Earthquakes and Tidal Waves

Here goes:

I have announced to my roomate that, after 6 years of living with him, I am moving out. Thus ends our long history of cohabitation. It has been a long, cold winter.

Since the announcement, I’ve been looking at apartments; my goal is to find a one-bedroom flat as close to my current neighborhood as possible. It’s proving to be difficult. Feels as if the whole thing is backfiring on me. But, I keep searching.

I’ve found several places that fit the bill just right, but there’s always something that turns me away: high demand, long waiting list, no availability, obscenely high prices, stupid college-level restrictions like assigned parking, or some absurd anti-pet rules — one otherwise awesome place demanded that no dogs are allowed on the premises, period, which encroaches on any visit by my mother who travels with her dog.

I want to stay in this area, I seriously do, but I’m being priced out of my own neighborhood. I’m trying to be my own man and live on my own now that I can sort of afford it (I’m almost 36 and I’ve never had my own place — what the hell is that?). It’s time to try, but it’s an immense weight to do it. Pushing stones uphill.

So, tomorrow is an important day: I’ll have to make a decision on this one apartment I’ve been considering for the past week, pay my deposit and application fee, and await my acceptance. Failing that, my deposit goes back to me and I keep searching. It’s a juggling act with 12 balls in the air. I’m tired. This has drained me, dragged me down. It’s a full-time job, and since most apartment managers don’t work outside of business hours, it’s cutting into my actual full-time job. More stress.

All my previous searches for a place to live have been a cakewalk in comparison; I’ve either moved in with someone else or have found a suitable place within the first week. I’ve been at this since the first of the month and it’s growing long in the tooth. Ulcers from the stress; paralysis from the options; insomnia from the anxiety; cramps from the fear of uncertainty. I’m sick from this nonsense and I want it to end. And this is only half the work of moving.

Out of being worn down I’ll most likely settle on the place tomorrow and keep packing up my shit to move. Hopefully they’ll have the place ready within the week so I can start moving by week’s end. Then and only then can I be locationally and financially detached from my roomate (we’ve been interpersonally detached for years). I want the charade to end. I want the new beginning.

Failed Bridges Rest Comfortably Under Water

Why do I settle for failure? Why does anybody settle for failure? Putting up with failure for so long. Why do it? Powerlessness? Tolerance for bullshit? Passive aggression? Hoping it’ll get better while investing nothing in it. Things fail, and we just go along with it. No fight left. No strength. It’s not patience, it’s just muffled intolerance.

I just…settle…for less than the best.

Is this a function of turning the corner into middle age? What’s with the fear of rising up to Change Things? Fear of failure is inviting failure. I want to keep going along with the shitty things in my life, and that is most troubling to me. It hurts to make change; it costs a lot of effort. I know the rewards are worth more than the investment. I know all this shit. So why remain? Why persist?

Confusion: Not If, but When.

It was only a matter of time. I have a generic name; one of the most generic names anyone could have. I get reminded of this every time I do a search for it. Currently, a Google search for my name ranks this site as second in the list (results may vary). Guess whose site is before mine?

Today, I got a message through my Contact page from a new visitor down in…Down Under.

hey there Shawn
not sure if you will get this or not but I had to contact you because you inspire me
I adore your vineyard background and your music is fantastic.
My email address is xxxxxxxxx @ xxxxxxx . com
I would love to talk to you more abotu yoru music
jason, (also a gay Christian in Australia)

I was crippled with laughter for a few minutes after reading this. Yes, I’m an asshole. Jason (and all you others), you have mistaken me for a homosexual Contemporary Christian singer of the same name. Make no mistake: I am not him. Please observe context; use critical thinking skills to determine if I am that guy before you say “Hello”. Maybe I’m not using enough profanity or anti-religious sentiment to make it well-apparent. I must be slipping.

Thanks for the compliments on the vine image, Jason, but I doubt if you have heard any of my music. I doubt you’d want to hear it. I hope you don’t take it personally that you are the mounted deer head on my fireplace mantle. Someone has to take the fall.

I’m being haunted by the good ghosts of 1997.

Two weeks ago, I got the itch to build a new desktop wallpaper for my laptop to replace the current one which has been there for a few months. I saw something that day that evoked a voice I’ve let sit silent, and I wanted to wake up that voice and weave it into something good. That voice spoke of an image I drew in November ’97 when I was in the throes of hungry creativity during my two-month stint of hardscrabble unemployment in North Carolina. During those two months, I wrote poetry, I drew art, I listened to music, I met people, I had a new relationship with an awesome girl. Even without a job, I was producing. I was in the springtime of my life.

The vision was to use this drawing, a box with circular vines weaving in and out of the box, in a layered tableau of drawing, ripped paper, a cherry branch, a few vines curling around, stick pins, all softly front-lit and backed up by a textured background. I could do everything in Pov-ray, but I needed a scan of that drawing. I remember scanning it some time back in ’99, so I searched my hard drive and all my backups for the image. It was nowhere. Disappeared to the ether. So my only option was to scour my room for the drawing and attempt to rescan it.

In my search, I managed to unearth a treasure. I found my birth certificate. Found some more poetry from North Carolina. Found a stack of love letters. Finally, I found it: the drawing, and all of the drawings I had created and compiled between late 1997 and 2000. Bingo.

I was really, really into vines, banners, fineals, things draping from suspended bars, very fine lines, crosshatching. Still kinda am. I had several mechanical drawing pens, and I used them with much attention on making the most miniscule drawings. I would fixate on an image for hours, touching here, shading there until I was satisfied. It was like sex. After all the work, something beautiful would be created.

In the span of a few hours, I had dug out and set up the scanner on a very obsolete computer and I rifled through my stack of drawings to find the best ones to scan and commit to pixels. Spent some time the next day cleaning up the vine box drawing while listening to Nine Inch Nails and Rush concert dvds. I was happy. For the first time in a while, I was happy again. Not just the memories that returned while I meditated on my art, but there was the happiness from meditating on art itself. Having a mind quiet enough to draw. And it was there that the Eros returned.

If life is not lived to create, then it is a lie. I can’t get any more truthful than that. The reason we are here is to create things that will outlive us. And I’m feeling that drive again, like it is the springtime of my life. I am insane for having kept the voice of the muse silent for so long.

Kind of shameful, really, that I kept quiet, but I kept quiet because of the shame; an endless cycle. I had created so much that the amount of crap scaled upwards with the output and I started seeing it; instead of loving all my babies, I hid them away and stopped producing. I heard the voices, the wrong voices, in the coffeeshops, on the message forums, in the channels, rambling about talentless hacks who take themselves too seriously, and that had a very chilling effect on me. I stopped producing and it became winter. The Very Long Pause.

I’m not finished with this image yet, but I will be soon. I worked on it all day yesterday and spent today taking care of necessary things instead. I don’t want to be done with the voice when I’m done with the image. I want to keep drawing, keep writing poetry, get back into music, keep speaking with that voice, the muse. To emote. To love again. To take my failures and abortions in stride as I keep up the creativity. To be a producer.

I’ve been living a lie. It’s time to speak the truth.

Update (Feb 3, 2008) The image is finished. I put the final touches on it a few days ago, and now comes the time to share. Enjoy!

Getting Over It

I am finally getting over my cold. We broke up a few days ago. She tried to hook me up with her sister Bronchitis, but I said “NO! I’m not interested. Let’s just pretend to be friends and never call each other ever again.” I’m also getting over my angry cough; for two nights it’s been getting me up at 3am in a fit of dream-coughing that gets so bad I wake up and have to do something about it. Disrupts my sleep. But I take some robo, double up my pillows to elevate my head, and make another pass at sleep. Maybe tonight will prove successful.

Work is hectic. My department is in the middle of a move to the new campus, so my coworkers and I have been pulling crap out of the corners, piling papers, sorting them into stacks, and then throwing away all the stacks. Every wire, cable, heat sink, component, processor, screw, server, everything has to be sorted, returned to its place and packed up by 5pm next wednesday. So far, it’s all a clusterfuck: trying to motivate and organize a department of ~75 people to get their stuff straight, and trying to get the movers to understand what we need moved, and trying to have all parties communicate what actually has to happen (versus what people think needs to happen) is a herculean effort. AND my coworker and I have to keep producing numbers. So, when all our equipment is over in the new campus across town, we’ll be with our test servers and offline test equipment in the old campus trying to do our work for two days, and then we’ll pack it all up and carry it all across town.

Predicting a huge pain in the ass.

While writing this, I remembered that I needed to update my timesheet, so I tabbed over to my Google Notes page to note the time I left today. What the hell…when I clicked on the note that contained all my clock-in/clock-out times for this week, the note disappeared. Deleted. So I clicked “Undo”, and the note came back, then I clicked on the note again to select it for editing…it deleted again. So I clicked “Undo”. It didn’t come back. It wasn’t in the deleted bin. It just…vanished. What the hell. All my timepoints lost, and I hadn’t had the chance to enter it all into my real timesheet app. So, I tried to remember and re-entered everything.

Maybe I should not be so trusting. Maybe if I say “Google sucks!” they’ll find this entry in their results for the search “Google sucks” (companies have departments that do this) and they’ll contact me to see what they can do to help make it right. Maybe I should file a bug report. Maybe I should just get over it.

I hate computers.