(Phaysis)

It’s been a while since I wrote something here. Let’s see…I went to see Nine Inch Nails and Jane’s Addiction at the Erwin Center a few weeks ago. I had bad seats, but the show was good regardless. The extreme strobelights on stage during the NIN set were unbelievable, and sorta gave me a headache. I’m just glad I’m not an epileptic with a floor seat. The venue site said cameras were allowed, so I took mine. Tons of people took theirs. I shot a ton of pictures; a handful are even what some would consider “good”. Amazing.

My problem with cameras — and I’ve discovered this the past few shows I’ve taken my camera to — is that my attention ends up getting split between my camera (and the technical and aesthetic aspects thereof) and the actual show itself. I don’t remember some of the show because I was too focused on my camera, and some of the joy of being there is diminished. As a further injury, almost everyone has cameras, and almost everyone is taking pictures of the exact same thing I am…so my pictures are close to worthless to anyone but me. Do a search on Flickr for Austin NIN|JA and you’ll find at least 100 photostreams with shots 100 times better than mine.

I had a great time, but the camera thing gets to be too much. Does that make any sense?

So, what else? It’s Memorial Day weekend, which means I have three days off. Three unpaid days off. Life as a permanent contractor has its downside. I don’t get paid sick leave. I haven’t had a vacation in three years (and I wouldn’t even call that a vacation…I went to Texarkana for that trip). If I don’t work, I don’t get paid. It’s that simple. After the paycut I got a few months ago, I’m living just below my means, so I can’t really afford to not go to work.

That being said, this Wednesday the 27th is my 24-month anniversary as a contractor at AMD. This is important to me, and scary for certain reasons. AMD’s human resources rules state that contractors cannot work beyond 24 months, unless certain conditions apply. At such a time, the contractor should’ve already been converted to a permanent employee, or they’re walked out the door. Luckily, I have a certain condition, but it is my hope that HR will continue to let it apply: back in February, I got a six-month extension on my contract, which puts me three months beyond my anniversary. Which means I’m done after August 27 if I’m not converted already.

My hope, my prayer if you will, is that I am not unceremoniously walked out the door this Wednesday. I’m kinda in-between projects, and it would make sense if they did, but my managers keep talking about future projects. The contract I’m working under isn’t between me and AMD…it’s between AMD and Volt Technical Services, the company I actually work for. Whenever HR deems, they can end Volt’s contract for my services, and that is perhaps the shittiest part of contracting. I am not an employee – I am a capital expense.

(written on Wednesday, 11/23/2005 10:33:39 PM)

Whirlwind. Past 24 hours. Past week. It’s Thanksgiving holiday, my first trip home since Easter, and I’ve been going and going. Since my convalescence this past weekend, I’ve been running on some kind of edge. I’ve noticed it. Alertness. Awakeness, even in the lack of sleep. It’s all the preparations for the trip. The getting the car ready, the packing, the attention to making things happen. In the course of 2 days I hacked up a script to log what it reads from a borrowed GPS receiver. The logs from my drives are beautiful. Pages of useful data of just me…driving to Texarkana last night and, today, Ouachita.

Yeah, I went. Since I was in the neighborhood, loosely speaking, I took the hour-long trip up to Arkadelphia to see my alma mater. This December will mark my ten years since I was a student there; December 14, 1995 was my last day of enrollment. And though I’ve been back to OBU two or three times since in 1996 and 1999, this time around had an extra impact, a certain amount of poignance. It’s weird. It’s good to see the places I still sometimes happily, sometimes ashamedly, sometimes frightfully dream about and remember. And it’s creepy to see the changes, to see which buildings are torn down, which are brand new, and which are still around in all their mid-90′s glory. I’ve been away from OBU for long enough that the act of looking at the campus inspired few heavy emotional responses, and the memories that arrived on first trigger were cold, matter-of-fact memories; place names, hidden areas, geographic layout, things no longer there. But the fallout, the memories that return to me after I saw those places, those memories are at once both warm like fire and cold like an Arkadelphia winter, and they’ve sparked tonight’s firestorm of emotions.

It’s a mouthful, and I’m still trying to ruminate and digest today’s trip.

I shot around 2 1/2 rolls of film, just buildings, spaces, surroundings. No people. The fact that the campus was quiet, that school was out the day before the holiday (I had thought they’d be open), made things empty and solitary, but after my 4 summers spent on campus, the experience of the silent emptiness there wasn’t so alien to me. I did drive up there hoping to visit with old staff and faculty still there and to do some business with my school records, which didn’t happen, but just the experience of being back was enough to justify everything.

In some sense it was the Ouachita that I remembered, and in another sense it was like I was a floating intruder surveying a foreign place, an interloper in a forbidden zone checking up on its changed, hidden secrets. If there had been students there today, if there had been faculty and staff, it would have felt like being a welcomed stranger, like how I feel when I’m walking around Renfest on a late Sunday afternoon near sunset: everything is quieting down, everyone is folding up, the parking lot is decompressing, and I’m walking around between the booths where my few Rennie friends do their business. Yeah, just like that.

But today everything was just empty. The only human noise was from the construction crews, the few stragglers walking around campus, the campus security truck tooling around, and the ever-present Arkadelphia autumn breeze knocking around the leaves. I took the occasion to walk down the hillside beneath the student center to the Ouachita River, to the river bottoms where I spent so much of my time. They’d done some work there, made a walking trail, built steps and platforms down the hillside, thinned out a lot of the trees to open up the space to the campus uphill. The pavillion is still there, and so is the picnic table where my first girlfriend and I ground into each other in the heat of early summer. The odor, the smell down there on the river bottoms, the damp soil, the volumes of still water, the smell of river rot…that smell became my friend, my elixir, my aphrodisiac. I smell it and I am at peace. And today I took it in by the lungfulls. It’s still in my soul. THAT is the Ouachita that I miss.

The people I knew there were good people; not to gloss over everything with a rose-colored sheen, but they were my friends. They were the fire that kept me warm, the spark that burned new experiences into my memories. They were there with me…ten years ago. Not today. I think that was part of what is so surreal about today’s visit, and so saddening and angering. We’ve moved on, they’ve moved on; there were no familiar faces there today to share in today’s experience. I think that’s the hardest part.

It’s heavy, these floods, these torrents of memories and emotions that’re filling my head right now. Just looking around and seeing everything has brought them forward after so many years of not being triggered. There are the big picture memories that’ve always been there, but today brought back the tiny memories, the things that’ve been taken for granted, the decorations on someone’s house on the edge of campus, the fact that the ground near the theater is covered not with grass but with clover, the angled plaques mounted on a courtyard…those memories have come back.

The side trip to Lake DeGray, where I loved going, didn’t help much with the flooding. Went to the Highway 7 beach because it was the closest of the places I used to haunt, and it had the expected late-November empty beach hauntedness. The breeze was a wind over the lake, chopping up little waves in my direction as I stood on the point looking over the lake at the waning sunset. The parking lot was empty. The water was low. And everything had a heavy, heavy poetic air. This is the sunset. I cannot go back. No more dawns. The music playing on my laptop’s jukebox affirmed it, hammered it home:

“The paths that I once tred
Have all but gone
Only embers now smoulder
Where bridges once burned
I feel alive and yet I fear
What may happen now
I know,
I can’t return
…
Can I start again?
Erase this pain
By casting doubts into the waters
Asking judgment of the sea
Though Fortune may guide the fools
I have no wish to be free
Until I am gone.”

-VNV Nation “Distant (Rubicon II)”

In the past week I’ve been ill, I’ve been hyper, I’ve been clicking through the to-do list, I’ve been awake. I even finally and officially met this girl I’ve been exchanging glances with at Mojo’s for the past 3 months. And I’ve been driving, enjoyably and alertly driving. Sightseeing. And now I’m feeling, feeling things I can’t explain without metaphors; I know the words, but I can’t put them together, can’t craft what is necessary to communicate these things. That is my state. I’m still digesting.

Last night was quite interesting.

It all started yesterday morning. As is my usual, when I woke up I turned on the radio to [KLBJ] to start the day. The morning show, [Dudley & Bob], my favorite show on that station, has a tendency to get really, really interesting. Well, lo and behold, porn star [Sydnee Steele] visited the studio, so obviously my ears pricked up. :) As is also my usual, I tuned in to the webcam at the KLBJ studio, and yessir, she was there. Dudley and Bob, and the rest of the on-air cast, sweet-talked her into stripping down nude. Score! It was great.

Also in the studio, just after Sydnee’s really-cool visit, were four girls from the [Canned Film Festival], which features local film shorts that were rejected from our recent [South By South West] festival. Let me tell you, Canned girls are hawties. Wow.

Luckily for me, luckily for us, I saved all the [cam images]. That was a real treat, after just waking up. Was nice, really nice. But the day’s just getting started.

Ok. So I’m off to work. Got to work by myself, which was a joy. No listening to coworker F coughing incessantly. No dealing with coworker N’s music. No dealing with BossMan pulling me from one job to another. It was a pleasure to see that little treasure Coworker M. She was dressed really cute. Oy. What I would do for her… *Ahem!* So, anyway, had a quick chat with Coworker S about that morning’s show on KLBJ, which he’s a fan of. Told him I saved the images. He got a guffaw and hinted that he wished he’d have seen that. Told him Sydnee’s here in town for an in-store appearance at the Adult Video Megaplexxx, told him I was thinking about going, at least for something to do. He was like, “Hey, that’s tonight?!” Hehe.

Day of work done, I head home. Did some tooling around with my site, wrote a script that generates an html index for images in a directory, and uploaded that morning’s cam images onto my site. Then I got itchy. Decided to go to the in-store appearance, but I wasn’t goin’ alone. You bet. I grabbed my roomate, we headed to Mojo’s in an effort to grab more people. Oddly enough, everyone I asked in my scattered groups of friends declined. Hmph. Prudes. So, just the two of us, we headed off to the store.

Let me tell you about the Megaplexxx. That place is clean. Well-maintained. Like the Blockbuster of adult video. Only here the staff was friendly, professional, and helpful. Very cool. So, we walk in and sure enough, there’s Sydnee Steele in all her porn-star glory. She’s wearing a torquoise stretch-tube dress, standing behind a table with all kinds of merch with her bodyguards keeping watch. There was a short line, so I walked around and looked at a few titles and rentals. Out of the corner of my eye, I catch her flashing a polaroid camera with some guy standing next to her with the goofiest grin on his face.

I walk around a little more. My roomate’s already bee-lined to the gay section. I got a kick out of that. Next thing I know, I’m right at her table, without really thinking about it. Figure, eh, why not, eh? Found out a topless polaroid was $20 (full-nude was $40). I pony up a twenty to her bodyguard, Sydnee and I exchange greetings and some small banter, she pulls her dress down to expose her enormous, enhanced breasts, and leads me behind the table to join her for a photo. I was surprised that, with heels, she was actually a little shorter than I am. Thin, tanned, nice body. She holds out her right hand, I take it with my right, lock fingers, she folds our arms over her waist, and I put my left arm around her waist to lock hands, and *flash* we have our money shot. (Har har)

Wow. Ok, so not only did I see a porn star, not only did I meet a porn star, not only did I take a picture with a porn star, but I got to touch a porn star! Man, that was truly cool. I’m such a fanboy. To say she wasn’t charming would be a lie. She was very sweet, very friendly. We had a short chat afterwards. Found out she was into finance before she got into the industry, so she’s not really doing it for the money or fame; says she just loves what she does. Heh. Gettin’ paid to have orgasms, yeah, I can see how someone would love that kind of work.

She signed the polaroid, signed a free poster, and after more chatting, I got her to recommend one of the dvd’s which she had the most fun in doing. Picked up “The Shocking Truth” (available from [Wicked Pictures]). Not a bad flick. I’m thinking it was inspired by the Mel Gibson movie “What Women Want.” Tongue-in-cheek, but, hell, at least the plot holds up. It’s interesting to note that on the dvd, the “Chapters” menu goes straight to the sex scenes. Now that’s forward thinking. Ah, finally some producers know “What Men Want.”

So, we leave the shop and head back to Mojo’s. My friends are still there, and we show our spoils. It’s funny the mixed reactions we got. Some were like “Dude, that fuckin’ rawks!” Others were like “Um, oooh-kaaay.” Hey, for months they’ve been admonishing me to get out more; well, dammit, I believe I just did! Fehehe.

I hung out for several more hours, and the group at-large was talking about almost anything and everything, including the making of a sex-map, trying to see just who has slept with whom, and which people are “eskimo cousins”. That was entertaining. Almost the ultimate cock-block for everyone. Funny how that happens. Yawning, I head home around 5am and reflect on the day. Yep, for once it was time well-spent.

And the dvd is nice too, by the way. :)

Later!