(Phaysis)

Tonight, after some coffee, I took a drive around town. Decided to avoid the big streets and thoroughfares I always take. Investigated some of the little neighborhoods I never see, the stuff in-between the high streets. The nooks and crannies.

I had the windows rolled down; radio off. Vent fan was turned off. All I heard was the engine, the tires, and the surrounding street. Ambient, peaceful. The midnight city was my music.

On West Lynn and 6th, I overheard three pedestrians talking about the song “Disgustipated” by Tool. One of them was quoting lines. It woke up a distant memory in me of a guy I used to know when I was 23. He was optimistic. Weathered, but ever-watching, ever-listening. He hungered for experience and thirsted for expression. He would watch documentaries like “Baraka” because they blew his mind. He drank to friendship because it blew his heart. He wrote poetry because it blew his load. All was life, death, pain, joy, suffering, art.

I haven’t been that guy in a long, long time. I used to think that I was one of the residents of bohemia, an enlightened, energized and empowered free-thinker who, with the stroke of his pen and a swish of philosophy, could create his own world.

That song, that album, I discovered it in my last year in school, and it informed me of a bigger world. One where the ugly beasts were beautiful; monsters and mind-expansion held hands and penned words like, “there was goo all over your hands; you wiped them on your grass, now your color was green.” That made sense to me. Bang.

And during that time I ran with people who understood, who knew, who had ideas, thoughts. Still in the twilight between youth and adulthood. We smoked, and talked, and drank until the lights went down and the sun came up.

That. That’s the distant memory. I’m reminded of that guy I was and I get a chill in my heart when I compare that guy to who I am now. I’m experienced, but with less hope. Weathered, but beaten. I don’t write poetry anymore. Music, the rhythm and melody has overshadowed any lyrical importance. “Baraka” doesn’t hit me as hard. My artistic drive has diminished, and tonight, I caught a glimpse of a reason why.

Back then, I could write my future. And I attempted. And passed, and failed, and failed, and passed, and failed. And I didn’t care one iota what was thought of me. It wasn’t important. We had our own society away from, yet within, the society of the world at-large. We were connected with a dim idea of something bigger Out There, that somewhere somebody was thinking the same Really Deep Thoughts that we were. So the eyes and ears of the people on the periphery of that world had no sway. I saw my friends, and my nonfriends be damned.

But that changed after I moved here. I started caring. And the voices of those around me carried with me as I walked. Suddenly, my thoughts and desires and drives had an audience. They told me every side of the story. They ooh’ed when I felt like striking out and aah’ed when I placated them by doing nothing. And as my world got smaller, they got bigger.

And that, that is my failure. I started listening to the idea that people, with whom I no longer associated, had something to say about the things I did. I let the faceless They With a Thousand Faces bear weight on my decisions to express myself. And it had a serious chilling effect.

I’m not sure if I can resurrect the dead. I don’t know if, during the course of the day, I can have him speak my voice again. I know his ghost haunts me in the night, but the scorching light of day overpowers him and I have to be a grownup again. His Eros, his Pathos, hides in the cool and the shade of the tomb. Wake up, dead man.

Two weeks ago, I got the itch to build a new desktop wallpaper for my laptop to replace the current one which has been there for a few months. I saw something that day that evoked a voice I’ve let sit silent, and I wanted to wake up that voice and weave it into something good. That voice spoke of an image I drew in November ’97 when I was in the throes of hungry creativity during my two-month stint of hardscrabble unemployment in North Carolina. During those two months, I wrote poetry, I drew art, I listened to music, I met people, I had a new relationship with an awesome girl. Even without a job, I was producing. I was in the springtime of my life.

The vision was to use this drawing, a box with circular vines weaving in and out of the box, in a layered tableau of drawing, ripped paper, a cherry branch, a few vines curling around, stick pins, all softly front-lit and backed up by a textured background. I could do everything in Pov-ray, but I needed a scan of that drawing. I remember scanning it some time back in ’99, so I searched my hard drive and all my backups for the image. It was nowhere. Disappeared to the ether. So my only option was to scour my room for the drawing and attempt to rescan it.

In my search, I managed to unearth a treasure. I found my birth certificate. Found some more poetry from North Carolina. Found a stack of love letters. Finally, I found it: the drawing, and all of the drawings I had created and compiled between late 1997 and 2000. Bingo.

I was really, really into vines, banners, fineals, things draping from suspended bars, very fine lines, crosshatching. Still kinda am. I had several mechanical drawing pens, and I used them with much attention on making the most miniscule drawings. I would fixate on an image for hours, touching here, shading there until I was satisfied. It was like sex. After all the work, something beautiful would be created.

In the span of a few hours, I had dug out and set up the scanner on a very obsolete computer and I rifled through my stack of drawings to find the best ones to scan and commit to pixels. Spent some time the next day cleaning up the vine box drawing while listening to Nine Inch Nails and Rush concert dvds. I was happy. For the first time in a while, I was happy again. Not just the memories that returned while I meditated on my art, but there was the happiness from meditating on art itself. Having a mind quiet enough to draw. And it was there that the Eros returned.

If life is not lived to create, then it is a lie. I can’t get any more truthful than that. The reason we are here is to create things that will outlive us. And I’m feeling that drive again, like it is the springtime of my life. I am insane for having kept the voice of the muse silent for so long.

Kind of shameful, really, that I kept quiet, but I kept quiet because of the shame; an endless cycle. I had created so much that the amount of crap scaled upwards with the output and I started seeing it; instead of loving all my babies, I hid them away and stopped producing. I heard the voices, the wrong voices, in the coffeeshops, on the message forums, in the channels, rambling about talentless hacks who take themselves too seriously, and that had a very chilling effect on me. I stopped producing and it became winter. The Very Long Pause.

I’m not finished with this image yet, but I will be soon. I worked on it all day yesterday and spent today taking care of necessary things instead. I don’t want to be done with the voice when I’m done with the image. I want to keep drawing, keep writing poetry, get back into music, keep speaking with that voice, the muse. To emote. To love again. To take my failures and abortions in stride as I keep up the creativity. To be a producer.

I’ve been living a lie. It’s time to speak the truth.

Update (Feb 3, 2008) The image is finished. I put the final touches on it a few days ago, and now comes the time to share. Enjoy!

Listening to Sophie & Ives’ song “Awaken”. Fucking phenomenal. Product of a transoceanic love affair between two artists, an american man and a New Zealand woman. An impossible love affair made possible by the internet. The hunger of the lyrics, and embrace of the music. Fuck. This is why I love the net; this kind of stuff exists. This is how I pictured the net in the idealism of my mid-20′s, a scant decade ago.

I dug out my boxes of floppies. Decided that since I have a lot of disk space I should probably backup those dusty pieces of yesteryear onto something a little more modern. Floppies and cdroms are poor mediums for long-term archival. Took two evenings, but I got through everything. Sorted and categorized everything into driver disks, boot disks, and important data. Backed up what I felt important. Found three floppies that contained all of the data I backed up from my three VAX accounts on my last week in school, December ’95. Every worthwhile email, every source code file, every text file, every configuration file. It’s all there.

Found a philosophical op-ed piece I wrote in September ’95 in the VAX lab. Forgot that I wrote that beast. Some generic 20-something blag about “This is our/your life, this is our/your world. Take it, use it, live it!” I obviously had some high hopes about the future although I was in the midst of failing miserably in my own schooling. Had no money for books; was dropping out of classes one by one; was working a night job and distancing myself from the very reason why I was in school, and for what? Some idealistic zeal that I just couldn’t shake even after leaving the religious environment which spawned it.

Yet there I was; writing about how we may come from chaos and shackles but through hope, through grasping onto the Now, through embracing new things (like the Internet), we may liberate ourselves and live the grand life we have all imagined. It’s apparent to me, in hindsight, that I had some obviously unresolved existential issues (still do). But the heart was still there: the desire to connect with others, to reach out, trade strength with people “out there” to build for ourselves a better world. Ten years later, a slim glint of that hope still exists in me, but to be perfectly honest, I’m too tired for idealism.

I’ve spun other yarns over the years about the salvation achieved by friends and strangers reaching out and offering kind words, helpful life advice, providing solace to those desolate and of ill psyche. Yarns about how we’re all on this great worldwide network and that it’s our Tomorrow. But the past six years have tought me, if anything, that such a dream cannot, and never will, be. We have forum users calling each other fags. Image boards are waging war on each other. A genre of websites has spawned that use other site’s content in order to serve their own share of the advertising market. It’s all money and marketshare now. Genuity is out with yesterday’s newspaper, seen as a weakness and as source material for someone else’s website.

I thought anonymity would save us; but it has doomed us to partisan bickering, flames, and trolls. It’s discouraging; gives me reason to not post anything on my blog.

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

On an Enigma listening kick tonight. Michael Cretu’s fledgling project has left an indelible mark on my adult life; each of the six albums is etched permanently into the soundtrack to my life. I listen and I’m swept backwards into times far-receded and fading into idyllic pastels of halcyon days.

1. MCMXC A.D. – my sister was given a copy of this by an uncle; it punctuates first the summer of 1990 and later the spring of 1992 when I was able to borrow it from a friend at college. I dedicate this album to my sister, to Ryan who loaned it to me, all my other friends at the time, and to Melissa, the girl closest to me who dug it most.
2. The Cross of Changes – I got into this album heavily in the summer of 1995, several years after its release. I borrowed it for a long time from my friend Steven down the hall. It punctuates that summer, the lightness and heaviness of everything, the passion of my first love. It’s dedicated to my first love, Donna, and to our friend Liz who talked me through the rough parts.
3. Le Roi Est Mort, Vive le Roi! – I discovered this album while driving a delivery van during my early months in Greensboro; I thought it was a new Yes album at first; glad to be wrong. Picked it up and didn’t put it down for weeks; it carried me through my tribulations there, kept me warm on the chilling nights of late autumn. First album where the romantic ties are slim; it hit me more on an interpersonal level. Dedicated to Stephen and Misty, Paul, Pam, and Joelle, my only friends-with-history at the time.
4. The Screen Behind the Mirror – arriving to me in the heady buzz of the early tech boom of 2000 in quiet Texarkana, it gave me impetus to keep pushing for escape into the world at large. I was living at home at the time and working at a hotel, so anything to make me get away from it was a welcome relief. Strongest memory is cranking this album at top volume with an empty house while getting dressed for one of my rare nights off. Dedicated to Josh, Jon, Laura, Liz, mom, and Sandra.
5. Voyageur – I discovered this album while hearing the title song playing before a movie. It was Cretu’s first departure from the slightly-worn chant formula that made his project famous, and cemented his place in the league of extraordinary electronic musicians. Of note is the song “In the Shadow, In the Light” which gives voice to my loves long-lost. Dedicated to Amy, my highschool crush to whom I drove to see for the first time in 13 years at a weekend festival near Houston.
6. A Posteriori – Possibly Cretu’s final album as Enigma, this album has a stark poignancy as either the end of something good or the transformation into something better. I was in a hard time emotionally last year when this came out, and I came to appreciate the smoothness, sensitivity, passion, and light that the album offered me, carrying me through another rough time into redemption. I dedicate this album to MaRanda, to whom I sent a copy, in whom I respect, from whom I’ve gained a new interpretation of love.

The emotional heaviness brought on by these albums causes me to reflect on my past; some people have no use for history, but it is my poison, tonic, elixir and medicine. I require a soundtrack for my life, and I gladly take its doses to give me perspective on my present.