Straight Edge Life

Why is it so easy to work the graveyard shift? I’m not all that fond of the daylight sleeping thing. It’s a pain in the ass for all sorts of practical reasons. Especially in this little town. But there’s something awesome about working at night. I always used to do my darkroom sessions at night. No interruptions, I could play my music as loud as I wanted, and it was easy to control the light for viewing prints. The same applies here… basement office, loud music, stable temperatures (I get sleepy when it’s too warm), no phone calls, no interruptions. In short, the perfect working environment for programming. Gets a bit lonely in it’s way… but only when I’m not working hard enough or get bored waiting for a slow computer.

In other news… I decided to go see an allergy doctor. I think it’s a good thing. Been fighting this crap for too long and I want to know what’s causing it. It’s bad enough that I don’t like to exercise outside. How wrong is that? It’s not that it’s better inside, I have no idea what causes it, but at least when I’m inside working out I’m not wet, cold, miserable and unable to breathe. I hear that allergy tests suck. All sorts of poking and prodding and pain. Oh well. I’m also going to see a shrink about leftover crap from my mom dying and from my mind-fuck of a divorce.

I’m sick and tired of hitting emotional roadblocks. I want my life to be open and to move forward, but there’s fear lurking around every corner. It’s actually closing my mind, making me not even consider certain options. Why not eventually go back to full-time photography? Why not get married or let myself fall in love again. There’s no rational reason, no lack of talent or determination, or opportunity… so why don’t I even consider any of it? I haven’t had much success figuring it out on my own so it’s time to get some help. There are causes and solutions to everything, doesn’t mean we can find them all on our own. Right?

Anyway… I had better get back to work.

Ok, wow. Just picked up a Quad 2.5GHZ G5 Powermac for a project I’m working on at the Public Defenders office. GOOD GOD IS THIS MACHINE FAST!!! I mean like orders of magnitude faster than anything I’ve ever worked on, ever, anywhere. Wow.

I have a dual 2.0GHZ G5 with 5GB of RAM at home and that machine is no slouch. Rips through just about anything I throw at it. Chews up monster multi-layered photoshop files with cycles to spare. But that baby can’t hold a candle to the Quad with only 512MB of ram. It’s really that fast. Ah… hopefully my 16 hour epic work days will shrink down to a quicky 12. Lovely. Too bad I can’t take it home and put it to work on all these weddings I’ve been shooting.

I thought I was going to sleep through the night at first… then I woke up in utter terror at 11:00 PM realizing that I have a meeting, no, THE meeting, in the morning. The one where I have to delicately explain why we’re months overdue with the new database system. So I flew down here and joined Karen the janitor in the basement dregs of the PDS for a long session of cleaning up other people’s messes. Got a ton done too. One of the gratifying things about development jobs is that you can always reuse 30% of the code you write for later projects. It’s a nice geometric progression because the more jobs you do the more pre-written code you get to put into play. This job for example is at least 40% code that I’ve already written. It’s nice. Unfortunately only about 5% of my time on this job is writing code. The other 95% is cleaning up the disaster that my predecessor left behind.

And yes, this job (and others) are exactly the reason why I haven’t been keeping this site very well updated. I have a hell-bent goal of being out of debt by tax season. But believe me baby, this site ain’t the only thing suffering at the expense of getting out of debt. No pun intended. Social life? Recreation? Physical fitness? Mental health? Ha! Who need’s ‘em?

Finally went out and picked up some boots and bindings for my Ride Decade this afternoon. Got the board last year, it was already the previous year’s model when I got it. The boots are from last season of course, on clearance. The bindings are new… Last year there wasn’t enough snow or time to go boarding. This year is going to be different. If there’s one thing I do for recreation this winter it’s cutting some turns through some trees in the white stuff. I may be working 16 hours a day 6 days a week, but Thursday, Thursday is my day in the hills.

I can’t, in fact, stop thinking about boarding. Pray for snow.

Shot another wedding this weekend. An absolutely enjoyable costume affair in the heart of the city. Drove down to the city with my dad, followed the bride and groom for a couple of days, and then back to Eugene with my sister. Haven’t slept more than a few hours a night for the last couple of weeks but life is good. I’m shooting. Even if it is wedding photography.

Ann and I headed out to the pumpkin patch last night and scored a couple of nicely shaped squashes (what the hell is the plural of squash anyway?) and made a mess in the kitchen.

I had to drive all the way up to Portland to deal with one of my web servers last night. Stupid thing just stopped accepting connections. I could ping it just fine. Just couldn’t get in. Started out from Eugene at 2 AM. On the way chemical spill on I-5 rerouted me way out on 99 east and horrible fog both on the way up and back slowed the trip down to a crawl. So I didn’t get any sleep last night obviously. I tried to sleep when I got back at 8 but got about 9 calls in the three hours when I was in bed. I finally decided to give up and just get out of bed. I figured my rich boy next door neighbor (his parents gave him the house as a high school graduation gift), who has been vibrating objects off my shelves with “eye of the tiger” all week, would crank his butt rock up pretty soon make sleep even more impossible. What a crappy day. On top of all of this I had to deal with a security threat on a different server and maintain some semblance of social dignity because family friends and my dad are in town. Blech.

Kristin Hersh. I can put her on and instantly bring back a million memories of my friend Sara from college. The music makes me feel like I do about so many people in my past. Conflicted. Like I never managed to get it right with any of them. They’re a million miles away, inaccessible and emotionally distant. I don’t feel connected. I get like this when I’m searching for ways to end, and reasons for, this growing feeling on loneliness. Maybe it’s this big old house I’m in. Maybe it’s just a lack of sleep. Maybe it’s more than just friends. Maybe I miss everything. I can’t quite put my finger on it. But I think it’s good to put on Hersh and keep my head above the sand. It’s easy to settle. It’s better to remind myself that things aren’t right. That things need to change. Whether or not I know what exactly to do to make things right. Eventually it will all make sense.

I’ve been on task for the last week or so. This always happens after I spend a bit of time doing something I like to do. It makes the stuff I don’t really want to do seem easier to handle. I guess maybe the trick to working hard is playing hard.

So yeah… It’s been busy lately. I know, I know. What’s new? But interesting stuff is happening. I’m being offered a full-time position doing programming work here in town. It can be either a 4 or 5 day position depending on how we set it up. And I’m very, very seriously considering taking the job. Especially if it’s a 4 day job. It would pay just enough to cover my bills and would give me the flexibility to work on other personal programming projects or go shooting a bit each week. Which I think is enough. I said a while ago that I’m done with big projects and I think this is the first step to getting away from contract work.

In the meantime I’m keeping way busy programming a number of different projects. I’m getting a chance to use xml a bit more, which is cool. I’ve been training Cam in Lasso, which is cool because he learns fast. And I’ve even been fiddling with a really speedy linux setup for a MySQL server. Fun stuff. More later…

I received an email this morning from “a worried mom”, a straight edge life visitor. She’s digs the idea of straight edge but is a bit concerned about the whole tattoo thing. What follows is my response. Almost verbatim… I thought you might be interested.

There’s a pretty big difference between the straight edge scene and the straight edge philosophy. The scene comes with all the typical earmarks that help a kid who hasn’t found their own identity “define” themselves. The tattoos, the music, even the typical clothing uniform of punk and hardcore music fans. But the philosophy itself isn’t tied to those things. The philosophy is about living a clean life and keeping your head, body and soul free of intoxicants. Healthy.

It might be worth trying to explain the difference to your kid. But it’s worth considering other aspects of the scene first… The music, although loud, hard and fast is surprisingly positive. The clothing, although ugly at times, is a fad and harmless. The hair… well, it will grow back and change back to it’s natural color eventually. So I wouldn’t bug your kid about those. No matter how much they don’t fit your taste. But about tattoos… it’s easier to see that as a line in the sand. They are permanent.

I don’t have tattoos, not because of any philosophical opposition to them, just because. The only complaint I hear about them from many of my friends who do have them is that you have to be really careful about where you get them on your body. It IS actually harder to get jobs with visible tattoos. Becoming a part straight edge shouldn’t hamper your future financial stability. But like I said, it’s a placement issue. Tattoos certainly aren’t a requisite for the straight edge scene and definitely not if you simply subscribe to the philosophy alone. Personally I feel like the strength and personal identity that the straight edge philosophy gives you makes the scene of straight edge itself irrelevant. Does that make sense? When you are strong and clean and smart you don’t need a scene. And that’s what straight edge is about. Strength.

There’s a mexican girl on the other side of my bench reading Playboy. Last night I briefly mingled with a 13 year old child star. Earlier in the day I had brunch with, among others, a girl who I’m pretty damn sure guest starred on Buffy the Vampire Slayer in season 7. I shared a room with Sarah’s brother, Josh, a Java guru working at Sun. Cool guy. Watched him spill so much game that he had at least two girls hanging over him all night. I hitched a ride in a convertible black mustang with a blond bombshell who looked suspiciously like Barbie. Also a cool person. Drank a 1:00 A.M. milkshake over onion rings in a fairly sketchy Denny’s in Burbank with Sarah’s husband, Johnny. On the Airport PA system Billy Idol and the Cure are keeping me chuckling audibly while I am now waiting for my flight. There’s a very country looking guy across from me tapping his toes furiously. I’ve shot more than a thousand images in the last 3 days and life feels pretty interesting for the moment. Of course, I wouldn’t want to live in this town, ever. Most of the people living here feel much the same way. But it’s definitely interesting to come and visit once in a while.

I came down to shoot a wedding. And that wedding was a lot of fun. Rachel wore this very nice 50’s style dress and the church was well lit. Can’t ask for much more. I’ve seen a few really funky wedding dresses and been in a lot of cave churches. And one thing I can say about L.A. is that it’s hard to walk 50 feet (not that anyone walks anywhere in L.A.) without bumping into 10 out of the 20 people you would need to coordinate a fairly major production. And they’re all happy in that wonderful California way to help you stage yours. So the wedding really went off without a hitch.

I’ve edited through the images from my Utah trip. Sadly, not so many photos from the desert as I would have liked this time. Just enough to add nicely to my Utah Photo Gallery (click to visit the gallery). Most of the stuff is from within Zion, Bryce or Arches national parks. Some shot on 35mm, others shot on high-res digital. All images are available as gorgeous prints; with or without mats, ready for framing, or framed upon request. Enjoy.

I had a great time on this trip, as I always do when traveling through the southwest, and you can count on more photos from Utah in the future. Although not right away, gas prices are a bit high at the moment.

Just got back from a trip out into Utah for a bit of photography and relaxation. Equal amounts of both, so it wasn’t an entirely serious photo trip. Casual shooting, casual hiking, lots of driving. The weather was great, even had a few thunderstorms. Great stuff. But as I’m sitting here editing my images I wish I could still be out there. A little more seriously this time.

Photography is what matters to me. Relaxation comes and goes, but photography teaches me. It’s not just a desire to shoot, it’s a need. Shoot, edit, print, sell. All four of those take me through the “process” of art. Instinct, self-discovery, voice, technique, and finally, validation. A lot of my work, the majority of my work, is never shown to anyone. I skip that last bit of validation simply because all I need is to know my own voice. To find my own path, to clarify my thoughts. But in whatever combination these things come they are essential to me. Completely, totally critical.

So, why does it take a third party to tell me what I need to hear? Rather, why does it take a third party to make me listen to the things I’ve been telling myself? To find what is essential.

This trip was great, perhaps one of the best I’ve ever had… but I need more. Something where photography is my only focus.

Getting back to my point about third parties… my life is scattered, progressively fragmented by a dangerous entanglement of work and life. It’s been cramping my creativity severely. My focus is all messed up. I can’t concentrate on my photography with any success and I’ve been making odd decisions. I can barely bring myself to pick up my bag and go shooting. So… at the urging of an article I recently read about motivation and creativity in the digital age, I am giving up AIM/iChat (except by appointment) and will only check email at designated times during the day. Maybe three or four times. TV, is also on it’s way out. I’d also like to turn off my phone, but I’m not sure that one is going to be possible. Things that I have considered many times in the past to help me regain my focus, but never did because I didn’t have any kind of backup telling me it actually could help. So… stick with me as I try this little experiment. The results should be worthwhile.

Just woke up. I was up pretty late last night programming. Still got a bit left to do before I’m done but it shouldn’t take too much time. It’s been a weird week. Like most of my weeks it’s been a blur. But it’s also been a little bit sad. My mom died from cancer on August 31st. This week, not so many years ago. I think for the rest of my life I will take that day to recognize that nothing is, or ever will be, as important as my family. This year it has been more like a full week as I have spent the majority of this week alone in my office. And trust me, being busy with work can never be busy enough to push something like this to the back of your mind.

This place, this house keeps me connected with everything that I love about my family. Both my old family and with the family I hope to start in the future. I can never be thankful enough for everything my parents selflessly gave or gave up to protect my childhood and to raise me as well as they knew how. They taught me about all the reasons to become straight edge and all the reasons to stay that way. They taught me about all the reasons to respect the people in my life, all people, and to respect the world around me. I can only hope I will have the courage not to bend when it comes time to show these beliefs to my own children. The strength to teach, the strength to show my own children an even better life than I had growing up. More importantly, to teach them how to find their own ways of staying healthy and loving life.

Anyway… I’ll be offline for a week or so. Heading out on a roadtrip. Back to a few familiar places to take a few unfamiliar photos I hope.

The dual exhaust of my twin G5 tower is like a pair of hair dryers in this room. A nice effect in winter, but not so much on a hot day like today. No doubt sensing the instability in my own mind, iTunes jumps chaotically from track to track with about as much continuity as a bingo card. Alpha Blondy, NOFX, Stevie Wonder. This unsettled mind of mine is getting to be a pain. I need clarity. I need the arrow. Direction.

I need peace between my heart and my brain. No… I don’t even care about that. Right now they are on equal ground, canceling each other out. It’s just not working. What I wish is that my heart would stop listening to my brain and just take over the whole show. For as much shit as my heart drags me through it always feels worth it in the end. Whereas I have never, ever, felt incredible after making a nice well-thought-out rational decision. No matter how safe and smart it may be to do that, it’s soulless. It’s a painful way to exist. And I’m put myself there not by getting good at being safe and rational, but by ignoring my heart. Rationality is the by-product of heartless decisions.

I stand when I need to jump. I know what needs to be done, what my direction is and where I am going to go. What remains to be done is to clear out the roadblocks, shut up, and just do it. This rational life I’ve built is not for me. I can think of a thousand things I’d rather be doing.

Ok, so here’s a hint to all house mates of the world. When any of your other house mates are gone away on a trip, be it for work, pleasure, or family emergency, don’t go into their rooms in their absence. There are many reasons for this, not the least of which is that it’s an invasion of privacy. Another reason might be because the house mate that’s gone just might really value his privacy… and have a redundant alarm system with boatload of motion sensors, alarms, triple power supplies and video cameras. An alarm system which faithfully notifies it’s owner, a second party as a backup and the police day or night, rain or shine on a redundant phone system. An alarm system which is very capable of revealing the trustworthiness of everyone in the house besides it’s owner.

I’m pretty bummed about this. The alarm worked while I was away. Which is great. I’ve done enough testing of the system, I wasn’t really expecting it to fail. But it sucks because I’ve technically experienced my first home invasion. By a housemate, who went into my unlocked but alarmed bedroom while I was away.

I think everyone has roommate and housemate horror stories. I used to live with this dude who threw spaghetti on the wall to see if it was ready to eat. It would fuse to the paint by the time anyone noticed in the morning. And of course we refused to clean up his mess, got mad at him and tried to get him to clean it off, which he never did… I guess that’s not so bad, but it was definitely annoying. I mean tonight… I have no idea if my housemate was looking to sniff my underwear, steal my data, steal my movies, fuck someone on my bed or borrow a book. And I don’t like that.

So here I am, awake a few thousand miles away from my home… knowing there’s someone still in my house that I sure as hell don’t trust.

I love the summer meteor showers in Oregon. A few nights ago I was driving up to Portland with Gabe and they were streaking across the sky in front of us. So cool. And with an evening like this, all warm and comfy, I’m psyched just to sit on this patio and stare straight up.

Ok, so do yourself a favor and don’t mix generic toilet bowl cleaner and lysol. I did just this in my downstairs bathroom this afternoon, creating a rather large quantity of vinegar smelling misty smoke stuff. Had to clear out of there for a while, returning only 10 minutes later with a rag over my mouth and a broomstick to flush the cleaners away. Yup, that’s right… it’s cleaning time. Got a house mate moving in tomorrow. I’m trying to make the place a bit more presentable. I’m made a hard promise to keep all public areas clean. No exceptions. I’m convinced that keeping my place clean is feasible only in inverse proportion to the quantity of things in my place. The less shit, the easier it is to keep it tidy. I’m getting a complex about this. Being stuck here with all this stuff for the last month has driven me to the verge of breakdown. It’s maddening. You should see my car. It’s like almost really clean inside. My laptop bag, my camera bag… organized. It feels so out of character but it feels so good to bring order out of chaos.

Ok, so I had an excellent meeting yesterday morning. The last 48 hours have sort of been a blur with work and the house and all that crap, and I couldn’t sleep for shit the night before because my kitten decided to play shredding machine on my ear. I wasn’t in tip-top shape for this meeting. I was exhausted, but shaven and clean. Which is good because there’s nothing worse than a stinky and groggy contractor coming into your office trying to partner up on a project.

Anyway… Out of weird coincidence this meeting was all about the stuff I was talking about yesterday. The folks I met with were potential customers, not clients. Clients make you work, customers pay you for work you’ve already done with the hope that you would eventually get paid for it. You know, work I did because I wanted to and because I loved it rather than work I did because I was just getting paid. So yeah… the meeting was photography related and fun and made me feel so optimistic. I feel like I’ve very quickly taken a fast step back towards the direction I want to focus my life. Photography. It’s not a huge thing. It’s not going to let me retire or anything, but it’s something. And something is better than nothing. Makes me smile.

Ok, to bed.

I know no other way to get something off my mind than to get it off my plate.

The truth of it is that I let myself get totally hijacked. I had this plan about 8 years ago to build a stock photography system to help me manage and sell my digital images. I knew it was the way. The way to independence as a photographer. The way to life on the road traveling, writing and shooting as an independent journalist.

I had no damn idea how much I would need to learn to make it happen. I had no idea how much time it would take, or how exhausting that time would be. I didn’t know that it would be endless hours learning endless languages. I had no idea that it, in effect, would change me from a photographer into a programmer. But it happened. Silently and forcibly.

So there I was, 28 and realizing that my marriage was a failure, that I was pretty damn depressed, miserable in my job, hadn’t photographed for months and basically programmed only because it let me lose myself in a world of logic, structure and predictability. Safety. How messed up is that?

After that realization and the subsequent realization that I was taking on more and more demanding programming jobs (not related to Pixenter), I started to realize that programming had other uses. It paid the bills. And paid them well. I could feel my mind sharpening at the same time, and that was attractive to me. I actually felt smarter after facing the crazy array of problems you face when programming these systems. I’m sure any programmer understands what I’m talking about. This stuff can be hard. And you have to be good at getting better if you’re going to make a living at it. I’ve never really felt smart before. Sensitive, yes. Aware, sure. Artistic, maybe. Talented, yes (or so people at my first photography job kept telling me). But never really smart. I got good enough grades, but this was different. After programming for a while I definitely felt like I could solve problems rather than just watch them and interpret. The outsider perspective of an artist, or photojournalist.

So, programing started to take another role in my life: a tool. A tool for getting out of debt. A tool for feeling better about myself. I started to enjoy programming. it was useful, and in some ways actually fun.

Sadly, programming wasn’t supposed to be a goal in itself. And this is when I realized that I had totally lost track of my original reason for programming. To serve my photography. So there I was (and still am), taking on more jobs, enjoying the work, making customers happy, building a business. Hiring people, joining the chamber of commerce. Still paying my bills.

It feels like a big circle. I’m coming back to where I started. For as much as I hijacked myself (and gone some cool places) I have not forgotten that I am a photographer and that I have a desire to work and live as such. I have only one bid out for a new project and only three projects on my plate at the moment. If we get this next project, it will be my last major programming project. If I don’t, the current projects will be my last. I need to get myself back on track. Any new incoming projects will be handled by someone else inside the company, or referred to another company. I’d rather be involved with maintenance, upkeep, hosting, and development of photography related systems. The major projects take over your life.

Ok. I’ve written enough for tonight. Back to work.

P.S. I got a kitten. A friend found it abandoned in an apartment complex. He’s in a box. So adorable it makes me want to hurl.

Ok… So I’ve put my Fitness Tracker online for anybody who wants to use it. It’s a pretty simple utility that allows you to record and keep track of your weight, body mass index and workouts. It’s not totally feature-rich but it gets the job done. I just added a charting page that puts your weight, bmi and workouts into bar graphs for easy review. Just click the sign-up link on the bottom on the home page to get yourself a fitness tracker account.

I wonder sometimes if mosquitos don’t like me because my blood is full of Tabasco. Seriously, I have a couple of friends who get many times more bites than me when we’re out hiking. It’s always been that way. Since high school, when I started drinking, er… eating, Tabasco. I don’t think other sauces have the same effect.

I was too busy to think about TV today. Didn’t watch a minute. I like being busy. The day went by in a flash. It was hot though and I wasn’t all that productive. I never am when it’s hot. I just space out a lot and stare at my keyboard. I slip into temporary insanity on days like this. I revert into this sub-human animal on a primal, single-minded, instinctual search for ways to cool down. Shade, water, even a cold floor to lay belly up on. Nothing else much matters. People call me on the phone and I barely remember the conversations later.

I have to remember that my goal isn’t just to quit watching TV as much, but to realign my life towards a better all-around balance of work, play, distraction and rest. I managed not to watch TV today but didn’t do so well with the other stuff. Oh well.

I spent the entire day fighting spam on one of my servers. When I finally got around to eating some dinner at 9:00 I almost stopped by Hollywood Video to score another Buffy the Vampire Slayer disk. See how bad it was getting??? Didn’t do it. Held back. Stayed strong. I utterly failed at my other goals for the day. I tried to schedule things, tried to get some exercise in, tried to eat well. Actually, if Gabe didn’t bring over those damn Skittles I would have eaten well. Work has a way of mucking up my plans.

Ok, so it’s not quite noon yet and I don’t miss TV. I started a list of my bad habits in a shockingly honest journal entry (paper) last night while not watching TV. What a depressing way to fall asleep, with a list of reasons why I am a slacker in my hand. To be fair I did try to make a second list of ways to fix my bad habits. Just a bit ago I finished reassembling some of my fitness equipment. Step one, right? And right now, while waiting for another possible house mate to stop by and view the room, I am scheduling my upcoming workweek as to help overcome my habit of doing work marathons rather than 8 hours a day. Long sentence. In a nutshell my bad habits include food, exercise, lack of sleep, work patterns, recreation, vacation and scheduling. All easy enough to fix I suppose, but it was tough to see how much I’ve let each of these slide, if only just a bit. Paints a bad overall picture of my health.