(Phaysis)

(Written Saturday, August 30, 2008, 9:30pm)

Ah, yes. Texarkana. IHOP.

So I’m sitting here wondering why I’m sitting here. I think I missed what I was supposed to do. Like I stayed at the house too long. Like I was supposed to call old friends and visit. But why visit? No news to report! That’s a lie; there is. There’s always news. But trying to reopen the dialog is a lot of work and a ton of bother. To what benefit? Affiliation. Affinity. But why? Why do I have friends? Why do I have to be with them? On the corollary, why do I not want to be with them? Why do I want to be alone? Why do I come to anonymous places like IHOP and sit in a faceless crowd? I’ll keep asking until I die.

I come to places like this instead of friends’ houses because…

• My own terms: I can come and go as I please with no protracted bowing out
• It’s quick, clean: the only relationship is “What would you like?” “Coffee, please.” It’s short, clean, efficient. The waiter / barrista / hostess doesn’t need to know my backstory. I don’t have to catch up to theirs.
• I spend nothing but a few bucks, and I get what I pay for
• The sound of voices is a placebo for social interaction

Actually, I’m scared of the baggage and bother involved in opening myself up to long-time friends / practical strangers. “So, what’s new in your life?” “Well, not much. I’m decaying. You?” “…decaying?”

I’m listening to people talk. Table of four. They’re all talking…at the same time. Is that the secret of happy society? Constantly talking in full duplex? I’ve had the understanding — it’s my programming — that polite society is simplex: one person talks, the rest listen and wait their turn. That sounds great. Sounds wonderful. But it’s not real. Anyone who carries on in that fashion will constantly get trampled on. His words will either fall on deaf ears or he will wait forever for his turn to speak, meanwhile the topic shifts and his unspoken words expire, never to be born. The dead words rot and leave the taste of lowered status on the tongue.

I pity the poor soul who acts in that way. He certainly leads the unfulfilled life. More accurately, I say he follows the unfulfilled life. Waiting your turn is no way to lead. Sure, it’s polite, but it’s soft, mooshy, flacid. The poor bastard can’t summon the moxie to get it up for those in his conversation to witness. Poor bastard.

Fuck that guy. Yeah.

We’re gonna grill out tomorrow. Pork chops on the grill. Apparently my sister will be cooking. I’m not sure who’s showing up; mom threatened to contact all my cousins. I have no idea if she did. As far as I know, my immediate family are the only people who know I’m in town. It’d be nice to see cousins. Can shoot the shit. Guess that’s what family’s good for. Maybe I’ll call my old down friends afterwards, see who has decayed more than me. I also need to fill up some family gas tanks and do some other charitable works while I’m around.

I feel like I’m failing on some duty to support my family or be there when they need it. I dunno. We don’t have a connection. Haven’t in a long while.

So, here I am. I still feel like I missed a step. Like I’m at the end and I’m scrambling to throw on as much support, love, and friendship I can at the end of my visit. Like I’m trying to make up for years of neglect with a rush of charity. I feel like an absentee father who swings through town bearing truckstop gifts for his children. Well-meaning, but thoughtless and cheap; his actions are more a self-defensive maneuver to save face, but his actions are counterproductive. His children thank him with disbelief and his ex-wife looks on with disdain. The whole affair is cheap and the gifts are worthless tokens.

You cannot give a thing that is worth more than your time. Money is free. Time is the one thing doled out unevenly to everyone and in limited supply. That flow will run out, and our lives will become forfeit. Don’t let them be bankrupt before their time.

And so here I am at IHOP. Not talking with anybody, not poking at the logs and stoking the fires of my relationships. I’m sitting with cold coals. This is no way to be.

Why do I do this?

(written on Thursday, 11/24/2005 23:58:55. Thanksgiving day.)

So of course the high that I’ve been experiencing the whole week would end like a car crash this morning. I got the sleep I’ve been missing, but due to the cold, the uncomfortable “bed”, and my nieces, nephew, and sister, the sleep I got wasn’t worth much, so I slept for ten, maybe eleven hours. The moment I open my eyes, glance at the blinds, and look up to the ceiling, I started seeing spots. Thanks to a casual glance while waking up, I got a migraine, first thing in my morning. On thanksgiving. So I took some acetaminophen and hoped for the best. The kids were no help, but I hung on long enough to take a shower after they left. By then, the spots were gone and the migraine was a dull throb. Picked up my mother and we headed off to my aunt Janet’s sister’s house for dinner.

Dinner was good, of course. Ate a plateful, had some dessert. Played quiet, didn’t have much to say because the migraine recovery. Some time later we all left, and I dropped my mother off back at her home and I drove on. Went to Liz and Laura’s house, hung out with them for a while. The girls went to deliver a plate to their spry 92-year-old great aunt, so I chatted with Doug, Liz’s husband, for a good hour or so. Longest chat I’ve had with him. Had a good time shooting the shit. The girls came back, Jon woke up from his nap, and we had a few laughs on the back porch. Came back inside, chatted some more, and then the television got turned on and we somehow stopped talking. Funny when that happens.

After some hour or so of my second helping of the “That 70′s Show” marathon today, I decided to head on. Went driving around, decided to plug up my laptop, get some GPS data, do a little bit of wardriving, and now I’m here again, IHOP, tapping away on my laptop again. The cashier/hostess remembered me from last night and recommended the waiter to seat me somewhere near a power outlet, just like I requested last night. Yeah, she remembered. Someone should give her a raise.

The problem I have with my time is knowing how to spend it. When I’m home for long stretches of days, my time is spent sleeping short hours, watching television, doing a whole bunch of nothing, making no plans, seeing the few friends I have, and leaving their houses so late that I really don’t want to drive around to check things out. The problem is filling my time in a memorable, quality fashion. I think, now that the holiday and my day at OBU are out of the way, that I should follow up on some plans I made, y’know, some ideas. I would like to track down my friends Eddie and Michelle. It’s been over 5 years since I last saw them, and I hear they keep asking about me. It will be really good to see them again. Also, if things get too slow, I’ll grab some of my friends and go to an empty parking lot somewhere to do the burning mushrooms floating newspaper thing I saw my Austin friends doing behind Mojo’s some years ago. There’s things to do, y’know? Hell, I could show pictures to my family. I think I’ll do that tomorrow.

Ah, yeah. Texarkana life. Some drunk dude just came up to me, asked me if I was lookin’ at Playboy on this thing. You could smell it on his breath. Heh. And…I just saw some other dude walking around with a UT Longhorns ball camp on. I just can’t escape that, not even for one weekend. And, AND, just to show how connected this town is to the pulse of the fashion nation (MTV), last night I saw some real emo kids, the kind that look EXACTLY LIKE some emo kids I saw back at Spiderhouse. It…was…creepy. Seriously, same look.

Liek omg this is so going in my eljay.

Transcribed from an offline journal entry written on Sunday, July 4th:

I do hate coming home for the weekend.

Same story. I get stuck in the house, for usually no good reason, and then go out a bit late in the day to plan something usefull. I dunno.

I’m currently sitting at Denny’s waiting on my meal. First meal today. And it’s 6:40pm. I should’ve called around to some of my friends, see what’s up and what’s going on. Today is the Fourth; no sense in wandering around aimlessly, but it looks like an eminent possibility.

Coming home is fine sometimes, and a drag other times. I was all gung-ho about visiting on thursday and friday. Around 7pm friday, things just wound down, and I wasn’t so interested, but I went anyway. And I’m here. I saw the town fireworks last night. Meh. About as interesting as any other town’s fireworks display. Getting into the park was little trouble. Getting out was the bitch and the bastard. Took me 45 minutes. Senseless. I was two city blocks from the interstate. Bleh.

But I left and drove around. Went out to Phil and Sandy’s place, cruised pasted to see if their pool party shindig was still happening. Didn’t see much of anything, so I drove on. Wandered around, stopped at a quickmart to pick up something to quench my dehydrated self, and went to see my core group of friends. As expected, they were all congregating, but they were congregating to throw a going-away-to-Japan party for a friend of theirs who works for a defense contractor. Got to meet him in real life for once; nice guy. I didn’t leave that clump of houses and their hospitality until around 4am. Snoozily drove myself back to my cousin’s house after grabbing something to eat and crashed out on the couch, light on, tv up.

Slept hard until 12:30, a half-hour before I had planned on waking up. And, as usual, I sat on the couch and watched TV; got suckerpunched into watching “Highlander”. Bleh. I’m sure the movie was good back in the day. I’m sure of it. But this whole pre-digital effects thing is so, um, 1980′s. But I finally got my ass up and moving, took a shower, got dressed, and around then my mother came home from work, so I hung out and chatted with her. That’s always a good thing. Got to see her room out back. Interesting. A one-room shack is where she lives. The shack’s been in the family for decades now, and after two uncles and two cousins, my mother now lives there. The rent’s cheap, which is good enough for her. She’s a real trooper.

I’m currently listening to the new Skinny Puppy album. Picked it up thursday. This weekend it’s been my salvation; a link of sorts with the larger world. I stacked a good mp3 collection on my laptop for the driving jukebox, among them is a cdrom full of industrial, futurepop, and rivethead-ambient songs ripped from Digital Gunfire. All of this has been my salvation, this angry, dark, and socially-disgusted music. The sun is out, the days are getting brighter, and my soul is inside, getting darker. Feh.

There went my Goth moment of the week. Heh.

But I can’t help it to not laugh or sneer when I look at all these little people in this little town. I used to think they were something, and they WERE something, but I left town. I saw larger things, larger places, larger people. These people aren’t so something anymore. And I can’t help but look at them as if they were like the cattle that they raise. A lot of good, decent, life-affirming “salt of the earth” folks here, and I can’t see them for anything special because this town has nothing, nothing to offer but chain restaurants, chain stores and chain smoking.

Sure, these are the people that make up 60% of this country. I’ll accept that. Grass-roots working folk. That’s no problem. Our country needs them. But it’s just impossible for me to see them as being anything but shallow, non-evaluating people who see only to the immediate needs of tending to their job first, their families second, and their future third. Their potential is just not considered at all. Potential is just not even on their radar. To them, potential is something only their “smarter than yours” children can possess; potential is just not for them because they have to work. And that’s how I see it all here. Just cattle.

Save me from this narrow-eyed mindset.

Things at work are still boring, stale, and dry. Irritating. Annoying. The other day I was talking with a coworker in passing, chit-chat kind of stuff. She was complaining about being on the tail-end of a chest cold, congestion problems. I remarked that there were some weeks I felt OK on monday morning, but by the time Friday came around, my chest was tight and my breathing was kinda rough. I mused about it either being fumes, falling insulation fiber, whatever. Doesn’t happen all the time. We shrugged our shoulders, I walked on to continue working, and that was that.

Around 4:30pm the bosslady calls me into her office. I hate when that happens, because she’s always got a serious look when she does it, and she’s called coworkers into her office quite a bit for no pleasant reason. So I was cringing, at best, and angry at worst, about what I could’ve possibly done to deserve punishment. So, I get in there, she pulls the door closed, and she begins asking me about a rumor from an unnamed source that’s floating around that I’m talking about possible health problems from the work environment, that she wants to “nip this in the bud”, and so on. I remembered thinking to myself, “Well, I know better than to trust that coworker again with chit-chat.” Either she relayed the chat, or the bosslady overheard, I don’t know. But I’m being asked about what I meant when I stated that. I told her it was only an observation, not a claim, not a fact. Whether it was environmental, or mental, I knew not. And now that I am living more healthily, it’ll be a span of time before I can make another assessment about it. Give my chest time to heal, then if it happens again, we’ll talk.

Talk about butterflies under the magnifying glass.

So, she’s got that “nipped”, and the conversation leads on to my attitude, my demeanor when I’m at work, my goal, what I’m trying to get out of working there. I’m there to earn a paycheck. That job facilitates my lifestyle, plain and simple. It’s not a career. Printing isn’t a career choice. It’s a job. Anything I do is just a job. But I can’t tell her that. She has a hand on the company pursestrings. I tell her that yes I enjoy working there, that yes my gruff and distant attitude is just a trait of my personality, and that as of late I’ve been having a mindset change, a slump. She tried to sum up my flat answers as best as she could, and she came up, rather accurately, with a flatline. And that’s exactly how I feel about life, about everything. Especially that job. It’s just, bleh. I have no ten-year plan. No five-year plan. No plans at all. She stated that I was smart, productive, and an odd fit for the job, and she started to question why I was there at all. I had no answers for her, simply because I didn’t want to paint myself into a corner. I didn’t want to provide ammunition, to hand her the pen to write my pink slip. She’s the bosslady. I tell her what will keep me earning pay. You can’t expect any other kind of honesty.

Flatline. I’m not happy there. Haven’t been in a while. She says she can’t imagine living a life where she’s not excited about what’s going on at work, about what she’s able to contribute to. If you ask me, I can see that people like that do exist, but I can’t, for my life, imagine what that position in life is like. I can’t. I’m sorry, but I can’t get excited about work. I rarely get excited about things these days. There are expectations there, everywhere, and I hate performing. Simple as that. Give me a task, show me a corner, hand me a machine, and leave me the hell alone. That’s when I’ll work. That’s where I work best.

But now, it appears I’m working under that magnifying glass.

Butterflies and wind.

My 10-hour nap is over, and I feel like hell. I really don’t know how you couchsurfers can do it. I slept on the couch here and my back feels like one of those turkish windmill knots that scouts earn merit badges for learning. But I got some sleep, and now that I’ve gotten up and have gotten online, I’m feeling much better. More sane. More like something resembling a human.

Ok. Our Christmas morning went rather well. I gave my mother the album “Cow Pie Blues” from Willie Nelson and a paperback how-to on screenwriting. She was thoroughly ecstatic about her gifts. I was worried, actually, about if she’d like the Willie Nelson disc. All I remember was that years ago, before she started listening to country music, that she’d poke fun of Willie and say things like “Willie Nelson? Eww, gross!” Now she totally digs him. So I’m happy. And her screenwriting book promises to give her most of what she needs to know about the mechanics and preparation of writing a screenplay, which is what she had major worries about. I wish her the best of luck on her writing endeavors.

To my sister, her husband, and their family, I gave DVDs this year. For the grownups, I gave “Bicentennial Man”, which I still haven’t seen and they haven’t heard of. From what I’ve been told, it was a good movie; not as long as “AI” which came out around the same time, but good in the “sad but heartwarming way”. And, for the kids, I got them “Spy Kids”, which they’ve seen on VHS, but now they get to watch whatever special features are on the disc. My sister was completely surprised that all three movies in the “Spy Kids” series were shot and made in Austin.

And that’s basically all the gifts I gave. Bah bumhug. :)

So, yeah, after getting something resembling 3 hours of sleep last night, I had to lay down for a nap this afternoon. I was sitting on the couch watching the TechTV version of “Battlebots” and suddenly it hit me. I was out like a light. Over the course of the evening, I woke up enough to relieve my backpain by moving into a different laying position. This went on until 2:30am, when I finally woke up enough to say, “Y’know, I really should wake up some time, but why does it have to be now when everyone else is asleep? Damn.”

So here I am, it’s almost 4am, everyone but the pets are sleeping, and I’m wide awake and in need of a shower, some food, and a little bit of company.

Ah well. I’ll try to snap some quickcam shots around town and post them. I haven’t seen much of the town on this trip, but I already see some snapworthy crap. Feh.

Ok. Later.