Surly Burly
Saturday 23 May 98 5:08 pm
I hate the weekends; have I mentioned that before?
Heh.
As you can guess, I'm not real thrilled about occasions
which result in twenty-four hour exposure to the Huz. This one is
two-fisted: a national holiday and a weekend. Oh brother.
Today was your typical Saturday. Kids waking
up too early, grumpy asinine swearing behavior, some snoozing here and
there. Went to get some groceries. Commissary was packed in
just the sort of way that makes it hard to breathe, but we got a goodly
amount of goods without too much cost.
Huz installed the secondary hard drive under the
CD-ROM and then took off to get me an IDE cable of the proper length.
The too-short cable was the whole reason the drive wasn't mounted when
I first got it. He returned with the cable and I got everything hooked
up again, though the CMOS battery had failed as it often does, whenever
the spirit takes it, and I had to remind the puter that it has a secondary
drive. Everything is running good and the cover is back on.
I tried to fashion some tunnels in the cabling in there to let more air
circulate; dunno how much difference that will make.
He's out there grilling right now. We do pleasant
things on the weekends, like cook out and go to the park and things like
that. It's not lack of activities that ruins weekends; it's all a
matter of attitude and behavior. How you treat people is the maker
or breaker of whether they want to be with you or not, plain and simple.
If you behave like an ass, nobody wants to play.
Gus
is getting ready to take off. I knew early this year that something
was about to change with him. He was just too tired of the status
quo. That's why I wanted to go to the Aquarius party, besides just
to have a good time. It's why I've tried to do stuff to help out
the KMFers. Gus often laments his lack of friends his own age, and
people he has something in common with, some similar interests, to talk
to. I relate, course I do. He and I have a lot in common, are
the same age (well, off by a year) and share a lot of interests, and I
thought that could be a basis for a friendship. For some reason,
though, we haven't hit it off. It just hasn't clicked. So,
anyway, the changes I saw back then are coming now. Wish I'd
written them down, it would look a lot more impressive now to be able to
point back and say, "See?"
I wish him luck. A great adventure is coming.
Moomie (ahem - excuse me - Darth Vader) has been
prying the chips off a dismembered 286 and experimenting with stacking
them and stuff. At the bookstore the other day, he asked me to get
him something labeled "Build Your Own Computer," a sectioned box wrapped
in cellophane. The visible part of the box contained compartments
full of what I think are transistors and resistors and various bits.
I assume the part of the box hidden by the label contained a book of instructions
on how to make the projects listed on the back. I told him we couldn't
get it just now, but maybe for his birthday. I could just see his
little brother ingesting some of these bits.
Gotta go play nice now for the cookout.
Heart in a Blender
Friday 22 May 9:41 pm
Today was lovely, for many, many reasons.
Harsh sun under completely clear sky, but a chilly breeze keeping it all
even. I had occasion today to wander through a cemetery, the fragrance
of honeysuckle all about. Some of the headstones looked newer than
others, though their death dates were older. Were the headstones
recently cleaned? Or only just recently purchased though the recipient
went dead long ago?
Some of the flowers had tipped over with all the
wind, so I righted some of them and tried to brace them some against the
edges of the stones. I also gathered some of the artificial flower
petals that had gotten scattered about. The cemetery appeared to
be all Christian. I took a vine of half-wilted honeysuckle back to
the car with me, and the fragrance filled the enclosure. Oh, so nice.
The odd thought hit me amongst all these flowers
and stones, that these people really revere the bodies of their dead.
I felt like an alien anthropologist, looking in on this. Guess I'm
just weird, but I don't give a damn about a body once the soul has exited.
I get disgusted thinking about all the embalming and stuff going on, when
decay is purposely engineered into the plan, so that the uppermost creatures
in the food chain may nourish those at the very bottom. I'd like
to be buried naked, as I was upon entering this world, in a plain box and
untreated against decay. Alas, I think it's against the law now to
bury a body without embalming. A disease control measure. If
I get terminally ill, maybe I will lose myself in the wilderness so no
one can enforce it on me.
The song that goes to the title of this entry is
playing in my head. Don't ask me who sings it, I never keep that
kind of thing in active memory, but if you tell me I will go, "Oh yeah,
them." Am finally getting the lyrics down, they are something like
this:
So I'll swallow my pride
And I'll choke on the rind
Or the lack thereof
Will make me empty inside
And I'll swallow my doubt
Turn it inside out
Til it's nothing but faith in nothing
Wanna put my tender
Heart in a blender
Watch it spin around
To a beautiful oblivion
Rendezvous, then I'm through with you
The tune is very catchy, and the lyrics clever, but
I myself feel nothing like the song, though the sharp aches I get in my
heart lately remind me of recent losses, am not ready to toss it into any
kitchen appliances just yet. I am keeping my walls up though, and
watching very carefully what's going on.
Z - it bears no resemblance to you and Maggy.
Maggy never reciprocated. She never promised you anything; she never
left you high and dry.
I been dying to say that, but we don't talk anymore.
He won't read it, he doesn't read my journal, but it matters that I get
to say it.
It didn't really sink in how many dogs I know until
I was chatting about them the other day. I make friends with most
dogs and cats I meet, and have a much easier time remembering their names
than I do people's. My current retinue of canine friends includes
Rollie the cocker spaniel; his next door neighbor, a Rottweiler whose name
I never found out, Sitka the Malamute blend down the street; a golden retriever
pup two doors over whose name I never heard; and a beagle named Shandy,
who belongs to my minister. Add to that countless others I meet in
daily wanderings, and it's starting to look remarkable. They all
seem to love me as well, except for Rollie's other neighbor, a very insecure
pug.
Some Changes
Thursday 21 May 8:06 am
Things might get a bit irritating in here.
Changing format yet again. You know I am going to experiment with
probably every method of online journal-keeping there is. So far
I have tried the plain text kind, the kind with no forward and back buttons,
the kind with forward and back buttons, the kind with photographs,
the kind with date/time stamps, the kind with extraneous links enclosed,
the kind with a boneyard for excess entries, and probably some other kind
that I just can't recall right now. I'm about to give a try to the
multiple entry on one page kind. Yeah, I know, that's kinda how some
of my entries have been already, with the time stamps. But I have
been thinking about how much of my journalling time gets eaten up by opening
documents, modifying links, saving the documents, sometimes finding
the documents, taking decent pictures, editing pictures to make them a
bit more decent, and in between just getting the freaking pictures to
load out of the digital camera. That last wastes huge amounts
of valuable time, as the entire puter has to throw all of its resources
into coaxing that image out, and every other function is locked tight.
I want to include images, I really, really wanna.
It's neat and cool and fun, but it wipes out huge swatches of time I could
be looking for a job. Or writing words. I will still toss in
images from time to time, but that needs to be saved for special occasions.
Anyway, I was thinking of putting several entries
on a page, putting the most recent up top, so a person can tell at a glance
if the journal has been updated. I toyed with the idea of doing it
the way Firedrake
and Evan do, just
having the most recent entry be the one you go straight to, but when I
figured out how many instances of link changing and generating it would
take, it came out to be just about the same as what I have been doing already.
I want to save time. I like my format best as it was at the
beginning of the green pages, and would stick with that, if you look from
a design perspective. The only reason for change is to gain something
in time savings.
So, any given page will have three or four entries
on it, depending on how long they are, and the most recent entry will be
up top. Each one will have its own title as well as date and time.
Each of these pages will still have the forklift down there to transition
from one page to the next. It bothers me not having the title of
every entry on the index page. On other people's journals, I like
that little enticing hint as to what the entry might be about.
Enough about that. A friend reminded me a
couple days ago that you need to take the joy in living, that there is
no excuse really to be miserable when you want to be happy. I've
been pondering this a lot, thinking about my moments, and whether I really
do enjoy the happy ones. (Ohmigod, you mean there actually are happy
moments?! Why Spring, we thought you were terminally depressed and
life is hell for you.) Also, I've been thinking about whether I create
happy times, take these reins into my own hands. Yesterday I took
The Other Dog (and now only dog) Misha out to do his thing, and just for
the hell of it, I lay out on the grass (not in his peeing area)
and gave a lot of thought to this subject, all the while savoring the texture
of the grass, the brown crispy herb kinda scent all around, enjoying the
mild coolness of the shade, watching a lone bird fly high up in the clear
sky, hearing the music of kid voices playing far away. I decided,
yes I do seize my joy. And I think that's what this move-out is all
about, my resentment at the barrier which makes seizing that joy so much
harder than it should be, and getting rid of it. This is in my power.
I do have control over my destiny.
So when I whine and bitch and moan in here, and
when I tell of the beautiful times, each is just a small example of what
goes on all the time in my life. They are just glimpses, it's not
possible for me to tell every incident of every day. I am really
not suicidal day in and day out, I just may feel like it right when I am
writing at that moment. There really is happiness, probably more
than some people ever have in their entire lives, but the ratio simply
isn't satisfactory to me. Peace in the home is just too damned important.
It's a war zone out there, it needn't be one in here.
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