Friday, December 31, 2004

Before I got a degree in English, I read a lot of science fiction. Which, of course, meant that I had more than a passing familiarity with Robert Heinlein.

Now, working on an English degree tends to take away most opportunities to read for pleasure, and when they do arise, you're a bit more particular (i.e. snobby) about what you'll read. Don't get me wrong, I never thought science fiction was puerile or "greasy kids' stuff"--after all, it's all text, hence valid in and of itself--it's just that I was more likely to read Thomas Pynchon or Thomas Mann in my downtime than Spider Robinson or Larry Niven.

Since I've graduated, I've been able to relax a bit and enjoy both science fiction and regular fiction, being entertained by both literary merits where I've least expected them and speculative ideas in a straight literature setting. Within the past year, I went back and reread all the Heinlein I have in my library. In general, I found it lacking something. No slight on ol' Bob--he was a great and influential science fiction writer with many amazing ideas--but, with the exception of Time Enough For Love, his utopian settings and bubbly, rational characters left me feeling a little flat.

Of course, that didn't stop me a couple of weeks ago, when I came across For Us, The Living at the Borders on Wisconsin Ave. Written in 1939 and billed as "Heinlein's first novel," it's really a parable that manages to encapsulate just about every single one of the ideas he later fleshed out in his Future History series. Set in the utopian U.S. of 2086, it takes the form of a series of often obtuse dialogues in which the peppy, well-adjusted inhabitants attempt to explain to a man from 1939 just how they got to be so peppy and well-adjusted, and their country got to be so damn swell.

Still, the book does highlight Heinlein's perceptiveness. The following passage--written in 1939, mind you--sounds like it could come from a future textbook entry detailing George W. Bush's 2004 campaign:
The churches had great political power. It was almost impossible to be elected to office if the churches disapproved. It is a matter of fact, easily checked, that every public leader of every corrupt political machine was invariably a prominent member of a large, powerful sect. He always contributed heavily to the church, especially to its charities. On the other hand every church stood publicly for honesty in government. At the same time they demanded of the government that there be suppressed all manner of acts, harmess in themselves, but offensive to the creeds of the churches. Churches and the clergy were usually willing to accept the word for the deed. Protestations of integrity, combined with tithing and psalm singing, plus a willingness to enact into law the prejudices of the churches, were usually all the churches required of a candidate.
I know! It's eerie. Written 65 years ago, to boot.

Why the fuck do we still tolerate it?

Wednesday, December 29, 2004

Have I got some sort of morbid fascination with this? Maybe. But check out this quote:

U.S. scientists said the quake that set off the wall of water had moved tectonic plates beneath the Indian Ocean by up to 30 meters (98 ft), causing the Earth to wobble on its axis and permanently shortening the day by a fraction of a second.
Did you get that? The Earth moved. The speed of the Earth's spin increased. For the rest of this planet's existence, our day will be shorter due to this one earthquake.

This is one of the reasons I don't like hippies. Mother Earth doesn't love us. Mother Earth doesn't care about us at all.

Tuesday, December 28, 2004

I had the day off today. I spent it hanging out in my apartment, drinking coffee, doing laundry and being open-mouthed in horrified amazement at the sheer scope and depth of the devastation in Southeast Asia.

My god, 60,000 people are dead. I know people who live in counties with populations lower than that. If you were to round up all the children under age 5 in Milwaukee County and drown them, you'd have killed around 60,000 people.

And this is just the toll from the initial damage. Death on this scale, especially when caused by flooding, is sure to bring disease with it. I hate to think of the final toll, by the time this is all said and done.

Oh, one thing: www.redcross.org. Check the International Response Fund.

That is all.

Monday, December 27, 2004

Sudden, inexplicable updates seem to be the rule rather than the exception when it comes to blogs. So, after an absence which has lasted through the autumn, I'm back with an update.

Things have changed quite a lot around here. Two days after Grand Theft Auto: San Andreas released, I was given my own store. The situation there was a little rocky: the manager and the de facto assistant manager had been let go. Both of them were very popular with their employees, so half of those employees quit "in protest." I'm not sure what they hoped to accomplish, as the company I work for is simply inundated with applications for employment on any given day, making employee turnover the least of their worries. To add to the irony, a full two-thirds of the employees who took such a noble stand were, within two weeks, inquiring about getting their jobs back. Of course, by that time I had other things to worry about.

I know that most people in the world don't keep track of these things, but in the world of video-games, the two months between October 25, 2004 and December 25, 2004 may, at some point in the future, be looked back on as the two busiest months in history. October 25 unleashed GTA: San Andreas on the world. The next week was essentially a pause for breath, which allowed me to gather strength, hire a few people and prepare for the week which followed, bringing with it Halo 2 (a.k.a. the second biggest release in the history of video-games). The week after saw the release of over 30 games, none of which, taken singly, approached the popularity of either GTA or Halo 2 but which, when taken on as a horde, were quite the retail challenge. The week following that onslaught was Thanksgiving week, kicking off the start of the holiday season and plunging me into a month of 6- or 7-day, 9 hours a day work weeks. Add to all this the fact that the store I'd inherited was in a state of disrepair unlike any that I'd ever seen before, and I think you'll understand why I haven't updated in such a long time.

Overall, though, I seem to have come through the challenge on top; my store has consistently earned more this year than it did last, which is a pretty good measure of success in the current economy. I had one visit from both my District and Regional Managers during the holiday season. My Regional Manager shook my hand and said that, what with all the challenges I was facing, I was doing an amazing job. Never mind that any monkey with basic math skills could be trained to do my job; I actually felt very good to have some affirmation.

About my aunt: well, she died. Shortly after I landed in Milwaukee, while I was hauling my stuff from seanb's car, my mother called to let me know that Donna was gone. I apologize if this seems like an afterthought, but nothing was resolved. She simply ceased to be, and the survivors are getting along as best they can.

That seems to be what death is all about.

Monday, September 27, 2004

I'm composing offline again, in the smoking area of the Richard L. Jones, Jr. International Airport. The smoking area reminds me of a bus station. I imagine that I stick out here, with my laptop and my black Chucks, but I'm kidding myself...I'm just like the rest of these bozos.

What I hadn't anticipated about my aunt's deathwatch was her total lack of lucidity. She lies there, frequently sleeping and grunting in her sleep. When she wakes, her eyes are either slit & sleepy & looking at nothing in particular, or they're wide & startled, as if she'd been physically shaken awake. In this state, every return to consciousness is a surprise; she's surprised by who is there and who is not, by the slow march of shadows & sunbeams across the lemon yellow walls and by the fact that, for all her fugue state, she is still there to regain consciousness.

I came to Oklahoma hoping to set things right with my aunt. I wanted to tell her that I was sorry for letting my student loans slip, for letting the same creditors who hound me hound her. I wanted to apologize for not keeping in closer touch, for letting my relationships in Oklahoma, which once were very strong, just slip away. I wanted to explain to her that...well, that I felt she was disappointed in me. Here she was with a good & loving marriage, one that has seen her through not just one, but now two bouts with cancer not just unscathed, but strengthened. She had followed her vocation (and I mean vocation in the most primal sense of the word: a calling, probably from some power much larger and stronger than herself) without swerving or deviating. She became a pillar in this small, rural community. She remained true to herself, to her family, to her ideals and was recognized throughout her surroundings for it. She was important to so many people. And she made a fucking difference in their lives.

Once, I know it, she had the same hopes for me. Me, a 34-year-old assistant manager of a videogame store trailing a string of broken relationships behind me like Godzilla festooned with burning bridges. Me, who had dropped off the face of the Earth and was holed up in a studio apartment in Milwaukee, screaming at his cat for tearing down his connection to Final Fantasy XI.

I wanted to apologize for what I had become. And I wanted her to tell me that I would be all right.
I'm composing this entry offline. The connection here is amazingly flaky, so I'm unable to access the wireless that's supposedly available. Currently, the deathwatch is on night shift, which means there's a hospice nurse sitting with my aunt. My uncle is trying to get some sleep. I'm still here, instead of back in the suite we've rented at my grandmother's retirement community, because my uncle's sister had to go back to Woodward; she has an audit at her job tomorrow, and on Tuesday her 25-year-old daughter will be sworn in to the Oklahoma Bar. I can't stand to think of my uncle here alone, although I'm not capable of the non-stop assistance his sister was providing him.

The most important reason that things here are so much worse than I imagined they'd be is the condition of my aunt herself. My uncle said that she'd gone downhill pretty rapidly since moving to hospice care, and from what I've seen, he wasn't fucking around. Apparently, up until she came home from the hospital on Friday, she had been very lucid, capable even of walking fair distances with some assistance. All that's changed, now. Now, the longest distance she's moved in two days has been from the hospital bed that's been installed in her playhouse to the portable commode at her bedside. This afternoon, even that mobility became unnecessary; she began retaining fluid to such a large degree that she's been given a catheter.

The lack of mobility doesn't really surprise or startle me; I'd pretty much figured she'd be bedridden. I was also reasonably prepared for her appearance; she has the shiny, yellowing skin and facial gauntness that the movies actually capture pretty accurately. Her hair is sparse & close cropped, her cheekbones are high & sharply defined and her eyes are sunken back in their sockets. Her skull is right there, plain & simple and yet almost obscenely intimate. That sort of closeness, where a mere observer can see what should by all rights be safely and invisibly giving structure to her healthy & living face, can see without any imagination the way death is whittling her down to the bare & barely living structure of life, is too close for anyone other than a lover, a mother or a doctor.

Sunday, September 26, 2004

Yesterday's post was brief, and sort of melodramatic. I'm sorry about that. We had to get my grandmother back to take her medication before she totally blew her cork.

That's the first thing here that's much worse than I imagined: my grandmother is no longer suffering from a bit of senile dementia, she's got full-blown Alzheimer's. She thinks I'm about 9 feet tall and that she still lives in Pennsylvania. She talked to her younger sister, who arrived yesterday for this deathwatch, for about 20 minutes and didn't realize who the woman was. At all. She kept saying, "You & I must be related." At first we thought she was joking. It soon became apparent that she was not.

The worst thing is that, up until right this fucking minute, my grandmother has no idea that her daughter was dying. And when I say "right this fucking minute," I'm not kidding. The irony here is that the only place on my Aunt & Uncle's property which has internet connectivity is the finished outbuilding referred to as Donna's Playhouse. This is the addition my Aunt had built as her private sanctum, where she could do her researches and pursue her projects undisturbed. This is her favorite place. And she's dying in it. Not 12 feet from where I'm sitting.

So, while I was writing the paragraph about my grandmother's Alzheimer's disease, my grandmother was sitting at my Aunt's bedside, staring at her. My greataunt, the very sister my grandmother didn't recognize yesterday, was telling me about bluegrass artists she used to go see in Radio Park as a teenager. My grandmother very suddenly & viciously said "Shhhhhh!" Then she stood, moved towards my aunt and began to shake and cry.

The synapses fire slower, and at random intervals, but they still work. She got it quicker than it would take an infinite number of monkeys to come up with Hamlet's "To be, or not to be" soliloquy. But not much.

Saturday, September 25, 2004

My god, it's so much worse than I expected.

Friday, September 24, 2004

My aunt, who lives in Tulsa, Oklahoma, is dying.

I haven't spoken to her in quite some time, because she co-signed for a few of my student loans, and I haven't always been able to keep up with them the way I should. This embarrasses me, and I can't stand embarrassment; it dissolves 20 years of growth & learning and turns me into a puzzled & frightened teenager who's ready to burst into tears at a moment's notice.

So I avoided her for a few years. And she developed cancer of a particularly nasty sort. At that point it had been so long since I'd spoken to her that I was embarrassed, so I avoided her, because as we now know, I can't stand embarassment.

Now she's dying. She's coming home from the hospital to start hospice care. She's an M.D. She knows what's coming, and what's best for her. She doesn't want the entire family to trek out to Tulsa to see her if she isn't dying. So the word's gone out, and we're all on our way.

Everybody except my brother, whose son, Lucas, will be born any minute.

I will meet my sister's son, Ezra, at the death watch for my aunt. I will see my grandmother, emeshed in a web of dementia that's left her barely recognizable, for the first time in years. And I will watch my mother, the youngest, outlive her sister and become the only surviving child of the three born to my grandmother & grandfather. Then, I imagine, my grandmother will turn into a cloud of gypsy moths and flutter away, leaving my mother alone.

Honestly, I don't know what to expect.

Tuesday, March 23, 2004

Here I am in Bensenville, Il, waiting for Final Fantasy XI and Splinter Cell: Pandora Tomorrow to arrive. Currently, I'm sitting in a Starbucks (hooray for corporate coffee), which is itself located in a Dominick's, which appears to be a fairly upper end supermarket. In order to stay awake, I'm drinking coffee, typing in Notepad and listening to two Russian women...talk about stuff I can't understand, since I don't speak Russian. I think they're a mother/daughter pair. The daughter is really cute but is, of course, far too young for me.

The trip down was relatively uneventful. Picked up the truck from Penske and got on the road around 8:45. Lost radio contact with WUWM about 20 minutes further on, and scanned around until I found some music that didn't suck, which reminded me why I've eschewed commercial radio entirely. Seventy-five (Mapquest) miles later, around 10:30 a.m. or so, I pulled up. I've been told I made pretty good time, which is funny because the truck has a governor which kicks in at the ridiculously low speed of 72 mph and because I made a couple of wrong turns (fuck you, Mapquest), one of which put me perilously close to the vehicular bog which is traffic around O'Hare.

Jesus, fuck! I think I'm going nuts. The Russian mother/daughter team just left to be replaced by the Starbucks coffee counter woman, who is taking her break and is talking, in Russian, on her cell phone at the next table over.

(Note to self: research demographics of Bensenville area and figure out why so many native speakers of Russian are here.)

Okay, that's enough for now. I'm sleepy and I want to smoke and Perdido Street Station has taken this weird(er) turn, so I think I'm gonna go. Further bulletins as events warrant.

Sunday, March 21, 2004

...a title. Whee.

My brain feels like someone took a shotgun to my head. I've been running myself ragged for two fucking weeks--going without sleep, eating one meal a day, working between 50 & 60 hours a week--and it's caught up with me today. My thoughts are sprayed out in a fine mist of exhaustion. Unable to gather them in to me, they swarm around in a buzz of anxiety and failing confidence. And for what?

For someone else. Someone else is getting rich off my effort. Someone distant and unconcerned, who so unnerves his employees they speak of him in whispers. These people will, I believe, do anything at all to make this man richer, in the hopes that his cast off scraps will, though only offal to him, prove valuable to them.

Fuck.... I can't even look at this corporate culture today. Hellswine rooting through a mud of cold semen and crushed fetuses in the hopes that Great Mama Demonboar will turn her corpulent and necrotic carcass and shit out a nugget of pure opportunity. Those who settle just for suckling get a mouth full of clotted blood and the snickering disregard of those who know where the real meal'll squirt out. And god forbid you decide not to wallow; they'll trip you up as you struggle to your feet and drown you in their filthy hellstew.

Ah, no. Waking nightmares and sleeping reason and gibbering potential on the day they tear down the fucking Vet. That stadium was younger than I am, y'know?

People shouldn't outlive buildings that hold fond memories from childhood. Especially when the building is of such mass and magnitude...
I mentioned something about a review of Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind, didn't I?

Well, tough titty, kids. The movie didn't inspire me to come home and write about it. It inspired me to come home, drop Wilco into Fritz the Amazing Monophonic Stereo, pour myself a glass of port that's been breathing since the 16th, and write about the kind of stuff that really matters. So, in lieu of a proper review, I give you three (3) facts about Eternal Sunshine:

1) You ought to go see it. If you don't, fuck you where you breathe;
2) When the house came down I was weeping. Not just crying, mind you, but riding my way through wretched, throat-clutching sobs as silently as I could while tears streamed down through the fingers I had clamped over my nose in an attempt to keep the snot from pouring down my lip and onto my chin;
3) Damn it! I forget...but it was something important. It wasn't just "Passion of the Fucking Who?" or "Charlie Kaufman is a genius," or "Kate Winslet is really fucking hot!" or "Christ on a unicycle, Jim Carrey really can act!" No.... No, it was something much less tangible. Something about memory, maybe. Or identity, and the way it can simultaneously imply difference and similarity.

Anyway, enough about movies. There's real life out there, folks. And it simply must be lived.

I fell in love today. Serious, breathtaking, worldchanging love. I have no idea what her name is, but she's way too young for me and has the most lovely long and glossy dishwater blonde hair, bright and liquid blue eyes, flawless skin, no upper lip to speak of topped by the faintest feathery fuzz of a blonde fem-mustache. Her mouth was small and her cheekbones were high and her neck was long and her body was compact and curvy and looked like it was soft and generous in all the right places. She was direct and wellspoken and looked me in the eyes unselfconsciously while we spoke and she smiled but didn't giggle or fidget and she had a British accent--my god!--a melodious and lilting British accent that made my heart fly against my ribcage like a moth against a lamp and during our whole conversation of three minutes--and for 20 minutes after! Twenty-three brilliant and coolly glacial minutes!--I could think of nothing but how I loved her more and more purely than any woman or person I'd ever met in the entire world. Twenty-three minutes of sheer, wondrous bliss at her beauty, and at the thought that my heart could still react to that beauty. Twenty-three minutes of a perfection that, for all that it's gone now, continues to make me grin like a fool when I remember it.

Will I ever see her again? No. Will I ever feel that exuberant in her presence again? Most assuredly not. Do I love her, right now? Hard to say; it's impossible to separate my current emotions regarding this absent woman from the memory of the 23 minutes of joy I felt this afternoon.

And, truth be told, I don't care to.

Friday, March 19, 2004

My computer has been resurrected. The story of its death is tragic and also annoying. It can't possibly be unique.

Once upon a time I had a website. I had enough time, money and internet access to maintain it, and it gave me an excuse to learn some neat web design tricks. It was a vanity site, sure, but it was a fun toy to have and I make no apologies for it.

Then I quit my job to move to Milwaukee. I gave up a fair amount of money and, in order to make ends meet, I dropped my internet access. So my website sat idle. Then the hosting died. Then my domain registration died. Then somebody bought the domain name and filled the site with porn and pop-ups and spyware and an ungodly amount of hellacious and evil crap designed to make the antitechnological arguments of Luddites seem reasonable in the face of a neverending cycle of dialogue boxes that won't take "No" for an answer.

I know this because I went there.

Sure, it was morbid curiosity. I wanted to see if somebody had moved in or if the site was just sitting idle. Now, when I ditty-bopped over I hadn't yet installed a firewall, or antivirus software, or pop-up blockers. Essentially, my computer & I walked in naked, were brutalized and raped, then shoved back out into the internet never to be the same again. I emerged stronger. My computer was a wreck, and wanted euthanasia. I set my jaw, blinked back tears, and I wiped my computer and reinstalled.

I was a wiser, sadder man, knowing that I can never go to my homepage again. But entities have died, and I must honor them.

In other news, I'm going to see Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind tomorrow night, probably by myself, possibly with a friend, but almost certainly without a date. Seeing this movie breaks one of my most important moviegoing rules: never pay for a movie which stars Jim Carrey. However, Charlie Kauffman pretty much trumps everyone else, so while the decision was painful, I made it with a minimum of hesitation.

Expect a review tomorrow night.

Tuesday, March 16, 2004

So...yeah.

These templates kind of suck a bit. Not complaining, just not especially happy with the selection. Of course, the price is right, so I'll quit my bitching.

Currently I'm hanging around in the living room, enjoying the portability of my new (as yet unpaid for) laptop and wondering what the fuck I should do with this space. The software installed on this new baby is bare bones at best: XP & its associated constituent parts, Yahoo! Messenger, Adobe Reader, ZoneAlarm and approximately 700 mb of porn. No Office. No Quark. Just Wordpad, Notepad and Blogger. For the time being, Blogger presents the most learning possibilities, so Blogger wins.

Self-referential bullshit like the previous two paragraphs always annoys me. We have amazing technology at our fingertips, the ability to communicate anything we wish to any number of people willing to take the time to seek out our thoughts and yet we waste it on frivolous drivel about what we had for dinner (steak, shrimp & Guinness), what we're doing (typing, watching TV and not sleeping) and the boring lives we'll lead tomorrow (work at five-unfuckinggodly-thirty in the morning, freelance business card design for the late morning and my D&D campaign from late afternoon 'til 10 p.m.). Where's the thought? Where's the wonder with the surrounding world? The desire to observe, comment and maybe even improve our surroundings? Or our lives? Culture is the conversation of human civilization, but instead of contributing most people seem content to change the subject to chit-chat or obfuscate the issues with gossip or, even worse, assume an open dialog is actually a monologue, that the symposium is a stage where drama and the desire for attention take precedence over logic and pure, simple talk.

Funny thing is, I hate preaching, hyperbole and clumsy attempts to riff off cliches almost as much as I hate self-referential bullshit. It's impolite to bitch about your neighbors' yards while your pet elephant shits in yours. And yet....

Anyway, let's raise a glass (of port, in my case) to hypocrisy, one of the small, reviled portions of human nature which allows us to communicate meaningfully all the same.