(Phaysis)

Break the sun!
Race towards the common ground
Life! Rewards! Dream!
On the highest of the higher planes.

Sieze—my—heart
Give me ’til morning dew I promise you
Freeze—the—gun
Morning a pistol SHOT!
And the race is on.

Be the one!
Let me be the only one for you
Love! Hold on! Regrets!
Challenges of Daily Bread.

Who are you?
Did you seek the morning castaway?
Hold out, fight, tonight—

Even though the world can beat you down
I am standing calling
Hold on to this life with me, tonight.
. . . Tonight.
Morning come to keep you down
Highest spirits heavy falling
Living under the starting gun
Time to fight!

Live! Love! Dream!
Heaven going ever higher
Sieze the world for me tonight!
. . . Tonight.
Give! Shove! Steam!
Hotter than the sun of summer
Hold out! Hold on! Hold on!
. . . Hold on!

Living out your dreams—

(written 1997-03-31)

So. Welcome to the new Phaysis-point-oh. My nine years with Prohosting have drawn to a close, and with the change in webhost comes a change in journaling engines. After 9 years of trying, and failing, and trying, and failing, and trying again (and then failing), I have given up on building my own engine and have finally decided to take the path of least resistance. Phaysis.com is now powered by WordPress. Resistance is futile.

During the site’s downtime (you did notice it was down, didn’t you?), I took the opportunity to convert all my old journal entries from the original engine (and a long-lived hack) called “Sojournal” (clever, ain’t it?), into a format suitable for importing into WordPress. Took a week of work to build the conversion script. So after installing WordPress on my new webhost, doing some basic configuration, and selecting the temporary design theme, I imported all of my old entries.

Now everything I’ve written over the 6 years I used Sojournal are instantly accessible by tag, category, archive, permalinks, and by the nifty search box to the upper right. Amazing how handy that stuff is, considering that for years the only way to read specific entries in Sojournal was to step through the pages sequentially…aaaaall the way back to the start. I know a few of you who did that, and I apologize for never fixing that design oversite for so long.

In the future, I plan to post an import conversion how-to with code and samples. Because I’m pretty damn proud that I was able to identify the need, start the project, plan the solution, and implement the code necessary to finally, for once in my unproductive hobbyist career, finish the damned project. (I have to celebrate my victories, no matter how insignificant they are.)

The upside to using WordPress is that it’s one of the most widely-used blogging engines around, so there’s a ton of support, themes, plugins, widgets, debugging, etc. So the heavy lifting has been done for me already. And that’s intensely liberating, because after years of groveling at the text editor with no less than five journal-engine abortions — “Glyph”, “Raganotes”, “Craftix”, “Ph::Thing”, and most recently “Munde” (the names are more clever than the code) — I can move on with my life and get to posting. Which is why I started this site 9 years ago (I promise you).

The downside? Spambots. Common attack vectors. Well-published vulnerabilities. A treadmill of upgrades to fix problems. Actually, the upgrades are fine, since the pen-testing is done by the developer community instead of me. And the final downside: homogeny…that’s a tough one to overcome. Everyone has a blog; what makes mine so special?

This is my blog.
There are many like it, but this one is mine.
My blog is my best friend. It is my life.
I must author it as I must author my life.
My blog without me is useless. Without my blog, I am useless.
I must write my blog true.
I must shoot the shit straighter than my blogroll who is trying to ping me.
I must bullshit him before he tracks back. I will….
My blog and myself know that what counts in the blogosphere is not the flames we fire,
the noise of our posts, nor the threads we make.
We know it is the blog hits that count. We will hit….
My blog is human, even as I, because it is about my life.
Thus, I will learn it as an author.
I will learn its permalinks, its categories, its tags, its comments,
its pages, and its blogroll.
I will ever use it against the ravages of annoyances and indifference.
I will keep my blog clean and ready, even as I am clean and ready.
We will become part of each other. We will….
Before RSS I swear this feed.
My blog and myself are the defenders of my personality.
We are the writers of our emotions.
We are the presenters of my life.
So be it, until there are no more emos. PEACE.

Gaslight comes through the window of my bedroom.
Its incandescent hues cast a broken square upon my wall.
It makes the old paint glow a faded yellow-white.
I can see the moving shadow of the curtains
blowing to the beat of evening breezes.
Lying in my bed, I feel so much;
only a child, but experiencing a memory of the ages.
Two other beds beside me.
In them, my cousins lie;
some on beds,
some on cots below,
and I’m the last awake.
Worn out, we’ve had a busy day
down in the river.
I can hear the traffic go by, to the late-night tempo,
down the street, just one block down.
The grownups are in the living room
talking, laughing, living.
I will remember this.

I feel you.
I stretch and reach, push forward
And straight for the gut you punch, pinch, jab.
I completely feel you.

Once, we were in harmony.
Now, you complain of my years of abuse.
Feed back the pain I fed to you.
Harmony went dissonant.

The moment I think of our unsteady peace,
You strike out at me.
Relief comes in waves; hope, in unsteady moments
Punctuated by twists, pangs.

What can I do to make things right?
What can I take?
I bow down, double over, hug you in some kind of embrace.
Will you accept my apologies?

Went to the opening weekend of Texas Renaissance Festival. I give my weekend’s experience a score of 65%. Friday night sucked, saturday morning sucked, but saturday afternoon and evening made up for it mostly. I hung out with my Texarkana friend Brian. We set up camp close to this group of people from Houston and San Antonio. A bunch of party animals. I made sure to get myself drunk saturday night on some of Brian’s camp-famous punch and two rum-and-cokes. Over two evenings I was able to eak out less than eight shoddy hours of sleep.

After the higher-than-expected ticket price, the flat tire made when looking most of friday night for Brian and his camp, and my expenditures on food, drink, and supplies, coupled with the lack of sleep, I made the choice to strike camp sunday morning, skip the second day of Festival, say g’bye to my new friends, and drive home where a shower and bed awaited. After unpacking and cleaning up, and during the process of getting dressed, I fell asleep. Woke up enough to transplant to the bed and stayed there for 11 hours. Got up around 2am sneezing my ass off, then went back to bed at 4 for another 4 hours of sleep before work. Sunday just did not exist.

65%.

The presidential debates are under way. Watched the Vice Presidential debate. Wasn’t as clear as the first Presidential debate last week. Both sides made good points.

Currently feeling something resembling the leading edge of a case of bronchitis. I’m in the denial stage. Feeling a little better after vacuuming my room and cooling off. Funny what a little cleaning up can do. A cluttered, unsanitary room with papers, tissues, and stuff everywhere is totally the way my room is when I’m sick. It’s not that way any more, so maybe it’ll work in the reverse direction.

Water + vitamins + cleaning = healthy Shawn

So, I got paid today. Rent is now paid, as are two of the three house bills. I got one of my breathing medications refilled. Got my three rolls of Austin City Limits film processed. I’m now certain that my camera has outlived its life expectancy. Quite a few of the shots are seriously lacking. Some are even double-exposed. I’ll have to do some creative cropping and color correction to get anything decent out of them, as most shots have the members of the various bands consisting of small blobs of film grain. I hate to admit, but I fear it’s time to get a digital camera.

I’ll see what I can do about the pictures; I’ll have to edit and decide which to post. That’ll be later. Sorry.

I got the inspiration to work on some Glass Door songs the other day. The desire waned by the time I got home from work and commenced to screwing with my music software. Sometimes I wonder if it’s worth it to even bother with the Glass Door venture.

Course, same could be said for Chrontium, Glyph (the planned website engine for Phaysis.com), the image gallery tool, and some other secret side projects.

Shawn, the Great Initiator.

Sleepy now. What follows is a bit I wrote a few weeks ago concerning an element currently no longer in my life. Enjoy. Signing off.

This back is broken shapeless, the bastards got it beat
hands empty to the merciless, on knees to pledge defeat.
Running from the headache, to flee from venom’s might
I could have won the battle, but I have lost the fight.

These ears are filled with sludge, from months of backstab hate
and petty bicker laughing, the faceless fools’ berate.
Holding back the bile, who cares if you are right
I know I’ve won the battle, but I have lost the fight.

Hands burning from the liars, who tempt and tease deceit
who promise love unconquered, then pull from under feet.
Bowing to the heartbreak, I’m lonely here tonight
I may have won the battle, but I have lost the fight.

Heart aching from the lesson, each passing day is learned
you think of me as nothing, your silence has me burned.
I leave your cold contempting, and make my burden light
tonight I’ve won the battle, but I have lost the fight.