Decade of Breath

I am ten years old.

A decade ago this month, I set out to quit smoking for the second and final time. My first attempt in October of 2003 failed miserably when I tried to go cold turkey. To soften the blow of being completely off of nicotine during that attempt, I gave myself congratulatory cigarettes. That, as you can expect, was a dumb move. After two weeks, I gave in and started smoking again.

Finally, in February 2004, after another case of chronic bronchitis that became part and parcel of my life here in Austin with all the mold and pollen, I decided that I really, really needed to quit smoking again. So I went on the patch. Since the drugstore didn’t have the high-dose patches in stock, I used the mid-dose patches and continued smoking for the first week, but with light puffs and low intake — down from 25 smokes a day to about 3 or 4 with plenty of guilt. By the time a week or so had passed, I continued the mid-dose patches without smoking, stepping down to the low-dose patches later. By the end of March, after six weeks, I removed my final patch and adapted to my new lifestyle.

I look back on parts of the habit fondly, but overall I regret ever starting. It was a self-destructive act that I began in ’95; when I was 23, I was obviously immortal and didn’t care. By 33, I started caring greatly. By and large, the only way I’ve stayed quit for 10 years is by following this dictum: I can’t start smoking again if I don’t put another cigarette in my mouth. This teetotaler attitude has served me well.

Stuffed

Do you know what I miss? I miss the headspace I could afford without a screen constantly in front of my face. Sometimes i remember my early 20’s before always-on communications, when I could sit in my room for hours and write, read, build, craft, think, dream the big dreams. The world outside was just over the horizon, calling to me to consider it. I felt it in my soul. Made plans to go out to it (instead of having it barge in on me). I’d visualize it like radio waves reflecting off the ionosphere, like a dome of light from a nearby town at night. Thoughts as deep as clouds are high.

Now, shallow thoughts, distracted thoughts. In my opinion, less a factor of age and more a factor of scattered attention. There’s a red flag on my screen with a number inside. There’s a tab with “(2)” on it. There’s a notification on my phone. There’s always something to answer.

It’s getting awfully crowded in this headspace. Not enough room for this addiction to confirmation, for this empty stand-in for real connection and friendship. When I turn face from the screen to do something with my time, the world moves on and I feel lost in a game of Catch-Up when I finally come back to the screen. That desperate emptiness kills me. So what is the solution?

Detect Traps

As useful as it is, it is a slightly hazardous thing to post a catalog of my music collection or to have my playlist tracked while I listen to music. Several times in the past — most recently this weekend — I’ve gotten requests from complete strangers to send them a copy of something in my collection. Case in point is this weekend’s request from another user of Last.fm:

Hi,

I’m very sorry to bother you, but as I see you’ve been listening to lo-bat quite a lot a thought you might be able to help me. So, the thing is, my hard drive crashed a while ago, resulting in a total loss of all my music, including all of lo-bat’s music. However, I have been able to retrieve some of it from various sources, but as his website is down, not all of it. Specifically it’s two tracks that i’m missing: Barbara listen to this and Kinderkopkes. Which leads me to my question: I see that you’ve been scroobling these two tracks before; do you still have them? And if yes, would you be so kind to consider sending them to me in some way?

Thanks in advance!

Cheers
[redacted]

See, as an occasional fellow listener of Lo-Bat. and his frantic 8-bit chiptunes, I have also noticed that his website has had problems in the past, and I’ve made a good job of finding what collection I have. I understand this stranger’s pain, I do. But here is the problem: who is this guy?

If I provide him with the two tracks he’s requested, do you know what I will have done? I would’ve broken US federal law, and potentially international law. Giving him these songs goes against the “Making Available” clause of the Digital Millennium Copyright Act, and would incur all manner of penalties and/or incarceration if I am found guilty. In all likelihood, it is a trap. I just can’t give this stranger the benefit of the doubt.

Before I can even consider sending these two files, I would have to do my own due diligence to track down the copyright of each song and determine if Lo-Bat himself is under signed contract with a record label or if copyright has been assigned to ASCAP, BMI, SESAC or any other agency to be enforced. That’s just too much work. Sorry, pal.

My advice in these situations is to decline the request. Protect yourself; there are entrapment trolls about, private companies who are paid by the copyright holders (usually the major labels) to go out onto the Internet, ferret out lawbreakers, and bring them to justice. With enough gullible suckers on the Net, it is a very profitable business. Believe it. So don’t be an RIAA show case; you can’t afford the help they’re demanding.

Disinterest

My resolution for 2013 was to make myself more interesting. Vague, I know. But I did endeavor with something concrete: I wanted to make myself more interesting by learning how to juggle. Seriously, yes. I’d been wanting to learn for years, but never got over that whole dropping-things fear.

Well, this year, I actually executed on it: purchased the Klutz juggling manual and beanbag juggling ball set, went through the tutorial, step by step. For about two weeks, I was half-assedly at it, throwing these three little beanbags around my apartment, having them hit the couch, the bed, the walls, the floor, thud-thud-thud. Turns out I have the physical grace and skill of a three-year-old, and after enough times dropping those damned bags on the floor, I began to worry about my status with the downstairs neighbor and I stopped. I just can’t handle more than two beanbags without losing my concentration.

Those three bags are still sitting on my shelf collecting dust. I see them every day taunting me, but I just don’t have it in me to get over myself and not care about pissing off the neighbors.

But isn’t that the purpose of being interesting?

Termination Shock

So, apparently it is a season of finishing things in Shawn Land. It’s not totally a good thing, though; it’s more like a mixed blessing. But it’s necessary.

First off, I finished an audio project for a friend of mine who asked me to create sound for his short film. The film is 5 minutes long, but is completely silent until the first line of dialogue halfway through. His experiences with test audiences and festival screenings taught him that audience members were being pulled out of the film, cocking their heads to the speakers and wondering if the projectionist is not doing his job. The request was for me to create a “tone poem”, or a series of sonic motifs that build in crescendo and tension and tell a story, but without interpreting what’s on screen. I’m pleased with how quickly and how well the entire thing worked out; I have a happy customer and got paid for doing something I like. I can’t wait to see the final print.

Speaking of media, I finished the entire 4-season run of “Farscape”. I got into it during the 2nd season, but dropped out after a while because of Other Things. This time, I managed to stream and watch the entirety of it in about 2 months, which is no easy task, especially somewhere around the middle of season 3 where it goes into the weeds. I’m happy that the story worked itself out and everybody got what was coming, but that ending came out of left field and left me shrieking “What?! NO!” I certainly hope “The Peacekeeper Wars” answers what just happened.

I’ve been reading Jack Kerouac’s “On the Road” for the past few months (more like “carrying it in my backpack for the past few months”). In a tiny way, after finishing it I understand “beat” culture a little more and how much it influenced and inspired the generations that followed. The Beatniks were a cultural phenomenon in the 40’s and 50’s, and these guys, the original beats, were the match that set off the fire. What we on this side of history think of when we hear “beatnik” is a vastly sanitized, culturally homogenized version of the actual thing: not a smoky bar full of black turtleneck and beret-wearing jazzhounds quoting poetry with bongos, but a ragtag group of people uneasy with staying put, uncomfortable at the thought of living with unspent wealth when there’s a wealth of experience it can buy, who seek no other goal in life but to push to the horizon and really dig that crazy vibe, to make with the real gone people. To get that tea and jazz. Thumb and drag. Wheel and track. Slum and tent. Beat, as in “beatified”, as in suffering for their sainthood. Chewing into the marrow of existence because true nature demands it. After reading this, I can point to a few of my old friends in school who may have read this in their youth and had it inform their lifestyle just a little bit. I love them for it; they are the personification of beat, and I’m glad they showed that side.

Now that “summer” is over, my downstairs neighbor is running his air conditioner a lot less, so I felt it safe to finally rearrange my apartment so that my bed is back in the bedroom and the couch is back in the living room. My home feels less weird now. “Why was the bed in the living room?” you ask. The air conditioner compressors for both apartments are sitting on the flat roof above my bedroom. The first 2 summers were somewhat fine with the hum from above, but downstairs’ compressor is having age problems and its thrumming is unbearable, which is why i moved my bed. The funniest part, now, is that even though tonight it’s 40F outside, the neighbor is still running his A/C like he’s a bear from Minnesota or something. Egregious. I’d love to see his power bill.

And, finally, the bad, bad news. I’ve been contracting with AMD since May, and today I was informed that AMD is canceling my Volt contract early. They want me, and three of my coworkers under my current manager, to be gone and off the payroll before they close the 2013Q4 books on the 28th of this month. So I have, essentially, 1 1/2 weeks left before I’m out the door. I had expected as much, considering what I’ve seen in other teams and departments. It’s not a personal thing; it’s completely impersonal. Not my performance, but the company’s performance. I should be OK with this, but it’s a tied-hand “what can I do?” situation. I’m not OK with this. I’m a contractor, so I’m a capital expense; the company has no legal allegiance to do right by me, and if the beancounters decide I’m expendable and easy to jettison when the books are heavy, then what can I do, really, but to just walk out and try to find something else? Just for once, I’d like to be let go for my own performance; that way I know it’s personal, that they’re actually paying more attention to me than their own quarterly reports.

Let us all praise the holy Quarterly Report. Without its guiding light, we might think long-term strategies were a good thing. And who has that kind of patience?

I certainly hope I can find something else, and soon. I have an addiction to money; my existential angst is tied up with it. I could live the beat life, but as it’s been described in the texts I’ve read, it’s not a great way to live. Especially when you’re my age.

So, things get finished. That’s a good thing, for once. I need to finish more things. The problem, then, is what to start next. But what a wonderful problem to have.