It’s Too Hot

Hello again. Time for your bi-monthly dose of new site news.

Things are moving slowly as far as stuff for the site. Nothing new there. I have the usual Big Ideas that I’ve had since the inception of Phaysis that haven’t been brought to fruition. But some of those ideas I’m getting new ideas about. Since I am now prone to imbibe a daily intake of coffee, ideas are popping and I’m making little touches to some code here, drawing some designs there.

I’ve set up a portable test server on my laptop and am experimenting with different content management systems, trying to find one that will fit my needs best. Some months ago I took a hard look at my history of glacial progress and decided that if I’m to have any luck with my site that I should stick to learning and using a prebuilt CMS instead of rolling my own. Well, I tried that track and found a few that fit what I needed…kinda. But the knowledge, code snippets, and concepts I’ve gained from examining them, hacking them to work on the limited setup I currently have Phaysis on, I’ve gotten new notions about writing my own CMS. We’ll see how it all fares.

On a negative note, I’ve been getting more spam than ever, and I have a feeling it’s from unsubscribing from a mailing list provided by a local radio station. Where I was once getting 12-ish messages a day I’m now getting 30+, and that was since unsubscribing. So the moral to be learned here today is that you can’t even trust the ones you can trust; they may be in a “business partnership” with other companies who aren’t bound by the first company’s privacy policy. Keep that in mind.

For shame, KROX-FM/101X. For shame.

I Asked For a Change

Some weeks ago I was asking for some kind of sea change in my outlook, looking for some kind of change in my life, something to make life less stale, more inspired.

I got what I was asking.

Last week I got curious and spent a few evenings looking through the boxes of photographs I’ve taken, all of them from 1993 to the present. This encompasses several eras of my life, from the latter half of my time at OBU to my first post-college residence in Texarkana, to my time in Greensboro, to my time back in Texarkana, and then the 5 years here in Austin, so reviewing these pictures was a flood of memories. The exercise gave me a more level perspective on my current life and I drew renewed ideas as I looked at those pictures. The people, the places, the memories. The ex girlfriends.

I found the pictures of a girl whom I consider the best girlfriend I’ve ever had, the girl from North Carolina. Our relationship in ’97 was incredibly brief and bright, interrupted by my sudden but necessary move back home. Things were starting to warm up between us and then *foop* it was cut short. We kept in touch in the early part of ’98, and she spent her spring break in Texarkana visiting me for a wonderful week before she returned to North Carolina. Some bad stuff went down in her life shortly thereafter and during the following summer we lost touch.

A few months after I moved here in 2000, I was in my bedroom cleaning out my wallet of all the crap that had accumulated. Pulled cards out, slips of paper, receipts. I found her old number and froze. All I had to do was call, but the uncertainty and trepidation took over and I put the number to the side. I drummed up the courage some weeks later and called only to find that the number was dead. So I made the determination to find her; but each time I searched online and found fresh leads, I felt creepy about digging for an old flame and put the information to the side, to never act on it. And I’ve been doing that dance for 5 years.

Well, the pictures I found of her Wednesday night enboldened me. Enough. Enough of the waffling, of the creepiness, of the uncertainty. If she is with someone else, then I will know. If she is still alive, then I will know. If she still thinks of me, then I will know. So I did a new search for her, combined it with the old searches and followed those leads. I sent out emails to people who had websites that referenced her asking if they knew her and could do the contact info forwarding thing. Done. That was easy enough.

Friday morning I awoke to an email from her in my inbox. Elated, I wrote her back before I left for work and after work called the number she provided me. We talked for an hour and it was good. Gave truncated, annotated histories; tried to compress 7 years of the past into a phonecall. She’s had a rough rollercoaster ride since ’98, the troughs and peaks fiercely overshadowing my own thrillride. But there’s still so much more to catch up on, much more to explore. We’re back in touch, and it is good that we’re talking again.

So. These new developments have me rethinking my own lifestyle, about my future, about my state in life. Without going into much detail, I’m looking for a renewal in my income, in my goals, in my motivations. I’m at a heavy time and I have heavy concerns now. It’s time to put the unnecessary parts of trepidation aside and take some responsibility instead of floating along on hopes and comfort zones. I’m taking the little steps to examine the way I think, the thought processes, the emotions, trying to understand them and, finally, to control them for my own betterment, like a watered-down method of zen buddhist meditation. If I can help myself in any way to take things into my own hands, I won’t find myself irrelevant at 40 and hungry at 58.

And so there it is. There is my sea change. These are heavy, pregnant times.

Things Get Stale

Well, an ol’ friend of mine, Colin, has moved off to North Carolina. He’s excited about the prospects of starting fresh in a new town with a house of his own after living here for 19 years. I’ll miss him, and I wish him the best in his new life in beautiful Asheville.

I’ve been thinking of my life, of the way it was when I lived in North Carolina. My talks with Colin, sharing my experiences, memories, joys, and caveats about that state have brought a lot of my life there back to me, and I feel so weird about it. Times there were tough; I make no bones about it, they were tough. Hard scrabble. But every place I went was still fresh. Not much in that mid-20’s time in my life had a chance to go boring.

Well, to think of it, that’s a lie; there were excruciatingly boring times; stale. Very stale. As stale as the air in my closed bedroom; the smell of cigarette residue, dust, chemicals from my work clothes, and sleep. For the eleven months that I worked my night shift job at PBM Graphics, I was nocturnal. I tried what I could to make something of my daylight hours. Gave it the old college try. I would catch the bus and hang out on a city lawn somewhere or do some shopping or just go walking around. But until I was fired from that job, I spent my days and my off nights mostly alone. Wrote a lot of poetry and journal entries. Got emo before “emo” was a word. Worked on my website. Life was dull, and I tried everything I could to make it exciting.

And then, as I mentioned, I got fired. That’s when my whole world changed. I was a daywalker again. But with no income it was a hard life. Paul and I were no longer roomates; he found an apartment in a triplex house north of the UNCG campus, I lived in a locking bedroom in a boarding house just south of campus. Rentwise I was on my own and I did what I could to make rent. Even went so far as to rake the thick blanket of leaves from the boarding house property in a deal to work off my rent.

Outside of looking for work and doing odd jobs here and there, I supported myself by “telemarketing”, meaning I would call my mother and ask her to bank transfer some money, which she did because, for once, she could. And I lived that way for over two months until I wrecked my car in the first snow of the winter and made the decision to move back home.

Well, it was during those hard times that I met the greatest people who ended up being the greatest friends someone could have. Kind people. Smart people. Not your typical coffee shop people. People who would listen to your problems and offer useful advice. People who would have you over for dinner and drinks, no charge. People who would drive you around when your car is stranded and in need of parts from the auto store. I don’t know if Greensboro is just loaded with people like that, or if it was all happenstance that I crossed paths with them and their charity, or if it was just the state my life was in that demanded my reaching out to others to survive, but those were good people. They made my life rich. Their general lack of negative comments and attitudes helped me stay upbeat, kept things fresh. Gave me good perspective.

So, I’m here in Austin, on the eve of my 5-year anniversary as a resident of this good city. Colin has gone away, and I know of others who are making the same moves to other places, and sometimes I have to stop and wonder what it is that’s urging me to keep my life in Austin. I get shaken about it sometimes, because right now my life is really, really stale. It feels that way more often than not. It’s good to be established, I guess. It’s good to have longevity when it comes to jobs, residences, habits, friendships, being a regular patron somewhere, yeah…but it’s stale. It’s boring.

I’m not considering moving back to North Carolina. At least not seriously. I know in my heart and mind that if I did it would not be the world I knew. Those 15 months there were unique and cannot be duplicated. They were at a time in my own lifespan where the neurology of feeling “fresh” about life was more prevalent, where feeling haggard and tired didn’t happen. I’ve aged, and these eyes of mine have seen a lot since then, so the innocence, newness, virginity of living there won’t exist, at least not to the same scale. Just as anywhere else. I’m sure if I would’ve lived in Greensboro for five years I’d most likely be feeling some semblance of what I’m feeling now.

I feel like I need a change. A different view on life. A different set of motivations. I’m not asking for sudden termination at my job. I’m not asking for eviction from my apartment. I’m not even asking for a different roomate. What I’m asking for is a sea change in my mindset; the ability to see things with new eyes, to find things that are still fresh, that are allowed to be fresh in the eyes of my friends. I don’t want the pass-or-fail edge that my final 2 months in Greensboro had, but I want the attention it inspired in me, the connections it inspired me to make. The last time I felt that was almost 5 years ago, and it’s time for an end to the stale.

Something “New”

Old news: The coffee shop known as Mojo’s Daily Grind has changed owners and is under new management. Gone is the owner who bought the place from Wade and ran it into the ground. New owners. So there’s hope.

New news: Tonight I knew I didn’t want to spend the entire evening at home. Again. So I left the house and went to Spiderhouse. The place was crowded as usual, and tonight I’m fuckin’ tired of crowds. I knew Mojo’s would be mostly dead, so I decided to give it a try again. And now I’m here.

I ordered an iced tea. What I got was a pint glass full of the murkiest, cloudiest, harshest black tea I’ve ever seen. Ever. And I’ve had some bad teas. I took one look at it as the barrista handed it to me and went, “woah, what the hell is that?” And he responded, “yeah, it’s strong.” And I said, “No, somebody squeezed the teabags after brewing.” He gave me a dumbfounded look as the other barrista rang me up for $2.25, to which I was like “‘scuse me?” So I ponied up the money for the bad tea and sought out a table.

This place is sparse, barren. There are people here talking, people on laptops, people reading, people doing stuff, but the place is lifeless. It is an empty shell of what it once was. Almost no art on the wall. The lighting is harsh and direct. All the funky second-hand furniture that Wade had accumulated to cram into this space with the intent of cramming this space with people is all gone. Every stick of weird painted chair, every tiled table, every oven door welded to a table stand – gone. What is left (thanks to the previous owner) is a sparse collection of wood and wire chairs, small tables, end tables, and couches. Pretty institutional. Sparse minimalism is best when used for the theatrical stage and for New York loft apartments, not for places where you’re trying to rebuild a lost community. We need to see less floor; these empty spaces reek of emptiness.

The new owners of Mojo’s have a long, long way to go if they’re aiming to bring this place back to prominence. It has decayed like an old amusement park, like a dead mall. The place I spent so many evenings and days between 2000 and 2004, the place in my memories, is not here. Hints are around, but it’s not here.

Another 4th on the Down

Two weeks ago I looked forward in time to this three-day holiday weekend and saw a bit of fun, frivolity, high times. Now that there’s only about 4 hours left of it, there’s still hope for the weekend delivering on those visions.

My fingers are crossed.

Today, scratch that, this weekend has found me in a weird mood. Restless, trying to escape the pervasive heat, trying to deal with parts of my body that let me down. Last monday I was getting dressed for work and inhaled some saliva after brushing my teeth. So I coughed. And each cough was punctuated by a hiccup. The coughing stopped, but the hiccups stayed. A few minutes later, I was bent over to pick up some socks in the closet when a hiccup hit me, sending my heart into another of its famous tachycardiac fits. Pulse shot to 180bpm (it’s normally 80~90bpm at rest). And it was rough. Lasted longer than usual (30 to 90 seconds). Much longer.

I had my roomate drive me to the E.R. where no sooner do I finish the paperwork and sit down to wait on my name to be called the tachycardia stops, my blood pressure drops, and I settle down. Total time: 15 minutes – the longest spell to date, and that’s scary. I was sore, and pissed that I couldn’t get an EKG before it was finished (that’s the only way to diagnose the cause of tachycardia). So I wasted time at the ER. And money.

The past two weeks have been kinda shitty moneywise. It was good that I did some math on my expenses because after all five of my autodebited bills come out of my checking account I’ll have around $150 left, and that’s to be spent on food, etc. I’ve been living skinny, and it’s scaring me. Always one paycheck from disaster. I want a job that pays better than my current job. I’m considering taking a part-time job in addition to my regular gig; put my wasted nights to good use.

Apparently, times aren’t tough just for me: I found out two weeks ago that my mother is sick again. The woman was too proud to call me to let me know (“I didn’t want to bother you…”). She’s unable to work and is down with full-body pains. Can only walk around with canes and walkers. So she has no money coming in, and the V.A. doctor will only give her pain killers instead of trying to give her quicker access to getting tested for Multiple Schlerosis. She has to be diagnosed with MS to be given the essential drugs she needs to minimize the MS attacks and get on with life. And things are moving glacially while she’s living the bad life on the skids.

It bothers me that I can’t afford to help my mother more; I shipped her two books, a card, and $40. She has food stamps, so she’s not hungry, but nobody visits her, hardly anyone calls her, apparently my sister will have nothing to do with her – and she lives in the same town (I need to get to the bottom of that) – and my mom’s just too young to be going through this kind of thing.

So I guess I have a few issues to deal with. Normally I am able to have good weekends and even better 3-day holiday weekends, but it’s not possible this year. Not at all. Don’t expect me to celebrate much.