(Phaysis)

South By Southwest (SXSW) is back in town this week, and once again I’m just not feeling up for it. Fact of the matter is that I never do. It comes to town every year during UT’s spring break; it’s loaded with tons of really cool stuff and…I just can’t make myself care. And that bothers me.

I come from a very, very small city. People there look forward to the Quandrangle Festival and the Four-States Fair and Rodeo. It’s something big, and it’s something to look forward to as a break in the monotony of factory life and sleepy suburbs. I moved here almost a decade ago to have access to and look forward to bigger things. But somewhere during that timespan, I stopped caring. When, during my life, did I do a violent 180° and cease to be a joiner? When did I become anti-joiner? When did I become the stoic mysanthrope marching to the beat of his own drum? I lost my sense of community. Maybe I burned out during my Jesus years. I dunno. But I know that I hate all things Big and all things Festival and all things Event. Why? Why?

I do admit that participating in stuff this big yields a great expense, not just monetary expense (SXSW wristbands are ~$130usd), but it’s the huge expense on time, energy, mental attention. And for what? To see a bunch of bands. I’m a music fan…always have been, and I fucking love to see the bands I like play live shows; even in a crowded auditorium, it’s an intimate affair, and the capacity of the room gives me confirmation that I’m not alone in liking who I like. But the foundation of my decision process is completely unlinked from this understanding.

When it comes to it, I picture having to drive downtown, hunt for parking, and walk 5 blocks to the venue, stand in line, pay a high cover, buy a drink at festival prices, and cram into the festival crowd for a bad view of the stage. Somewhere on the fatigued walk back to my car, I’ll get hit up for spare change at least once. It’s a likely outcome, it is, but it’s the only outcome I visualize when I’m trying to decide whether to engage in the process of going to the show, festival or not.

On the surface, that seems to be the answer to my abhorrence of going out. But underneath it all, something deeper is happening. I hate people. I hate crowds. I mean, I like being anonymous, but I don’t want to be alone. Does that make sense? It’s a bigger town, and there’s a high chance that I’ll never cross paths with someone who knows me from any of my regular haunts (God forbid someone I know shows up and sees me having a good time–the horror!). That’s comforting. But it also means I’m on my own for trying to be a joiner in a scene. You can’t just walk up and say hey to people hanging out at a show; it’s just creepy. So where’s the payoff? Where’s the big reward in going to see a band and enjoying the fuck out of the show if there’s no one I know to recount the experience?

It’s a huge expense on me to go to any of the shows during SXSW; even the free, non-festival shows that are all over the place typically require throwing myself into the fray. I’m a non-joiner. I stopped wanting the company of others. And so, on the final balance sheet, the costs outweigh the returns. Therefore, I don’t go, regardless of how fucking badly I want to see these bands.

This is what happens every year: SXSW wristbands and badges go on sale without any of my attention. Since I seldom read the Austin Chronicle (founder of the festival), it flies under my radar. Once I’m reminded that SXSW is coming up, I yawn and feign disinterest. And it begins, and I finally grab a Chronicle to see who’s playing, and that list soon becomes a list of who I want to see and in the span of hours turns into a list of bands I should’ve seen. For instance, here’s a list of bands playing this year that I really, really would like to see, but won’t:

• Ulrich Schnauss, electronic musician from Germany who I’ve recently started adoring
• Peter Murphy – yes, THAT Peter Murphy – played tonight
• Tori Amos, playing right now (I guarantee that nobody without a SXSW badge is getting in)
• Meat Puppets are clearing the stage now
• Echo and the Bunnymen
• Deadmau5, an electronic dance duo
• Tricky, tomorrow night
• Devo shortly thereafter
• Dinosaur Jr
• I Love You But I’ve Chosen Darkness (I like this local band)
• The Crystal Method

This list is of pretty-much the only bands I care to see out of the 5 pages of fine-print listings. I know SXSW is all about the smaller bands and the unsigned acts. I get that. But I can’t justify running around between venues to listen to unsigned showcases. I just can’t. I know, I know, every single band has a Myspace profile with their music…fuck that nonsense. Spending all that time researching these bands in order to plan my schedule just adds to the cost. There’s no easy way to sift this pile of rocks, and in the end I have to rely on chance. The last time I went to see an unsigned band that I actually knew, I had the chance to hear a few bands that I ended up really, really liking. That’s a huge payoff. But it’s pure serendipity; it’s pure luck, pure chance.

Serendipity. I stopped listening to Serendipity shortly before she stopped talking to me. I think what happened is that somewhere during my first 6 months here I fell in with a crowd of non-joiners who pissed and moaned about the ills and evils of 6th Street and festivals and whatnot. Generally, they trampled on and killed every flowering desire growing in me to get out and live in the face of chance. Their voices became the din that drowned out the voice of Serendipity until all I could hear is static. They spoke out, and I listened, and I internalized and slowly, root by root, I died. I can point the finger, but I’d be lying if I didn’t point it at myself, and that’s a hard truth to swallow. I listened, and I let them influence my life into a cold stasis. I overheard, and it became the fulcrum by which I weigh the balance of costs and returns.

That’s been years ago; I don’t hang out with those people anymore. Most of them I don’t talk to, some of them I refuse to acknowledge, and a handful of them I still respect but see once in a blue moon. Their sphere of influence is completely dissolved, but I still bear the damage in myself. Some day, I’ll wake up. Some day, my root will wake up and take to the soil. Some day, the flowers will return.

So it’s 10 o’clock. I got off of work a mere 4 hours ago. I ate, went to one coffeeshop, found no seating there, went to another coffeeshop, again found no seating, bought a cup to go, and went home. Three hours later, I have fuckall to show for it. WTF. What’d I do tonight? I read some myspace (for the first time in 2 weeks), I played two rounds of Unreal Tournament, and that’s it. WTF.

I’m in a crisis, folks. I don’t know what to do with myself. Tonight’s restlessness is but a symptom of a growing problem I’m facing with the concept that, at age 35, I’m wasting my life on useless, wandering, meandering pursuits that will neither benefit me nor mankind in the least. I’m wasting my time. Is that what life’s all about, or is there more? I mean, I leave work, find a fast food place to eat, and then either go home and mope (and do nothing productive) or I go to a coffeeshop and sit there, laptop open, mouth agape, mind blank, and do nothing productive. It’s like Where do I begin? I have so much stuff that I want to do. So much I want to say, to share, to experience and I do nothing about it. Just hold it in. I’m currently, physically, dealing with a case of diarrhea, but I feel that it’s my life that needs to take a shit.

I’m giving in to that part of my instinct that’s a scared little animal. I’m afraid to express. Fuck sakes, it takes me 5 minutes to gather my volition to write an email to my manager at work. It takes half an hour to decide on calling someone. Shit, it’s been years since I asked anyone out (it failed, naturally). So what the hell? If I were a bird whose species relied on crowding onto a rocky cliff face to build a nest, I would have no offspring because I don’t want to play the game. I don’t want to fight for my piece of dirt. I enjoy crowds when I can sail through them anonymously, but when something’s at stake — my life, my property, my status — I want nothing of it. I’d rather starve and let those animals fight like dogs over their precious piece of meat. In a large enough population, this behavior would be more apparent. Maybe that loner nature is necessary to cause me to seek resources elsewhere. I don’t know; there are 12 answers, and they’re all correct. I’m such a fool.

Sometimes I just want to click off. Existential angst of late. I’ve had the desire to formulate some kind of journal entry, but as things are going, it takes too much work and energy to do so. I’ve had so much Life coming at me at once, there’s not enough energy or will to put the words together. Hence my usual silence. Seriously. Too much of Life.

Big fires to put out, little fires to put out. So scattered, all over the place, bunched up in little notes and to-do lists. So concerned with forgetting to do something that I write it down, make a note, and then I fail to remember. Sometimes I fail to actually attempt to do what’s on the list.

To-Do lists are the tool of the devil. Make a note of that.

I’m looking for another car. It’s that season again, and now that I commute 25+ miles a day my Mirage is failing sadly. The increased smoke is drawing attention, and there’s an aweful lot of cops on the road. Was looking at a Honda Civic: 2002, 130k miles, EX trim package with power everything and a sunroof, stickshift, 4-door. Everything I wanted in a car for $7,000. I didn’t move soon enough; the dealer jacked the price up another thousand. Fuck that. My search passively continues.

I am currently digesting the first season of Battlestar Gallactica (the remake). I wish I had been old enough to follow the plot of the original, but I was in 2nd grade; all I cared about was the kid and his creepy robot monkeydog. I will tell you this much about the new show: I am hooked. Damn you all to hell, I am hooked. This is the most I’ve ever seen Edward James Olmos speak, and he’s perfect for the part.

You should know what kinds of assholes I share my apartment complex with. Monday night, the jackasses downstairs decided to crank their music loud enough that my floor was vibrating. So, I did what any angry neighbor would do: I kicked the floor. Expectedly, they turned it down…and then proceeded to agressively slam their ceiling with whatever they had. I fully expected them to start fucking with me; I don’t care so much about breaking and entering now that Texas has the Castle Law, I’m worried about them doing something stupid to my car, to the plants in front of my apartment. People can be that trivial.

I hate apartments. Keep thinking about moving out.

Found out there’s a hiring freeze at my job which is expected to last a while. Even the permanent employees are required to burn off some of their vacation time over the holidays; mandatory closure as a cost-cutting measure. Last time I saw that was 2001, during the dotcom crash; I was contracting at Motorola and after the layoffs of unimportant staff, they had each department take one week off. Shortly afterwards, Motorola sold its Austin campuses to its spinoff company Freescale. I don’t see much logic in mandatory closure; I guess it saves energy and infrastructure costs and requires employees (most of them salary, mind you) to spend their vacation hours instead of acrue them. But you lose so much time during the ramp down and ramp up periods after the closure. How to Shoot Yourself in the Foot, 2.0.

Ruby On Rails made me her bitch tonight. She spanked my ass hard with an important lesson. I’ve had this mind-crushing problem with trying to build a test harness for one of my model classes. I set the record attribute, try to save, and my missing-attribute validation kicks in. I know I fucking set that attribute, so why’s it not passing validation? Here’s the lesson: ActiveRecord uses automatically-created accessor methods to set/get the values of a database record. What was I doing? I was trying to use an ActiveRecord instance as a hash with special powers. That’s wrong, wrong, wrong. When I go “person[:password] = ‘secretpass’”, I’m setting something in a hash somewhere that AR is not paying attention to. I’m really supposed to go: “person.password = ‘secretpass’”. What a dumbass. So two weeks of frustrated freetime were spent debugging an issue that was all my own fault.

- I should call my mother some time. It’s been a while.
- I need to take a shower before bed.
- I should go into work early tomorrow.
- I need to start using my bicycle more; I paid so much for it, and I’m so out of shape.
- I need to pick up some antacids.
- I have a dentist appointment next month.
- I now have 1.5Gigs of ram in my laptop. I can play games again, but I need to make space.
- I have so much more to do with my Rails project, it’s unreal.
- I need new shoes
- I should get a haircut some time soon
- I’ve got to put all this on my to-do list

So this is the beginning of the weekend. I’m already depressed. I get in a down funk every weekend, and I hate this. My job is the only thing that defines who I am, and I fear my job. I’ve either forgotten what to do on my own free time or I remember but don’t want to do it; don’t want to relax and reconnect with people.

Yeah, I’ve been seriously withdrawn from society lately; no big news to you, I’m sure. Just can’t get comfortable with anybody else. No friends, therefore no society. So fucking paranoid, it’s sick. I’m leaving incredible parties after 40 minutes. I’m walking out of rooms and going away instead of speaking my mind. I’m standing there for 3 minutes waiting for someone to interrupt their conversation with someone else to see what I want; instead, I should be interjecting, making my business, and letting them continue instead of standing like a conversation leech. So afraid of people.

If you see me out in public, give me a hug or something. I need more of that shit.

I hate Ciprofloxacin. It’s an antibiotic, one of the harshest. Most prescriptions of the stuff last a week. My prescription, however, lasts a month, and I’ve been on it one week, long enough to have it doing its ill effects. Not my first time on it; hopefully it is my last. UTI‘s are a bitch.

One of the worst side effects of cipro, aside from stomach cramping, excess acid production, the requirement to supplement your digestive bacteria with yogurt, chance of tendon ruptures, fatigue, and insomnia, is that cipro makes me paranoid. Not “the feds are out to get me” paranoia, but the “o god, I didn’t say that the wrong way, did I?” kind. Sure enough, it makes my social awkwardness that much worse. Like I needed the help.

Typically, I can go to the coffeeshop and hang out with others or alone. If someone comes to visit my table, I can greet them, invite them to sit, and we chat. Or, if I visit a friend at theirs, the chatter is good and friendly. Not so on cipro. I kinda stand there and watch it all happen. I see myself doing it, but the thought never occurs to me to quit the creepiness. I just see the unfitting awkwardness, get uncomfortable, and excuse myself as I walk away. I don’t like it; not in the least.

Sometimes I think I’m turning into that old, creepy man who’s got the stink on him that everyone can smell. The guy people put up with only because he’s a customer. And that’s the paranoia talking; I must keep that in mind at all times while I’m on this stuff. Sure, when I grow up I want to be a dirty old man, but don’t want to be a creepy old man. There’s a marginal difference between the two: one is more socially adept; the other just lecherously leers from an uncomfortable distance.