Straight Edge Life

This is my favorite time of year in Eugene. The time when I’m happy. When I’m restless, preoccupied, eager to leave and forced to do something to calm my senses. I don’t self-medicate. I don’t smoke weed, drink beer or sniff coke up my nose. I don’t hide in distraction. I’m straight edge and I fucking love being forced into a corner like this. Feels good to know I have the resources to fight my way back out. Without drugs. And not just back out, but back out stronger, smarter and more fit than I was before.

It’s dark, it’s late and the city is concrete, steel and color. I’m only a few minutes from home and already soaking wet in the rain. My shoe is making that weird sucking sound again and nothing in the world could bring me down.

The question of the day? What to do. Maybe tomorrow I’ll leave this town and never look back. Maybe I’ll buy a house and start a family here. I feel chaotically bent between far too many choices. I have no idea how I’ll figure it out but I look forward to figuring it out. But there’s something suspicious going on; something I can’t figure out.

The other day I was at Allann Bros. eavesdropping on a couple of guys who just got out of their AA meeting. They were talking super loud and one guy was bumping into my chair repeatedly so I’m not going to feel bad about it, ok? Anyways… They were talking about what they would do if someone put a bottle of beer in their hands right now. Would they drink it? Would they set it down and walk away? Would it go flying across the room and hit some poor schmo on his way out the door? They both easily thought of a few things that would make them drink. But simply being handed a beer wouldn’t do it.

I don’t know about addiction. I don’t know what it’s like to have something have power like that over me. Sometimes I wish that I did have experience with addiction. To know what it’s like to be powerless to something other than myself. Something destructive. I think it would make it a bit easier to empathize with people. I feel like for all my self-righteous straight-edge babbling I really don’t know shit about the world. Not the real world anyways. I mean I’ve had difficult times in my life, but none so unique or overwhelming that I feel like I’ve had it rough. And maybe something really bad happening would push me into addiction. Or maybe not. I don’t know. And that’s the tricky bit. I’ve never been tested severely. But then I’ve never been a drinker at all. So the cycle doesn’t really have a chance to start.

I guess I feel like I have a pretty good set of tools for dealing with Life (with the big L) and yet I’m often consumed by not-so-big worries because my life is so simple. These little things, they are the only things I have in my life. So I burn energy. I apply all my knowledge and experience to deciding whether to delay a project and take a vacation or work straight through because I’m dirt broke and need the money. Fuck, it’s kinda lame. It’s odd. I mean the last few years have been sorta non-stop with death, disease, divorce, and stress. For the last few months though… I’ve been stable and pretty bored. I’m sure something is coming soon enough. I should shut up.

I recommend watching this movie before you watch any movie which has the potential to be a disappointment. Big Trouble in Little China is the quintessential good bad movie. If you can love this movie (and you likely will) you’re much more likely to love the movie you’re about to watch. Big Trouble is so awesome at getting me in the mood to watch bad movies. It shows in perfect form how good a bad movie can be. It’s so lovable, so silly, so fucking funny.

In a nutshell it’s about a big bunch of trouble in Chinatown, San Francisco. Go figure, right? Well it’s hard to say much more without giving away everything about the plot. Plenty of Kung Fu, lots of fighting, and enough humor to go around. In a word; Choice.

Lycos is taking an interesting approach to dealing with spam. They’ve released a clever screensaver which is designed to hurt the spam industry by consuming spammers bandwidth, driving up hosting prices and hopefully putting them out of business.

Personally I love the idea of fighting spam by driving up the cost of business, but it’s not the first time I’m seen this type of tactic taken to achieve specific goals. I’m from Eugene, Oregon where books like Ecodefense and Edward Abbey’s The Monkey Wrench Gang, are as common as bibles in hotel drawers. This, my friends, is an ecoterrorist’s tactic.

Both Ecodefense, a book outlining in detail how to achieve a successful campaign of monkeywrenching, as well as The Monkey Wrench Gang, a book romanticizing the act of monkeywrenching, directly state that the most effective way to win the war against those committing crimes against the environment is simply to drive up the cost of doing business. In the ecodefender’s case by whatever means necessary (so long as no people are hurt); and in Lycos’s case, by walking in the grey area of legality regarding Denial of Service attacks.

Check out the article in The Register above or check out the discussion on this topic on slashdot.

Lycos recently released an interesting screensaver called Make Love Not Spam or MLNS. Essentially it’s a coordinated denial of service attack against known spam servers. Well, it’s not exactly a denial of service attack, but it is meant to drive up the cost of spammers hosting to astronomical levels, thus making it prohibitively expensive to send spam. Normally a true denial of service attack is against the law as it is meant to shut down the targeted site… and if you plan to download the software inside the US you will have to lie about where you’re from on the download site; but since the software doesn’t actually send overwhelming amounts of traffic to the spam servers it is only floating in a grey area of legality while trying nobly to accomplish a greater goal.

Personally I give Lycos props for having the guts to release something like this to the public. If you’re into using a tactic like this to bring what I consider an evil business to it’s knees, please download and use this software.

I’ve never been one for the blue-eyed girls. Never for blond hair either. But this, she, is different. I’m like a fucking kid right now. Can’t sleep, waiting by the phone for her call, smiling like a damn fool all day long. Thinking endlessly about the next time I’m going to get to see her. Hear her. It’s fun. I’ll totally admit that it’s fun. It’s really really quite fun to have a crush.

Cool thing is that she seems interested as well. I think she’s pretty shy. Might even be a slow moving girl in the romantic stuff. Doesn’t matter. I’m digging this harmless stuff. More to the point, I’m loving getting to know her better.

Released the first version of my first open-source project this evening on LassoForge. A very simple fitness tracker that I use to track my progress as I work out. Next up… the system that drives this site. But that’s going to take a bit as this site is rather a mess on the inside.

Dang. Just reread my entry entitled Ghosted… what the hell was I thinking? I swear sometimes I should just shut up. I can be so dramatic. I can’t even remember what that entry was about. I probably just had a bad day or didn’t get enough sleep and I make it sound like the world is ending. I’m amazed people still come to my site and read that stuff. I beg your forgiveness. More upbeat, I promise.

Ok, here’s the deal with all that’s been going on in my life lately. 1. My dad is retiring, selling the house, moving to Sweden and getting married. 2. I’ve been working too hard and falling behind. Just can’t seem to catch up. 3. I’ve been trying to do fun stuff with my free time and have actually been having a bit of success at that. 4. I’ve been printing a lot of photos and have been framing as many as I can afford to frame.

In a nutshell that’s about it. The first thing there about my dad is sort of a big deal. I mean damn. I’m happy for my dad, extraordinarily so, but it’s very sudden and has some pretty big implications for me. Like for example I’m going to try and buy the house. Most people think about and plan for buying a house years before they actually do it. I’m going to try and do that whole process in about 60 days. So that’s funky. And obviously I’m a bit bummed that he’s moving. I like the guy and he’s not going to be exactly available to watch NCIS, grab lunch or go see a movie with when he’s in Sweden. Bummer. One less friend in Eugene.

Other than that I’m just doing the daily grind thing here. Work, play, work, play. Well more like work, work, work, work, play, work work, work… You know how it goes.

Ok, I hope everyone’s thanksgiving festivities went well and that you are all fat and happy. Until the next entry…

I hope to dream of ghosts tonight. I hope to dream of something different, something unreal, something frightening enough to scare me into forgetting. Something removed from my life and my restless brain. For tonight and for the last number of nights I can find no peace. Not in sleep, nor while awake.

Where is my courage? Where is the old decisive Ari? Grrr. Sorry to be opaque here. If I knew how to put any of this into words I would. Life hasn’t only be restless for the last few days, it’s been almost literally turned upside down.

Located on 5th and Olive. They’ve finally got free wifi access.