Straight Edge Life

My mom died a year ago this weekend. To be honest it seems like it was yesterday that she was here in this house working in the garden with a couple of loaves of zuchinni bread in the oven. The house is still filled with memories of her. I’m doing what I can to make it “my” place, torn between completely emptying the house and starting over and accomodating artifacts of my memories as her son in this house. It’s tough to make peace with this. When my mom died she had been sick for a long time. I’ve made peace with her death because I know she’s not suffering anymore. And that is far more important than my sadness and anger over losing her. I would prefer she be in peace and be without her than have her here and in pain. Ironically I had to make a choice to euthanize one of my cats this week as he was facing a long and painful death from a tumor. The same reasoning applies only I had to help make the choice to send Barney on his way. A strange twist I wasn’t happy to be forced into managing. But peace with this house, me, and memories of my mom is far more elusive. At the same time I’m so excited to be here, I love the house, the neighborhood, everything, but I’m also hesitant to work on or in the house because everything reminds me of her and I don’t want to get rid of it. Sometimes it’s good, sometimes it’s sad. It’s always emotionally charged. I know this is part of my desire to leave town and work in a completely mobile fashion. It’s hard to be here. It’s hard not to be overwhelmed by emotion. Both happy and sad. I occasionally run into people who knew her. Dylan, from a group of friends I was never especially close with in high school, when I ran into him last weekend, told me how much he really liked my mom. How she had suprised him with her genuine interest in him and his interests. She had sent him a book on dinosaur evolution after a conversation they had on the subject a few months earlier. This was the kind of person she was. Genuine and suprising. I know that eventually this house will change. It will no longer be a dusty museum to our memories of her. But it’s going to take me and the rest of my immediate family finding peace with a different kind of memory of my mom. If I hit the road for a while and find solace in retreat, so be it. I’m patient. This is something my cheating wife, Nichole, didn’t understand. She was urgent to purge everything and start from scratch with nothing related to my mom or my family in this house at all. I am happy to let this unfold as it unfolds. I’ve spent too much time trying to push things into a conclusion. It’s about the journey. I know that’s a bit of a cliche, but it’s fitting enough for my situation.

Howdy! It’s a fine Friday morning and I just finished a fat deadline. It’s time for a breather before the next. I think I’ll head down onto campus to buy a cheap printer so I can finally make some business cards. I can’t believe I don’t have business cards yet. It’s pathetic. People ask for them and I never have them.

So lots of folks have been visiting SXEL lately, reading this blog, and ignoring everything else. And that’s totally cool. What I would like to do is invite you to make some suggestions for improvement. I spend a lot of time spilling out my two cents about movies I’ve seen, music I love or hate, software I despise, books I’ve read, entering quotes (which people do seem to enjoy, judging by the number of page reloads by individual users) and finding cool links to other sites. And with the exception of the quotes, it doesn’t seem to be doing it for you. What else would you all like to see? I’m a sensitive guy, accomodating. I can adapt. Or is the blog interesting enough? What if you could chime in and give your two cents about a blog entry? Would that be cool? Let me know.

I have a secret urge to own a chihuahua and a motor scooter. Some kind of vespa or an aprilla or someting. Why? One, chihuahuas are the only kind of dog I’ve found myself to get along with. They are compact, mean as the devil himself, and really loyal to their owners. They have no idea how big they are or whether it matters. Yeah, yeah, they are obnoxious and stupid little dogs. I should be in love with giant huskies right? Something that fits my outdoorsy lifestyle? Yeah, maybe. But when you can put the dog into the top pocket of my Lowe Alpine pack and it will ferociously fend off my camp from bears regardness of it’s size, who cares if it can’t keep up on the trail. And two, scooters, just about the most useless mode of transportation a person can own in Eugene. Well, they just look like fun. So there it is. You all know my dark secret now. Maybe it’s my soft side. Every tough guy has his soft side. Remember, they made a whole CD of bad butt-rock about it.

It’s a nice enough day today, I don’t care.

Just took a call from my dad, who the vet calls instead of me for whatever reason, and we had to make a choice about putting Barney to sleep. Poor little guy. I think we did a lot to keep him happy throughout his whole life. He had a good home, lots of warmth, good friends, great food, couches to destroy, walls to pee on, and plenty of love from the people he owned. I’ll miss his drooling, his impressive ability to purr for literally hours on end with very little encouragement. Just a day or two ago he was laying so peacefully on me while I typed a couple of entries into SXE purring like a fool even though he was in a lot of pain. Sometimes he was aggressively affectionate. Sometimes he would just sit with you for hours. All the while purring. He drooled, he pooped, he barfed like all cats. But he was ours and we loved him as much as we could. I’m sorry to see him go. 18 years isn’t too bad for a cat.

Ok. So I’m in love with the girls that work at Humble Bagel. The tall brunette, the short really cute brunette, and the medium sized brunette with the curly hair. When I think about it I’ve had a crush on the girls that work at Humble Bagel since I was in middle school. I know this revelation doesn’t really warrant an entry of it’s own, but I really don’t have all that much else to say today. My cat Barney is still sick. That’s why I was down near Humble this morning. They are taking him into surgery to see if they can find out what’s wrong. I’m sad. I’m worried that he’s got cancer or a tumor or something. The poor little guy. It’s been a hard summer for the kitties. God, I just wish things would ease up a bit and I wouldn’t have a crisis each week. It’s all important stuff to take care of for sure, don’t get me wrong please, especially about Barney, but I would love to get out of crisis mode. I think you know what I mean. Right?

By the way, thank you John, for turning me on to The Roots. Good stuff.

“New Yorkers like to boast that if you can survive in New York, you can survive anywhere. But if you can survive anywhere, why live in New York?”

–Edward Abbey

“”The missionaries go forth to Christianize the savages–as if the savages weren’t dangerous enough already.”

-Edward Abbey

“Despair leads to boredom, electronic games,
computer hacking, poetry, and other bad habits.”

- Edward Abbey

“Who needs astrology? The wise man gets by on fortune cookies.”

- Edward Abbey

“A diplomat is a man who always remembers a woman’s birthday but never remembers her age.”

- Robert Frost