Straight Edge Life

“Corporation, n., An ingenious device for obtaining profit without individual responsibility.”

- Ambrose Bierce

“We do not act rightly because we have virtue or excellence, but we rather have those because we have acted rightly.”

- Aristotle

I have been thinking about taking this site off line for a few days. It’s been up and running for nearly a year and it’s been a good companion for me as I’ve felt compelled to write. But I don’t feel very compelled to write these days. Writing is a very selfish thing for me. It’s dangerous too, because it gives me this strange sense of security and comfort. Which is good, I guess, but I’m not the kind of guy who needs a lot of comfort. Not now anyway. A year ago, and even a month ago I’ve needed a hell of a lot of comfort. I needed something to help me figure stuff out with my failing marriage, my subsequent divorce, and my father’s failing health, as well as the death of my mother. For a period of 18 months before I launched this site the world seemed to fall apart around me. It’s taken until now to feel like I’ve gotten my feet back on the ground again. And now that I feel like I have my feet on the ground, shit, even that I’ve made it through almost gracefully, like I managed to handle it well, I just want to go out and live my life. I don’t have all that much I want or need to say. And I’m beginning to feel like if I’m going to have this site up and running, I should really keep it up to date and well maintained. I should feed it regularly, if you know what I mean.

Right now, the last thing I want to do is be tied to a computer, feeding a website with things I feel obligated, not compelled, to say. If I’m going to write today, it’s going to be in a sketchbook, on a train, as I move from one city to another watching the world outside my window. Because I haven’t been doing enough watching or listening lately. I’ve been talking, rebuilding my strength slowly. Doing what I can to keep the walls from building back up. Doing what I can to really truly heal from 2.5 years of hell. And again, now I’m feeling like I just want to live.

I doubt that I will take this site off-line. That doesn’t seem the thing to do really… I think it’s about to transform again. Perhaps into a travel journal. Somewhere that I can show you what I am seeing, rather than let you in on the inner workings of my healing process. I know it’s not as dramatic, or as meaty, but I think it’s healthy for me. I want to add to this site because I want to, not because I feel I have to. So, I guess that’s it for now. Thanks for listening.

My man Steve has been promoting his brother’s film, Crowfilm to friends and family for a number of months now. I got a glimpse of it in late October and was impressed with what I saw. I’m not going to write any kind of review on it, because I honestly don’t like to review someone else’s art. I’ll just say it’s a film about the common crow. It was filmed entirely by this one man over a number of months as he got to know crows better and better. Edited, and pieced together fantastically with music borrowed and made specially for the film, it’s wonderful. Anyway… It’s been included in the Full Frame Film Festival DVD. It will be available in Blockbuster in a couple of weeks. Please check it out, I’m sure you will enjoy it.

I went and saw a preview of Taking Lives last night. Excellent movie. Really quite well done. It was fun and I think a lot of people in the audience were just as thrilled with it as I was. Judging by the number of screams and twitching bodies surrounding me, they were definitely as thrilled as I was.

It wouldn’t be fair to give away too much, so let me just say that it’s a thriller in the classic sense. A whodunit in top form. I’m not always that excited about movies that fit so perfectly into a genre. They tend to be predictable unless they are almost perfectly executed. And even then, it’s not a matter of being totally surprised, because you always suspect that anybody could be the culprit, it’s a matter of how wrong you were in your suspicions. Taking lives threw me for a loop a couple of times. And still, a day later, I’m excited to go see it again to figure out the stuff that I didn’t catch the first time. I’ll give it a 9 out of 10, solid performance.

Exhausted and awake. My hands shake slightly as I ease into the idea of bed. Of sleep without interruption. Went to bed at 2 last night, got up 4 hours later at 6. It’s now right around 2 again and the consecutive set of 18 hour work days is starting to get me down.

I was considering a short little ramble about how I love being productive but sorta hate the fact that I’m slipping off the face of the planet into the green glow of the programmers universe. Fuck that. I’m sick of all the self-examination I’ve been doing. I’ve got better to do with my time and you’ve got better things to do than read about my inner conflicts. I think from this point forward I’m going to reserve that kind of stuff for when I’m stuck, emotionally cornered as it were, and I need to work stuff out. And in the meantime I’m just going to let you all in on what I’ve been doing… Which has been a lot.

1. I started planning a trip today. Where? Turkey, with a train trip north to Berlin or Paris. Whether or not I actually do this trip it’s nice to look forward to.

2. I’ve been working around the clock building Pixenter. Since my last announcement it’s undergone yet another fundamental shift; which consequently quadrupled the amount of programming I needed to do. But I feel much better about it’s prospects and I’m “almost” done with it anyway. Soon, I promise, I’ll show the thing off to you.

3. I’ve been dating a very nice lady here in town. I don’t say a damn thing about it on SXEL as to respect her privacy. If we break up in a hideous and public fight you can count on me bringing all the retroactive nitty gritty of it to SXEL. For your reading pleasure.

4. My incredible friend Sara came out to visit and hooked me up with so much new music… Oh, it’s sick. And she’s sending a bizzillion mixes of, you guessed it, SKA. Hell’s yeah. Let’s here it for Sara for helping me get my SKA fix. Not to mention the fact that it just kicked ass to hang out with Sara for a weekend. We used to hang out in college non-stop until she had to leave (stole a public safety van and drove it off a cliff into the mississippi, shhh nobody knows about that). It sucks when your closest friends are so far away.

5. I’m going to do a series of self portrait using my Mamiya RB. I’ve been dying to see what I look like through the lens. I know I’ve aged a lot since the last time I had my portrait done. With as much detail as the RB can produce, it should be interesting. I think aging is a beautiful thing. Especially in men, who don’t seem to hide from it as much. There are some people who know how to age, to accept it with grace. I hope to be one of those people. Shit, I”m only 28… but I ain’t 15 anymore either.

Enough for now. Thanks for all the support. More later…

Ok, so besides all the obvious reasons not to drink in general, I’ve discovered a reason not to get wasted on a Saturday night on Riverview Street specifically. I was driving home on Saturday night and the dumb-asses at 1715 Riverview were throwing another party. Riverview is a small street where it’s pretty normal for cars to pull off the road to let another car squeeze by. So when 1715 throws a party it can get pretty congested. And on this night there were a billion trust-funded college kid suvs making my route home a bit of a dodge and weave experience. And as I was pulling around a hideously inefficient red dodge thing, there like a dear in the headlights, was a guy with his pants down around his knees, wandering about peeing. He stared me straight in the eye, totally surprised to see a car in his bathroom. Now, I might consider this funny if I hadn’t had to slam on the brakes to avoid killing the guy.

Imagine that, being killed with your pants down while drunk and peeing in the middle of the street. How in the hell do you explain that to people in heaven / hell / or wherever you end up after they pull your pants pack up and lay you out on the slab? “How’d you die?”, “Really, with your pants down, while actually peeing?” … “Was it worth it; getting drunk every weekend?”, “No, man, it wasn’t”.

Well, this has been one of the most productive months of my life. Plants around my house are dying. My friends are leaving messages asking where I’ve been. My car is running on an empty tank because I’m too busy to fill it up. And you are all languishing, waiting for something new to read on Straight Edge Life. Well. Without further ado, I offer my spooky story from a couple of halloweens ago to keep you happy. I know it’s no substitute for writing more frequently, but everyone I know has enjoyed reading this. So perhaps it will fill the SXEL fix for a day or two while I try and balance things out a bit more.

PART ONE
I don’t know if I ever told you about my friend Steve and the ghosts that drove the tenants out of his old house in Corvallis. Well, it’s a scary story. Sort of a long story too. It’s been one heck of a month but I can’t keep this story quite much longer…

Now, back to the spooky noises resonating in the basement of my friends old house. Three summers ago Pete and his brother Dave were dispatched by their parents to help rennovate their old house now that the tenants were gone. 332 Central if you ever stop through town. Pete, the perpetual student (I think he’s got 3 or 4 master’s degrees in physics, chemistry, and math), and Dave the perpetually unemployed filmmaker, spent the summer of 1999 tearing out walls, carpets, and counters. The house was essentially unlivable due to the construction so they stayed with friends for most of the summer. Near the end of the summer, when most of the renovations were done Pete and Dave moved into their old bedrooms on the second floor to ease the back pains from sleeping on people’s couches. On the same day that they moved in to the house they ran into Pete’s old friends Trevor. Trevor is a cool guy, drinks a little much, does a bit too much acid. But he’s sharp, focused, and reliable. He also used to live at 332 a couple of years previous while Pete was living in Eugene. Trevor asked Pete why the most recent tenants left. Neither Pete nor Dave knew. The conversation lead to why Trevor had moved out. The story was frightening. Trevor was an avid gamer. Nintendo, Sega, whatever. And he was a skater so he has all the usual quirks that come with the skater persona. His housemates banished him and the games to the basement. At the time the basement was a pit. Typical dirt floors, uncovered walls, bare ceiling of a generic storage and utility area. After a while even a skater can get sick of the nastiness of his surroundings. He began to pick up the place, began building a floor and rewiring the place for wall sockets. Each night as the weather was getting bad enough that he couldn’t skate outside anymore, he was up later and later working on the project. The project expanded to include a mini-pipe and drywall. Eventually a bar was planned. After a while, when the hammer was down, the saws were off and he was enjoying the fruits of his labor he began to hear the noises. Evil howling noises resonating through the walls themselves. Not just the walls, but the pipes, the ceiling and just simply the air itself. The very feeling of the place changed. It was like a Fellini film, where perceptions of normal are turned upside down, leaving one lonely character right side up gaping at the insanity of it all. But it wasn’t funny like a Fellini film. Everything about the basement was wrong. These noises were biological yet inhuman. In fact Trevor couldn’t for the life of him determine what they were coming from or what was making them. Howling, screaming, tearing and scratching noises. Metal banging on metal, crushing flesh, churning the core of his spine. Shivering horrible screaching. Howling. Each night at sunset they began, and nowhere else in the house could they be heard. Determined not to leave the pleasures of his gaming and skating palace basement Trevor stuck it out. For weeks he went down there only in the day. During the day nothing but your imagination suggested that he had done anything but a great job fixing up the basement.
To be continued…. (I gotta go back to work for a bit)

I’m hoping to do nothing this weekend. That, in my humble opinion, would be ideal. N O T H I N G. The absence of things. Deadlines, clients, responsibility, etc. This would be nice.

On one hand I feel like I’m really doing well these days. The whole divorce thing has completely mellowed out, I’m making strides professionally, and things are almost stabilizing in my life as my own boss. And then, on the other hand, I have no social life, I’m unable to even think about dating, I can’t remember the last time I really took some time to myself to chill, write for this site, or just wander around and take photos.

Balance, it would seem, is not my forte. But all feels good. I’m not freaking out about any of this. I’m not “buggin’” as it were. I’m just sorta mellow. This is probably normalcy… A sense of wholeness without perfect balance. How strange. It’s definitely new to me.

I went to her wedding. Paid $5 dollars to dance with her in the fading light of the day. It was the first time of two that I have watched “the one” move permanently into the hand of another. Heartbreak comes in so many damn forms. The echos of my own failures. The echos of mistakes made years ago. Bad timing, bad situations, inexperience, immaturity… whatever you want to call it. I seem an expert in the art of fucking up relationships. Of watching my dreams walk quietly away.

The girl with perfect posture. The girl with the biggest smile. The girl with perfect pitch. Curly brown hair, draped gracefully over her shoulders. A long black felt coat and cherry lips.

A gemutlich dream. But a dream nonetheless.

I can remember the fragrance of every woman I’ve known. I can remember the long kisses in hallways, the electricity between myself and another. The passionate love, the dirty exhibitionism, the quiet climax beneath thin sheets and the oppressive heat of an illinois summer. My first time, my last time, and everything in-between.

It’s a dream. In and out of my life without predictability or controllability. Unexpected, hilarious, and unrepeatable. I couldn’t ask for more.

You are visiting this site at it’s new home on a brand spankin’ new xserve web server, co-located at a fine facility on internet 2 (the speedy one). How cool is that? I’m happy about it. A lot of work still to do, but the hardest part is behind us.

Killer. I’ve got my new server all set up and doing it’s thing. You are all visiting this site at it’s new home on a brad spankin’ new xserve web server. Should be faster, although that probably depends mostly on your own connection. Anyway. I’m still fiddling around with the DNS and all of that fun stuff. More later.