subtle tones shade my surroundings. The furniture is pine, the curtains have a bluish tint to them, the walls a very diminished hint of salmon. My flesh, 'white' as well almost blends in with everything else. I view the world through sleep renewed sight- I see my world with a soft focus. I turn onto my back and stare at the ceiling, sighing. I lift my head just a bit to look at my toes and wiggle them.

I am reborn and I am a woman... though I take both things for granted because I am and always have been me. I am not an outsider pretending.

I live in an... apartment complex- the eighth floor of a fairly old building built after the tenements, but well before the ephemeral complexes now known as 'condos' or lofts. I live in a building that retains a sense of timelessness, though one day its time will come too... as will my own. I am a mortal female... though perhaps through a trick of imagination I can reinvent myself into longer or younger lives...

I become the building. I contain several lives. Thousands of dramas contained in my existence.

Within me a woman named Anne is waking up, going though her morning ritual of contemplating the journey between bed and shower. Despite the simplicity of the task, there are a million permutations that have been considered at one time or another. The complexity of her life bleeding back in from the void of sleep. In the end, she'll walk the twenty steps to the bathroom and turn on the shower, but not before wondering if she should call this person first, maybe start the coffee pot before she turns on the water, maybe make the bed, maybe stare out the window...

In another apartment a man is sitting back in an old desk chair with his feet propped up on his desk. He's trying to imagine himself out of a life overtaken by monotony and boredom. He's going about this task in a way thats most creatively designed to thwart any real changes to the afore mentioned monotony and boredom... he's imagining himself as a completely different person instead of imagining himself as a completely different self. In a few minutes he'll put on his shoes and make his way to work and nothing at all will have changed.

I feel myself stretch in the gathering heat. The sunlight hits my eastern side and as this sun exposed side expands ever so slightly, I lean almost imperceptibly to the west. My interior creaks, the wood and pipes shifting with my movements. The lives inside me start to gather the momentum to spread out across the metropolis we're in.

We're all in a dynamic system, we move and change. We're all in a linear system... I see my beginning and my end, and I have also seen many ends and beginnings come to pass within me. We're all in a circular system: energy comes and goes, the cold and the heat comes and goes and comes again, the days pass over and over and over...

My birthday invite:

2007-11-13T19:07:00.000-08:00

Of course, you're all invited...

I'm actually posting this on my blog so that, through some convoluted process that I have yet to actually understand, I'll be able to send the graphics inline in a message sent from my Gmail account.

Of course, if you're halfway around the world and I haven't sent you the invite via e-mail, its because I figure you probably won't be able to make it. If, however, you find yourself in NYC this weekend, stop by!

For your consideration:

2007-08-19T19:48:00.000-07:00

The scales are exactly the same:

If the similarity is at all meaningful, then perhaps I've only really moved as far as Gardena...

A Day in The Life, August '07

2007-08-18T19:52:00.000-07:00

My alarm goes off at around 7:30. Its the alarm on my phone- used to scare the hell out of me; bolt upright and wide eyed with panic at the desired time, but now I can sleep through it for the half hour that it rings. I consider this a measure of my general satisfaction with life: getting enough sleep isn't the hard part, what matters is whether or not you're thrilled to be awake.

I live in a railroad apartment. There are two separate entrances- one at my end of the unit and one into the kitchen. My roommate lives/ sleeps in the middle. He's nocturnal, it works out well: I get the apartment for the day shift and he gets it for the night shift. Problems only arise when I make a trip to the bathroom at 4a.m. and he's in the shower. I keep a couple of empty plastic bottles around in case theres an emergency.

Once I've peeled myself out of bed, I get dressed enough to leave my end of the apartment and enter the kitchen end. My roommate snores loudly. I can hear him well from this end.

I take a shower. Its hot outside... and humid. I dry off the best that I can then I don a pair of sweat shorts and wander out into the kitchen. I wear just enough to stay decent and as little as I can in hopes of drying off.

Breakfast drink: blended bananas, apples and peanut butter.

A brush of the teeth, a semi-critical look in the mirror and (occasionally) a shave...and then I put on my shirt and walk thorough the hallway back to my room. Here I get dressed (cargo shorts and tee-shirt) and apply whatever ointments, lotions, deodorizers, band-aids, etc. that my current state of unhealth demands. This is also my alloted period for daydreaming, staring at the wall or picking my toenails.

At nine o' clock, I pack my backpack, check my pockets and step out the front door.

They planted a tree out in front of my building about a year ago. Its a lonely tree... my street is broad, the sidewalk a bright white in the summer sun. I have to squint after stepping out of my dark building. Being an hour out of phase with the morning rush, the street is fairly deserted. I feel like I'm in a ghost town- this abandoned street cooking in the sun. Maybe high noon for a gunfight, my hands hover quivering over imaginary guns.

My train is in one direction, my coffee in the other. I walk up to the corner to get my coffee. I've been getting a cup of coffee from the same guy almost every morning for the past two years. Every time I come in, I still have to ask for my cup of coffee. I feel like it should be a given at this point. Sometimes (rarely) I ask for a sandwich too, or I'll get a bottle of O.J., but I always get a large coffee; milk, no sugar. Sometimes I wait just a bit before I ask... to see if he realizes my predictability. Its a bit awkward... and predictable, but its all part of my routine- I think I'd miss it if it went away.

I walk to the J train. Its an elevated train that runs over nearby Broadway. There's a train that swings into the station at 9:15, and daily I watch it roll in when I'm a few hundred feet away- just a bit to far to run to catch it. "god-dammit!" It rolls away just as I'm hitting the stairs. Between the hours of 8 and 9, and then again between 10 and 11, trains run through at least every ten minutes, probably more frequently even during the earlier period. Nine o' clock to Ten, however, provides bleak prospects for a train. As I stand on the platform I watch several trains roll through going in the opposite direction. Manhattan vomiting back the husks from the morning rush. My next train comes at a little after 9:30.

I can't explain why I can't catch the 9:15. Sometimes I leave a bit earlier, but then it seems like I forget something and have to run back to my apartment. Sometimes I leave a bit earlier and then the train seems to arrive at the station just that same bit earlier. Its another routine I've fallen into, and one that seems to defy my best efforts at circumvention... but then again maybe these aren't my best efforts. It doesn't matter: I get to where I need be on time, I just like getting to work a few minutes early- to ease out of my morning and into my workday.

The train, when it finally comes carries me across the Williamsburg Bridge into Manhattan. I get off at City Hall. My school, BMCC (Borough of Manhattan Community College) is on the opposite side of Manhattan from City Hall. It takes me ten minutes to walk the length of Chambers from one side of the island to the other. I roll into school shortly before Ten.

I get a small cup of coffee from the cafeteria. They just raised the price from sixty five to seventy five cents. The cashier is rarely a jolly customer, though sometimes she'll chuckle and give me a wink like we're both privy to the punchline of some huge practical joke. Its these rare times that make me generally well disposed towards her. I always say good morning, even though most times she just ignores me.

She hates breaking twenties for my seventy-five cent cup of coffee. She'll give me a look that I might deserve for farting in an elevator. I've played with the idea of trying to give her a fifty to see what she'd do... but I might not live to relay the details.

The lab is on the sixth floor. Sometimes I'll take the stairs. Sometimes I'll take the escalators. Sometimes its faster to take the stairs because walking on the escalator is foreign to most people. Theres an elevator as well... for the really lazy. I only take the elevator on rare occasions- usually when I'm going somewhere with someone who doesn't share my hang-ups. I try to keep my self-righteousness to myself.

As a student, I'm not allowed to have a key to the lab. I have a partner that's actually a student at a four year school- she can have the key. She's always really late... sometimes late enough to really piss me off. I wait between ten minutes and two hours for her to show up. I think she's really depressed. She has a harder time getting out of bed than me: that can't be good.

The work we're doing seems to have no particular direction to it. This could be a big part of both of our problems with getting out of bed.

We're working with 'smart concrete.' This is concrete with shredded carbon fibers embedded in its mixture in order to conduct electricity. By running a current across electrodes placed on the concrete's surface, you should be able to detect damage and possibly stress by changes in the electrical resistivity of the material. This could be really interesting, but the concrete sample that we were waiting for didn't cure up right, so we have to wait about a month before a new sample may or may not be ready.

In the meantime, we're developing our technique using carbon fiber boards- we're painting electrodes on them and doing daily checks to try to determine what factors affect any changes in resistivity of the boards from one day to the next. We've been doing this for a couple of weeks now- the same routine, daily, completed to more or less of a degree, depending on when my partner manages to show up that morning. The professor guiding the research has left on vacation. I think we both feel like we should be doing more, but we're not really sure what that is. The summer is almost over and the research has gone nowhere.

I don't like getting paid for work that didn't get done, even though in this case its not my fault. I want to quit, but that would be... quitting. I've had to turn down several other (much better paying) jobs because I made a commitment to this work. Having a lab partner who hates what she's doing doesn't help my mood either.

On Tuesdays and Thursdays I leave the one lab a few hours early to do work for another professor. In this case I have no idea of what the larger picture for the research is. I'm not even sure if the professor I'm working for knows...

I'm in a room full of expensive equipment- an ultrasonic welder, an injection molder, a mill and a force gauge apparatus. We melt strips of plastic together with the sonic welder, put them in the force gauge and measure how much force it takes to tear them apart. Some of the strips are cut by hand from large sheets of plastic, but its been determined that now we need to use an injection molder to make strips from pelletized plastic.

The brand new injection molder probably costs about two grand. For that price, I estimate that we could hire a plastic fabricator to make a mold and cast a few hundred of these pieces (and I also estimate that this number would be more than we'd ever need...). For three hundred dollars, we could hire someone to make a high-quality mold out of an aluminum block and use our injection molder to make an unlimited amount of these plastic strips. Instead, I've been asked to make a mold using our limited set of tools.

Before I was an engineering student, I was a cabinet maker and a carpenter. I like to make things... in fact, it would be a true (though broad) statement to say that I settled on engineering as my new undertaking because I want to know how to make e v e r y t h i n g. Even though I attempted to hint that there would be faster and better ways to make a mold or even procure strips, when the final conclusion was that I was to make the mold, I wasn't one to shrink from the task.

I've probably put in about ten hours of labor to make my first mold in aluminum. Its pretty crappy, but since its my first attempt I have trouble feeling bad about it. Its understood that this is my first attempt, and that future attempts will be better. After three attempts I will have made more money that the mold maker in his first (and only) setting at the mill, and (though I'm not one to sell my efforts short) this third attempt will most likely be of lesser quality than the professionally made mold.

I can only conclude that the reason for things being this way is because this professor is an old Russian gentleman, and I'm sure that in his day in the Cold War era Soviet Union, it was faster to do something yourself than wait for your requests for supplies to wend their way through the twists and turns of an underfunded and corrupt bureaucracy.

After I'm done with the mold, he wants me to make a $150 clamp.

He tells me often that the project isn't moving fast enough.

I head back home around five. I'm broke: the plastic job only rakes in about 8 hours of work a week, while the concrete job will be paid by a stipend sometime in September. I watch free movies in McCarren Park on Tuesdays. Sometimes I run or bike in the extended sunlight. I've been trying to teach myself some circuitry in the evenings. Sometimes I read, sometimes I write, sometimes I just piss away the evening on the internet.

Dreamtime

2007-08-12T19:38:00.000-07:00

By accident, I started fooling around with Google Map's customizable maps tonight. After mapping out the bike trip I took today, I realized that I could do something much more... interesting; something I've always wanted to do...

I've always wanted to map out my own personal dreamtime. Much like the Aborigines have their own mythology presented as a fusion of dreams, creation myths and real geography; I have my own set of recurring locations and themes that I come to in my dreams. So, using Google Maps, I've spent the last hour trying to document as much as I could about my dream geography.

While there are plenty of locations that I've visited and revisited while dreaming that have no geographical analogue (as far as I know...), there are a handful that I can place on a map, and most of these are located in my homeland, the Palos Verdes Peninsula.

I've stayed away from specific dreams as much as possible, in order to present the locations in my dreams that are, for one reason or another, consistent in one way or another.

The map is located here.

The most interesting part of this exercise for me was trying to actually match the dream places with the real. Up to this point I've never tried to fuse the two, so I've always assumed that everything would match up perfectly (geographically). Of course, in the process I've discovered that my subconscious had leveled whole housing developments, distorted landscapes and shuffled other features around to make my dreams more illustrative of whatever it was that it was trying to convey to me at the time...

Housekeeping 1

2007-08-05T16:57:00.000-07:00

...So I changed the name of this here blog to Ishmael & Me. Hungry Bunnies was an uninspired choice. Ishmael & Me reflects more of where I'm at... a nod to the narrator of my favorite book and somehow an extension of my most common response to idiots that can't have exactly what they want when they want it:

"Yeah: you and everybody else."

Perhaps I'm trying to set Ishmael's philosophical approach to hardship as some sort of admirable (from where I'm standing) counterpoint... or maybe I'm grasping for meaning where there isn't any...

Terror in the Rockies was waaay too long to be your standard acceptable blog post. This is the age of soundbites and blogs are meant to be quick distractions. I've been in a sentimental mood, and the stories I'm relating deserve more than broad strokes... read them if you're sick of watching the tube.

I'm trying to post a few more things before I go back to school in September... then you shouldn't expect to see anything new till December. I put all my time into nailing my coursework. Bam!

...and all this sentimentality: I can only assume I'm chewing the cud of my adventurous days as a first time college student because I'm now dedicated to living a monk's life 'till I get a degree I can use.

We could be heroes

2007-08-02T21:24:00.000-07:00

[a drunken blog...]

Shit! We could all be heroes!

Terror in the Rockies

2007-07-01T16:26:00.000-07:00

I'm reminded of a time, roughly ten years ago, when I took the worst vacation of my life. I was a student (more or less) back then- more of a student in spirit than in any sort of application of myself to my studies. I was interested in adventure and ways in which I could flesh out a sense of freedom without falling into the compulsive behavior that I seemed to see in the lives of all the 'ordinary' people I saw around me.

Instead of paying rent, I was camped out on the roof of the co-op that I inhabited during the school year. I lived under the solar panels and kept my stuff stashed in a storage closet in the building below. If it got too cold or too wet one of my friends would let me crash on their sofa. Most of my acquaintances were amused and/or interested in my decision to live on the roof, so they cut me a bit of slack when conditions weren't ideal... but it couldn't have lasted longer than the summer without my reputation turning into that of a deadbeat rather than an eccentric.

I worked at the Tower Video on Telegraph Ave. It paid something menial, but it kept me in chips enough to catch the occasional movie or go out with my friends. I don't know how I could have paid rent on the wages I made... I realized at some point that I was only just getting by despite my thrifty ways. I was living to work and working to live and there wasn't much more to it.

I can't really remember the particulars of my financial situation beyond that. Somehow I had managed, in the past, to take one at least one trip every summer- nothing fancy, usually a bus ride to Yosemite or somewhere similar where I'd go hiking in the back country for a several days. I had made these trips with my then-girlfriend, Anne. For about two or three years running we had gone to Denver and Boulder and into the Rockies. It was becoming a tradition. Despite the fact that I was now no longer traveling with Anne, I decided that this year would be no exception.

Over the course of the summer, I managed to divert the barest amount from my near-minimum wage until I had a couple hundred dollars saved to make my trip. For the last two weeks of of my break, I would take my vacation. The first leg would be a trip to Lake Tahoe, where I would hang out with some of my good friends from High School, and then I planned to hitch-hike to Denver and do all the things that I liked to do in Colorado.

I don't remember now how I got to Tahoe. Probably my friends picked me up. For a week we did all the geeky things that we had been in the habit of doing since we first all became acquainted, as well as taking in some water-skiing, hiking, swimming and the like. Then, when it was all over, they dropped me off along the side of the road and I stuck out my thumb.

(And now I'm sure that I've turned a few more of my poor mother's hairs gray. I think at the time that I was doing this (and this wasn't the only time) I was already providing my parents with more than enough grief and it was probably an unwitting act of mercy that I didn't share these things with them. (I really just didn't want to get a lecture.))

There usually isn't a lot to say about hitch-hiking. I've been in some mildly distressing situations, but I always managed to get out of the car if I thought something might possibly go awry. The rest of the time I've usually been picked up by genuinely nice people that either wanted to help a kid out or to pass the miles with a bit of conversation. This particular trip fell pretty much into that norm.

The first person that picked me up did so because someone had done a similar favor for him when his car had broken down on a lonely stretch of road- he wanted to pay the favor forward; though he made it clear that his car was a beater and that he carried nothing valuable. After a few minutes of conversation I think he realized that he had nothing to fear from me and the rest of the trip to Carson City was uneventful. From there I caught a ride with a retired trucker to Reno.

The stretch between Reno and Salt Lake City is a giant stretch of desert. Its a scary thing to contemplate when you're just one person hitchhiking with a couple of canteens and no guarantees that you'll make it all the way across with just one car...

I walked across Reno to Truckee (its a really short walk) and set up shop outside of a truck stop. I put out a sign saying where I wanted to go, and waited to see who was going my way.

I waited this way for hours. I've rarely had such poor luck. Perhaps that fact that I had my misgivings about the next leg of the journey showed itself in my demeanor... I dunno. I waited 'till sundown then gave up for the day. At this point I decided that the wise thing to do would be to catch a bus out of Reno straight to Denver- I'd have a place to sleep, and I wouldn't have to worry about getting stranded out in the middle of the desert. I walked over to the bus terminal and bought a ticket.

I was starting to feel a bit uneasy about my money situation. In fact, what I'm about to tell you sounds really frigging stupid to me now, but what is really inexperience and youthful optimism often gets mistaken for stupidity by the grumpy, old and jaded. (There's a cry from the peanut-gallery of my mind: "Nope! It was just plain stupid!")

I'd planned out my trip so that I would be taking a bus back from Colorado once I was all vacationed-out. There really wasn't a contingency plan for getting freaked-out about hitch-hiking across the desert and taking a bus instead. While I sat in the Greyhound lobby waiting for my bus to show up, I started thinking about how how much I'd be paying in hostel lodging in Denver and/or Boulder, how much I'd be spending on food, what kind of money I'd have to entertain myself... I didn't have enough money to cover any one thing sufficiently. I needed to bring the 'vacation' to a halt, and go back to my crappy job for the last week of the summer. I went to the bus counter and told the clerk that I'd changed my mind and that I wanted to go somewhere else. In a cinematic fashion, he pointed to a sign next to the window: 'No Refunds, No Exchanges.'

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I probably thought about just hitchhiking home... it would've been pretty easy to just get back and lick my wounds... but all that money spent! Plus, this was my lodging for the night... better by far than taking my chances under a bush by the train tracks... Thinking back now, hitching back might have been more entertaining by far than what I'm about to relate to you, but I'd dropped my money down the rabbit-hole and I'd be damned if I didn't chase it all the way to Denver.

My next morning found me somewhere in the badlands of South Dakota, where the bus made a sharp right and dropped down into Colorado. The next few hours left me to formulate a plan for how I'd spend the next week 'till my return ticket was ready to go.

From Denver I headed straight to Boulder on a shuttle bus and booked a night in the hostel there. Then I went out on the town and bought some plastic sheeting, nylon cord, and enough canned food to last me a week. The next morning I headed out to Estes Park and got a wilderness permit that allowed me to spend the next week in the Rocky Mountain Wilderness.

I was 22. I wore combat boots and camouflage shorts. I sported a small canvas backpack from the French Army- it was half the size of a regular pack and probably half as comfortable to boot. Inside were four clean shirts, plenty of clean socks, a camp stove, as much food as I could fit in the remaining spaces, and a book of Australian short stories that my mom had given me. Strapped to the outside were my tarp and a sleeping bag. I carried two canteens on my belt and a bunch of incidental survival supplies in my pockets. I'd gone camping with less... I figured I was prepared.

Most of my camp spots were ten miles apart from each other. I'd planned out a route so that I'd circle through a fairly large section of park over the course of the week. Unfortunately, I hadn't figured out that ten miles really wasn't all that far to walk in a day.

I'd wake up with the sunrise because there wasn't much else to do after it got dark. Campfires weren't allowed, and anyways a campfire ain't much without someone to share it with. Even with easy walking, I usually got to my next campsite by lunchtime. I'd string my cord between two trees and make a tube tent out of my plastic tarp, then I'd eat some lunch and take in my surroundings. I probably also spent some time writing in my journal. By then it might be about two o' clock.

... so maybe I'd go dig a hole for a camp toilet, and draw a picture- in my journal or in the dirt- and then I'd look at my watch and it would be... two-thirty.

Its not that I don't enjoy the wilderness: now that I live in New York and I haven't camped in a couple of years I feel like theres a great void in my life where the great outdoors used to be. Maybe it was because I was confined to a schedule... camp here tonight, there tomorrow... maybe it was because I really didn't have many other options... I was bored.

Terribly bored.

...and while I think that there's something to be said for being able to do things on your own- that it shows strength of character and a wealth of inner resources- sometimes having another person around really helps to bring out the best in yourself. There's a mutual purpose- to pitch a tent, to cook a meal or just to enjoy a day.

Now, I also had the afore-mentioned book of Australian short stories. One wouldn't think that any collection of short stories would last all that long, but this slim volume seemed to have its own particular endurance- perhaps because I turned to it as a last resort knowing that it would have to last the entire week.

I've always been pleased to have a little something in my blood that broke up the otherwise 100% American-ness that I seem to represent. If God made me a straight white male in a time when straight white males were rapidly falling out of vogue, and people were celebrating their cultural, ethnic and or sexual otherness, at least I could turn to my Australian heritage as a point of pride- my otherness. Even when all the Australians of my generation that I met proved to be serious assholes (Americans with accents), I still kept that keepsake visible in my interior's furnishings.

One thing I've noted over the years is that Australian art... creative expressions... tend to linger on the dysfunctional- every protagonist is from a fucked-up home, completely at odds with the society around them and generally depressed. Which is not to say that the resolutions aren't sometimes up-beat, but getting there is a barefoot walk through the dog park.*

...and of course, despite the dysfunction, I may have enjoyed these stories more were I not alone in the wilderness with not a whole lot to do and no particular destination in mind (barring the Denver bus station at the end of the week). But while my outer surroundings were beautiful, my inner life was getting a double shot of failed marriages, sibling enmity, racial tensions, etc.

And I passed a week this way.

But I've failed so far to take into account my green and active imagination, which also had plenty of time to spin its gears in the long and sunny Rocky Mountain afternoons. Maybe it was the stories I was reading that set my mind to dark thoughts, or maybe it was the seeming precariousness of my predicament... Somehow I got on to the thought of serial killers. 'Damn,' I thought, 'it would be really easy for somebody to stroll into a campground one night, kill everybody, then disappear back into the night.'

It was a really stupid thing to think about. My nights started to become far from restful- my ears and imagination working together to make creative presentations about my immanent demise.

Of course, this lack of sleep made my waking hours even more surreal. By day four, the sole of my left combat boot was starting to peel away- I had to use cord to tie it onto my foot. I started to have elaborate daydreams about gorging myself on pizza. It rained one afternoon and I tried to take a shower for kicks- it was cold and the soap didn't wash away as well as it would have with the directed stream of water from a shower head.

...And now that I'm thinking about it, I'd say the shower might have brought on some of the compounded misery that followed. I believe I took that shower in the afternoon before my very last night in the Rockies. In the nearby clump of bushes where I'd lathered up and spent an interminable time trying to get the soap off in the cold rain, the scent had probably collected- a mouth watering mystery to the various furry animals around me.

The sun set and i crawled into my sleeping bag. I turned on my flashlight and read a story about a suicidal divorcee. Great. The next day, I could head back into Denver and buy something light to read before I got on the bus. With my lonely ordeal in the wilderness almost over, it felt like Christmas eve. I turned off the light and rolled over on the hard ground.

The pizza I'd been dreaming of was not too far off. There was a spot in Boulder that I had in mind- one price for all you can eat pizza. I'd gone the year before, and the scene of the impending feast was vivid, and even moreso because I'd been entertaining this fantasy for three to four days. As sleep started to overcome me, I stepped bodily into that vivid scene; heading straight to the counter to grab my first few slices. There was a plain-jane pepperoni, and right next to it something I'd never seen before I reached out. CRACK!

I was back in the dark, wide awake. I waited. CRACK (crack crack crack...) It sounded like someone was tossing rocks down a ravine. CRACK (crack crack crack...) This went on for a long time, all the while I was sure it was just some crazy animal at work, but part of me wouldn't rule out that it could actually be a serial killer. I lay there in a slight panic and debated with myself: what should I do? "Hey!" I shouted, "Who's There!"

The rocks stopped.

I poked my head out of the tent and swung my flashlight around. Nothing. I went back inside my cheap tent and turned out the light. In a few minutes the noise started up again. I didn't shout out this time, I peeked out of the tent again, and shone my flashlight in the direction of the noise. Nothing to see within the range of the flashlight. I was wide awake now. I decided to read another story. Girl raped by her boyfriend. Sigh. There'd been no noise in the interim. I decided to try to sleep.

CRACK!

In my mind I saw a cockeyed cartoon chipmunk doing something totally mundane in an absolutely stupid fashion and making worlds of noise to unsettle me. In my mind I saw a big black bear making a concerted and repeated effort to get to the bag of food I'd tied up in a nearby tree. In my mind I saw a hellishly skinny guy in formal wear with a jackass grin and a knife tossing rocks to torment the lone camper surrounded by miles of wilderness and not much else. With my flashlight I saw jack-nothing. I tried to make peace in my mind with the source of the noise- whatever it was- but I couldn't get to sleep. I read depressing stories and dozed with the flashlight on 'till dawn, then slept 'till it got too hot to sleep any more.

I looked around in the daylight to find the source of the noise. I couldn't even find a... ravine... or slope that would be good for tossing rocks in the way that I heard them fall all night. I packed up my stuff and shuffled off on my decaying boots back to civilization.

The pizza was better than I remembered it. I ate till I could just barely move. There was a strange little girl at the table next to me- she was telling her mom all about the details of an imaginary world that she'd made up, but she presented it all as if she were a university lecturer. A girl with a child's imagination and a womans syntax.

In Denver I bought a new book- who knows what now... Before I boarded the bus back to Oakland, I tossed the tarp and the book of short stories into a dumpster.

I broke my vacuum cleaner

2007-06-03T17:56:00.000-07:00

Yup. I broke it... awhile ago, actually. Right before the last semester started.

I forgot to put a fresh bag in the thing. How did I do this? Well...

Y'know how people always wish they could be a fly on the wall...? Sometimes I wish I could watch myself from a critical distance: see how I manage to waste so much time when I'm not under the gun. I think (I mean, I know really) that I start several things at once. My attention span can be measured in seconds- I start something, run off to the kitchen to go get a glass of water, come back to my room having managed to cleanse my mind of the original task at hand, and then start something else. I can do this several times in an evening. My desk... my room is a mess. I'd love to watch it all happen- see myself in autopilot. I'm not sure if I'd laugh or cry.

So I'm guessing that I removed the old dust bag. Ran downstairs to throw it out, and then forgot all about vacuuming for quite some time. I probably even popped the thing shut at some point telling myself that I'd put in the bag later.

When I got back to the vacuuming several days later, it only took a few seconds for dirt to get sucked, unfiltered, into the fan and clog up the whole works- but lemme tell you: for those few glorious seconds, I had the most spectacular vacuum cleaner ever! It let out a whine like a jet engine and little bolts of electricity jumped from the hose across a gap of at least five to six inches to pepper my thigh with painful jolts. Being somewhat fascinated by static electricity, I endured the shocks while I watched the nifty little blue bolts pelt my leg. Then the fan clogged, the whine turned into a metallic roar and I finally felt an urgent need to shut the thing down.

Anyways, the whole machine is in pieces now. I took it apart to see if I couldn't undo what I'd 'done'. I've ascertained that the metallic roar was the fan violently disassembling itself. I'm the proud owner of a plastic carcass and heavy-duty motor. I might have to part ways with the plastic...

I spent the last hour looking at new vacuum cleaners online. Chances are I won't buy any of 'em. I'm about ready to throw out my carpet along with the defunct Dirt Devil. Brooklyn's a nasty place to own a carpet anyways...

2007-05-31T11:28:00.000-07:00

I ventured out into the world. I bought coffee. It doesn't seem to help.

Thus begins my third blog, "hungry bunnies."

My last blog was intended to be an uncompromising exploration of the things that made up me. I'd post entries and then spend the next few days cringing at the thought that I'd posed such self-incriminating things about myself. It was all pretty tame in retrospect. I quit posting because I started encountering 'things' that I couldn't bring myself to post in spite of my masochistic mission statement. I also quit posting because I'm in a lawsuit against the city and I started getting paranoid about who (or what) was reading my entries.

So... welcome to "Hungry Bunnies," a self-indulgent rumination about the life of a person named Brian; edited for the benefit of my mom and the city's lawyers.

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DISCLAIMER:
The characters, and the narrator, depicted herein are entirely fictitious. Any similarity between the characters and any persons, living or dead, is entirely coincidental.
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When I want to start a new hobby, I buy lots of magazines. Its a good place to start- dive right in and read the opinions and musings of august individuals in that particular pursuit. I adopt their ideas, their approaches and plow forward into that new endeavor, eventually replacing or qualifying this starting knowledge with the lessons learned from my own experience. In my opinion, theres no better way to start a new venture.

We become what we pretend to be.
Everything comes about through practice. I pretend to be compassionate. I pretend to be truthful. I pretend to care about the environment. I pretend to be thick skinned like I pretend to be patient (not so well). I pretend to be good at everything that I pretend to be, and (thankfully) I seem to be pretty good at pretending this. There is no arrival, only constant proposition and exploration. I pretend to remind myself that I'm only just pretending, and in this way I pretend to not get too smug.

I think sometimes we view life as a labyrinth that we need to navigate our way through. Perhaps this is correct, but the only way to get anywhere is to scale the walls.

I pretend to be wise. Please put me in my place.

My name is Brian. I live in a ghetto of suburban hipsters in North Brooklyn. I study engineering.

I have time off. I have a headache.

2007-05-31T07:17:00.000-07:00

I have time off. I have a headache.

I think coffee would help quite a bit.

Yes it would...