Push Up and Twist

Effective June 1, I am promoted at work to Tier 3 technical support. This is a good and bad thing. Good in that I get more pay and more capabilities in the datacenter. Bad in that I have more responsibilities and will be in the on-call rotation. I should be happy about it. Really, I should, but I’m just not feeling happiness for the outcome. I’m a guy who wants to go to work, do his hours, and go home to find some meaning in his life that is not tied to his job. I feel like I should be proud about the promotion, like I climbed a rung of the ladder on my own merit, but that’s not exactly the case. Due to a handful of people leaving the company this month, it’s essentially a battlefield promotion. “Your sargent stepped on a landmine, so congratulations, sargent!”

Because our staff has lost both of our overnight guys (among others), management has reactivated shift rotations for all eligible employees, me included. So this week I’m going to graveyard shift for a while. Here we go again. Time to hang the black plastic over my window and retrain myself how to sleep in the afternoon and be even more alone than usual. It was nice having that day-shift stability for the past five months, but nothing is forever. Nothing.

They also want to put me on the team that deals directly with our preferred customers. That’s great, I guess, but that means I’ll have to sit on conference calls and answer emails with customers who know my full name and direct number. I’ll be their guy, the man on-point to troubleshoot problems and contort to their custom whims. I should be proud of all this, but I’m not. The only bright spot here is that once I’m on this team, that will cement me back onto the dayshift because that’s when the special support hotline is open.

I just can’t be happy, eh?

Downtowner

Last night, I was walking down the hipster end of Sixth Street, just had a hipster slice of pizza at a hipster pizzeria, and then a hipster bird on a hipster sign shat on my hipster beard. It was magical.

Bottled Up

Due to a recent health issue, my doctor told me I had to stop drinking, give my body a rest. It’s not that I’m addicted (I’m not), it’s that I’m habitual. When there’s a bottle in my house, of course I’ll have some shots before bed. But I’ve been doing this daily — for the past three-something years. My liver’s not pickled or anything, because quite honestly I never got to the point of killing a fifth all by myself in a night, but that low level of alcohol knocked some things out of balance, caused me to go to bed dehydrated, have crappy sleep, and wake up hating the world. Now I go to bed hydrated, get crappy sleep, and hate the world in other ways.

So my most recent bottle was emptied about two weeks ago, and I haven’t been to the store since. I’m not saying I’ll never go back, or that I’ll never have another drink. That’s a bullshit claim. I’m saying that my health is something I need to look after, and that daily consumption may not have been killing me but it was making my health a burden to carry.

The downside is that I am increasingly pensive and irritable, to a hateful point. It’s surprising and it’s a scary thing. I don’t want to be that — I’m trying to take better care of myself by not drinking every goddamn day (only occasionally with other people around, for once). I don’t want to hate, don’t want to be antisocial, don’t want to have all these negative emotions, but goddammit I have no release now, nothing to pat me on the back and tell me things will be alright. Y’know?

Is this to be expected?

Sonance

The latest album from Shara Worden’s project My Brightest Diamond is in my heavy rotation this week. Of the ten tracks on her release “This Is My Hand” (2014), the one that is really getting under my skin is “Resonance“.

It’s a complex piece of work. The disparate musical and rhythmic elements phase in and out, each on its own apparent time signature, starting and stopping at its own whim, mashing together into a polyrhythmic, atonal whole. This serves as a strong poetic allegory to the hunger of Worden’s lyrics, of seeking resonance with the rhythms of other people as they phase in and out of our lives, of reaching out in search of a matching heartbeat in the noise. “All alone, we come and go / I long to be known by you / A resonance coming through”. The dense structure never fully congeals into a hard rhythm — just like the complexity of interpersonal relationships never fully merges into a beating dance — but eventually things melt together into an understandable drone where we can let go and let it wash over. “Can I dance without pulling back? / I can’t control you / I don’t even want to”.

The parts that swing together are the choruses, the points where the author draws inside and paints an overall conclusion about the world. A single, solitary viewpoint, an ideology, an interpretation of reality, As the author reaches outward for a hand to pull her back into the dance, the polyrhythms reappear, the chaos restarts. Other voices, other views, other lives take the floor. Reality is not so clean and pure. Holding hands to stay together, a resonance eventually comes through.

The vibration of one inducing the vibration of another. Resonance. Tuned strings. Poetry.