(Phaysis)

For the most part, the trip home was ok. Saw my family. Drove for 13 hours total. The drive up was wet; when it wasn’t raining, it was foggy. The return trip was faster than expected (ssssh), but I was heading straight into the heart of the sun for most of the voyage. Saturday was soggy, but we still had a cookout at my mother’s place; grilled hot dogs with saurkraut, pasta salad, potato salad, baked beans. Good eats.

Headed out for a drive around town Saturday night; seems the construction progress has slowed down a bit. Saw only two brand new churches. God Boxes. Cruised by the houses where a few of my best friends in high school lived; it was strange to see the houses without the original families inside. Things change, I guess. People move on. I have; I’m nowhere near where I was, or who I was, back then.

As agnostic (and as atheistic) as I have been in the past 2 decades, I’ve been thinking more about the supernatural, about higher levels of existence. The Big Thoughts, the kind of stuff that used to keep me drunk in the 80′s. I haven’t asked questions of faith in a decade. Three weeks ago, ABC’s Nightline program hosted a panel about Satan, and the four panelists presented four completely different views on the Red One.

The most notable panelist was author and philosopher Deepak Chopra. Of the four, I agreed with him the most. His point is that the existence of Satan is an extension of our desire to push off blame for our actions onto an outside party, and that it takes an amount of self-delusion to believe such an entity exists. I agree with this. After my fall from faith in ’93, the one realization I found that hit me the hardest was that once I take God out of the equation, the entire Devil complex falls flat like a cardboard box. Poof, gone.

What the show did, eventually, was get me thinking about the invisible again. Since then, I’ve looked at notes on Gnosticism, Buddhism, stuff about spiritual awakening. I don’t believe anything…yet. But it’s got me thinking, and remembering back to a time when I felt something higher and bigger than myself. It was a fire that kept me warm. It was a wind that drove me. And I pushed, and produced, and felt something. I haven’t done that in years, and now, after this spark, I’m burning to write again.

Woke up early this morning without an alarm clock; I guess I’m getting trained, which makes it all that more important, I suppose, to get to bed on time even on weekend nights. That happens, mostly, since I tend to turn into a pumpkin after midnight. I blame the post-coffee fatigue.

I’m heading up a posse to go see “The Watchmen” tonight at the Drafthouse. More like a double date. I’ve written about the Watchmen movie before, and that underscores how excited I am to be watching it tonight. I really, really hope it lives up to the book and does it justice. The ending better be intact; that’s what hit me the hardest about the book, and if they change that, or shift one small bit on the premise, so help me I’ll just…I’ll just fucking blog about it.

Had a thought yesterday on the road home. I was zooming past all of the new construction that’s going up everywhere. As I descended into the river valley, I could see 10 cranes in the sky; new condos going up where there used to be decay. Most would call that progress. I call it a travesty, and there are quite a few of you out there who would agree. This isn’t the town I moved to. But, in actuality, the town I moved to never really existed. It’s true that Austin has changed immensely during the 8 1/2 years I’ve been here; I’d expect no less than change…but not at the cost of the soul of this town.

The buildings and shopping centers and strip malls that pop up all over the hillsides…they multiply like bacteria across the landscape, like an E. coli bloom in the fertile petri dish of central Texas. And they lay to waste the precious resource of space, materials, community. And even though they try to buy the appearance of being “local”, they all look the same: large parking lot broken up with a handful of native, transplanted trees; planters lined in local limestone bricks; and the buildings are all made with steel beams, steel studs, and clad in stucco or thin limestone “bricks” for the façade. The shops that inhabit these places have no root here; they are chains, and they have no stake in the health, heart, or soul of this community. There is no soul to be found in them. It’s all money.

I’ve considered all of this before, but what’s unique about my train of thought yesterday is this: those of us who cry about and bemoan the loss of Our Olde Towne, we’re holding onto a stylized memory. When I think of old Austin, I think of a time that existed before I moved here, when abandoned auto dealerships were converted into coffeeshops, when punk-rock dive bars existed in converted garages, when people met in the marketplace instead of the marketplace moving out to the people. And people walked everywhere because everything was local, and people my age listened to indie rock and punk and blues and country. And the vegetation in the hidden spaces downtown felt a little wilder, the landscape was greener. The cold days felt warmer, the summer sun was brighter, the beer was cheaper, and the soul of this place was alive. The halcyon times. And that’s all the halcyon times are…warm fuzzy feelings on top of a communal memory.

Those places and scenes may have existed and flourished to the extent that we remember them, that’s a possibility. Or maybe it’s no more than an extension of our innate ability to artificially remember an idealized past that didn’t truly exist, to feel melancholy for what could have been, to feel nostalgia for the brief times that things were all right. Life was still tough then. The long-term memory of The Drag still had a four year timespan, and then everything’s forgotten. Everything is forgotten still, and all we have are the pictures, videos, movies to help us remember the warmer, happier times.

That Austin doesn’t exist anymore, and just like any other history of any other place, it’s an ideal. The same things happen now that happen then. People hang out, and the spaces they inhabit gain a bit of soul. People move on, soul dies. It happens. New spaces were built then, and those buildings are an integral part of our current environment. New construction today will be integral tomorrow. It’s the change that hurts. It’s the painful lesson that everything is temporal, and that what we cherish today will at one point die. That happens with life, and to some degree that happens to places. You can’t expect Mojo’s or Les Amís or Sound Exchange to exist and flourish forever. You just can’t.

But what you can do is get involved in something, some place, some scene, bring a bit of soul to the party, wherever it happens to be. Accept the change and be the change.

Math is the foundation of abstract thought. Actually, they go hand-in-hand.

I faltered years ago and skipped over some important mathematical fundaments and got lost, sowed the seeds of confusion and grew the crop of poisonous mental ineptitude that killed the young abstract thinker in me. I have trouble thinking past my immediate surroundings. It knocked me out of architectural school, a computer science degree, electrical engineering. I have always been technically-minded, but my weakness in math has been my stumbling block.

I was listening to this woman talk to a kid here in the allergist’s office. He was saying that he wanted to go to architecture school. The woman (not his mother) asked what grade he was in, what math class he was taking. Ninth grade, algebra. She went “Ew, algebra. I don’t think I need to know what X and Y are doing.”

That hurt my brain to hear that. I wanted to speak up in defense of math, but held mute. Damn my shy nature. My behavior is annoying, but hers is terrifying. Don’t revel in your ignorance.

Maybe I should heed that lesson.

(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?

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.