Enigmatic Histories

On an Enigma listening kick tonight. Michael Cretu’s fledgling project has left an indelible mark on my adult life; each of the six albums is etched permanently into the soundtrack to my life. I listen and I’m swept backwards into times far-receded and fading into idyllic pastels of halcyon days.

  1. MCMXC A.D. – my sister was given a copy of this by an uncle; it punctuates first the summer of 1990 and later the spring of 1992 when I was able to borrow it from a friend at college. I dedicate this album to my sister, to Ryan who loaned it to me, all my other friends at the time, and to Melissa, the girl closest to me who dug it most.
  2. The Cross of Changes – I got into this album heavily in the summer of 1995, several years after its release. I borrowed it for a long time from my friend Steven down the hall. It punctuates that summer, the lightness and heaviness of everything, the passion of my first love. It’s dedicated to my first love, Donna, and to our friend Liz who talked me through the rough parts.
  3. Le Roi Est Mort, Vive le Roi! – I discovered this album while driving a delivery van during my early months in Greensboro; I thought it was a new Yes album at first; glad to be wrong. Picked it up and didn’t put it down for weeks; it carried me through my tribulations there, kept me warm on the chilling nights of late autumn. First album where the romantic ties are slim; it hit me more on an interpersonal level. Dedicated to Stephen and Misty, Paul, Pam, and Joelle, my only friends-with-history at the time.
  4. The Screen Behind the Mirror – arriving to me in the heady buzz of the early tech boom of 2000 in quiet Texarkana, it gave me impetus to keep pushing for escape into the world at large. I was living at home at the time and working at a hotel, so anything to make me get away from it was a welcome relief. Strongest memory is cranking this album at top volume with an empty house while getting dressed for one of my rare nights off. Dedicated to Josh, Jon, Laura, Liz, mom, and Sandra.
  5. Voyageur – I discovered this album while hearing the title song playing before a movie. It was Cretu’s first departure from the slightly-worn chant formula that made his project famous, and cemented his place in the league of extraordinary electronic musicians. Of note is the song “In the Shadow, In the Light” which gives voice to my loves long-lost. Dedicated to Amy, my highschool crush to whom I drove to see for the first time in 13 years at a weekend festival near Houston.
  6. A Posteriori – Possibly Cretu’s final album as Enigma, this album has a stark poignancy as either the end of something good or the transformation into something better. I was in a hard time emotionally last year when this came out, and I came to appreciate the smoothness, sensitivity, passion, and light that the album offered me, carrying me through another rough time into redemption. I dedicate this album to MaRanda, to whom I sent a copy, in whom I respect, from whom I’ve gained a new interpretation of love.

The emotional heaviness brought on by these albums causes me to reflect on my past; some people have no use for history, but it is my poison, tonic, elixir and medicine. I require a soundtrack for my life, and I gladly take its doses to give me perspective on my present.

Fortune Falls

Today, I watched a bird suffer and die.

I was finishing my meal at a chinese restaurant, about to crack open the fortune cookie, when I heard a rattling slap on the window to my left. Seeing no one outside, I looked down to see what had hit the window and there it was, fluttering on the sidewalk. Small grey bird with generic brown markings, short but pointed beak in black. The beak was curled downward at the tip, most likely from the impact. Five people trickled by in the first minute; it fluttered and tried to get away from them but got no further than two feet from where it landed. The people noticed, some bent over to see it, but sensing the need for more help than they could invest, they walked on. And I sat inside watching.

I don’t know if the wind was knocked out of it. I don’t know if it was dazed, but for a bird its movements were erratic. The damage was obvious. It pulled its wings in, tried to get up on its feet but failed in standing. Its head twitched and its mouth was open as it tried to breathe. The breaths were deep and fast, and then shallow and fast, and then its eyes lowered and closed. The breaths were shallow and slow, and then nothing. A few seconds of motionlessness, and then its tail and legs twitched. I have seen a death rattle.

The fortune cookie read, “You will be showered with good fortune.”

The horror of death is to die alone and unnoticed. I could not help this bird to live, but I was there to help make its unfortunate death meaningful. I paid attention. The biblical verse of Luke 12:6 says “Are not five sparrows sold for two pennies? And not one of them is forgotten before God.” This bird will not go forgotten.

On My Second Week As 35

Reflecting on my life and where it is now. Turned 35 a week ago; I’m almost at the statistical halfway point until death. Sometimes I feel halfway dead already, and that’s unsettling. Starting to see further signs of growing older.

As I sat down to write this entry, I cued up some music, logged in, and sat with a blank form; the words didn’t come, and the music was keeping them away. I’m now seeing what our parents went through, that mental focus gets harder and harder. I’ve said before that I can’t get any work done at a coffee shop unless I have relative isolation; the same is true when writing journals. Sometimes it happens, sometimes it doesn’t. I had to turn the music off so I could think. Nothing but the drone of my computers’ fans; no distracting sonic impulses, no melody to carry my thoughts off like so many children behind their pied piper. I don’t want to be this way, but it’s a progression that’s been occurring for a few years. I guess I’m finally starting to recognize it.

I had an old flame come into town for my birthday weekend; not that she came in specifically for that, but she was travelling and stopped over for a few days on a coincidence. It was a true pleasure to see and spend time with her.

I had settled it within myself that I would be over and done after pining for her, holding a candle for her, for many, many years. And yes, I was done, resolute to move on. She has her life, her love, her choice; though we had a brief, jubilant shout of greatness years ago (with a few echos), her life was her life, mine was mine, and that was that. I sighed as I watched her drive away out of my life for the third time, but after being on a high from the greatest birthday weekend ever, I didn’t mind so much. I felt 29 again. I could conquer the world. I could date around. I could move on.

The nirvana didn’t last long; I foresaw that the depressive crash to my intense manic phase was imminent, and like a self-fulfilling prophecy it happened. Midweek. She and I are on the phone; I’m keeping her company as she was driving through Mississippi on to her home. She said she missed me. There was something in her tone that made me doubt my own resolve to move on. It cracked my foundation.

By the weekend, she made it home at last and got settled in with her new life and new love, and I was here aching and debating with myself. I felt withdrawal; cold, lonely, hungry. I knew what a heroin addict feels when he needs a fix. It’s that hunger, the desire to feel warm, loved, whole again. It hurt. She had nothing to do with my state but to say she missed me; that pebble started the avalanche that revealed the mountain of physical, mental, and social loneliness and longing that’s been hidden underneath years of snowy denial and distractions.

Enough time has passed since this revelation; my neurochemicals are somewhat leveled again. Still a little pensive, but that’s my nature. I don’t feel so bad about the whole thing, but I’m still left with the knowledge that I need someone in my life. It’s a bad, vulnerable place to be, sexual politics being what they are. I guess my best move is to keep my guard up and try to be the awesome guy I know I can be. Beyond that, it’s anybody’s guess.

2,600 Hertz

Last week I took the opportunity to hang out for an evening with a guy named Emmanuel Goldstein (nee Eric Corley), the founder of the venerable 2600: The Hacker Quartely, a magazine written by and for hackers. He was in town for the technology portion of the local South By Southwest conference where a founder of Make Magazine, a friend of his, made a keynote address. Emmanuel was also slated to make a few presentations.

Two weeks ago in his radio show Off the Wall (broadcast in NYC) he mentioned that he was coming to Austin and that he would be interested in hanging out with any of his listeners here who would care to do so. My buddy John jumped on the chance and invited Emmanuel to join us at our usual friday night meeting. He accepted.

I was the first of our group to arrive; the big table where we usually meet was occupied by three guys I’d never seen before, so I set my stuff down at another table and made my way to the counter for coffee. As I passed the table, I overheard the three discussing when Austin 2600 meetings were held; one was under the impression that it was the 2nd friday of the month. This was the clue that told me these were the guys we were waiting for. I interjected and corrected them, saying they meet on the first friday. I turned to the older guy and asked if he was Emmanuel, he acknowledged, and I smiled and introduced myself by saying, “Ah, we’ve been expecting you.”

I got my coffee and settled in at their table; traded introductions with the other two guys. Within minutes, other people from my group were showing up and joining in. Emmanuel was asking us things, getting a feel for how life is in Austin, and he pulled out a digital audio recorder, asked us if it was ok to record us for his show, and we agreed. The final results can be found at the Off the Wall site.

He started by asking us where we were from, how long we’ve been living here in Austin; he wanted our opinion on how our hometowns and Austin represented life in Texas. Being a New Yorker, he likely has some notions of what Texans are like and he wanted some better depth to the image, hence the questions. I’m not sure how well we fleshed it out, but apparently he did leave Austin with an understanding of how laid-back it is here.

Emmanuel wrapped up his recorded segment by asking us about the local pirate radio scene. One of the things he does when he hits a new town is scan the dial and what he found was KPWR at 91.1MHz (they don’t do their own broadcasting; they’re of the new breed of pirates that essentially set up an internet-only music stream, and it’s up to volunteers to independently set up a transmitter and simulcast the stream). He dug into what we knew of them and the other “stations”, and he was blown away by how strong the scene is here. Later that weekend he got to take a tour of the KPWR studio and meet some of the volunteer staff there and was impressed.

It was nice to meet and hang out with Emmanuel. As unassuming as he is, you would never know by looking at or listening to him that this is a man who helped in the formation of an entire hacking subculture. He gave hackers one more voice, a touchstone, and a community in a dark time one decade before the public embrace of the embryonic Internet and the chat rooms, message boards, and document archives it enables. Well met.

From Scratch to Soothe the Itch

It’s growing. The itch to redesign Phaysis from the ground up is growing. Not just a redesign, but a rebuilding. It’s my webspace, and I should damn-well start doing something with it. I need a blog, a gallery, a space for uploaded files, RSS feeds, some commenting code, and, among others, a method to email me from a form.

I do have some of that functionality already, but it’s spread out in disparate pieces of seperately-maintained code. Currently, I have a journal viewer and a journal writer; two seperate pieces with their own libraries and very little shared code — totally inefficient. I have a form-mailing script which is a few major versions behind the latest revision I’ve written for use elsewhere. I have a fortune-cookie generator — cheesy and oh-so 1998. I even have a space where I can upload files, but the moment I share a link to a file with a friend, the URL for the rest of the space is easily discernable and other files can be grabbed. For a gallery, I have a static html page (yes, static) that pulls in the image files that I resize, upload, include and annotate by hand. There’s no tags, no categories, no users, no comments, no feeds. On the blogosphere, I’m rockin’ my own island. And my itch to rebuild it all is growing.

I’m having to learn and live with WordPress in the order of building the knitting site for my client. I vehemently hate to admit it, but I like it. It hurts to say so, because a) it’s an already-built piece of software, b) it’s written in PHP, and c) it’s subject to the same problems and vulnerabilities every other WordPress installation may be subject to. But it’s damn easy to install, configure, and use. I’m torn.

I guess my biggest problem with using something like WordPress is that I can’t help but feel a twinge of defeat and sadness when I go to a hacker buddy’s site one day and happen to notice that instead of reinventing the wheel as is sometimes the hacker creed he has, instead, installed a set of tires and has gone on about his day. It’s true that in this day and age nobody needs to know any programming to be published online, but when I see someone take the easiest road instead of using their skill for their hobby, my own stance on my hobby is challenged.

So I have two roads, really: the easy, pre-packaged route to my apartment home, or the difficult trek uphill to my own cabin on the mountain. Whichever path I take, the itch remains until I reach my destination.