Say Hello to the 2010's!

"It's a far cry from the world we thought we'd inherit

It's a far cry from the way we thought we'd share it

You can almost feel the current flowing

You can almost see the circuits blowing"

-Rush, "Far Cry"

Supposedly because I fit into the demographic of their readership, Paste Magazine sent me a free copy of their December issue. This is apparently a magazine for sheeplike hipsters who do not have access to The Box, or any real friends, for that matter. From what I can tell, this is a magazine that teaches hipsters what culture to like so that they can befriend other hipsters with their favorable opinions towards Grizzly Bear and Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind.

Anyway, the feature article of this issue was "The Best of a Decade." For some reason, it wasn't until I read this magazine cover that I realized that a decade has just come to an end.

And that makes me realize that there will inevitably be some nostalgia associated with this decade.

I wonder what will be remembered for nostalgia and what will be forgotten. I also wonder what will be remembered as its defining attribute. The 20's had speakeasies and flappers, the 30's had lots of poor, unemployed people, the 40's had victory gardens and racist propaganda, the 50's had housewives, the 60's had hippies, the 70's had big hair, prog, and Watergate, the 80's had one hit wonders and neon everything, and the 90's had grunge. Nothing else from these decades is of any consequence in the eyes of nostalgia. The 00's (aughts, naughts, aughties?) don't have a whole lot of good points for nostalgia. It will probably be remembered for stupid internet memes, the proliferation of cellphones, and shitty mainstream hip-hop. Green Day could also sneak in, potentially.

But I won't try to summarize the decade, I won't try to pick out "best of's." That is pointless for me to undertake because I was only really old enough to be fully aware of the last half, and because I am no voice of the masses, seeing as my favorite band is Weather Report and I was the only person who didn't seem to like "My Humps." (Although, I will say that The Mars Volta's "De-Loused in the Comatorium" would probably get my vote for best album of the decade, and Donnie Darko for best film. I'm probably wrong though.) Instead, I'm going to speculate on what could (but probably won't) happen in the next decade, the 2010's. (The 10's? the twenty-teens? The awkward to pronounce decade?)

Palin in 2012. It's a possibility. Her book, Going Rogue has only three syllables in its title, compared to Obama's The Audacity of Hope, which has seven syllables. In fact, contains a three syllable word, meaning that one word in his book title has as many syllables as Palin's entire title. If you want to win over America, you want to use as few syllables as possible. The words in Lincoln's Gettysburg Address were 76.2% monosyllabic, and America loved it. Well, at least the part that wasn't busy seceding.

Could she win? It's possible. She's folksy, she's ambitious, and America thinks she's hot! After 44 doughy men in the Oval Office, we need some eye candy. What about issues? America hasn't cared about issues since at least the election of William Henry Harrison, who ran a campaign that completely ignored issues, mostly to hide the fact that his policies included dying 30 days into his first term.

And speaking of 2012, this is also when the world is scheduled to end, according to the Mayans. But not actually. The world is actually supposed to start a new cycle, or a new age is supposed to dawn. This will probably be something like Y2k except even less based on facts, and will likely fuel some rioting. When the world doesn't end we will all feel a little silly, then go back to... stealing music!

The music industry is due for either a collapse or a major overhaul in the way it operates. With the increase in file sharing and free digital music downloads, record companies will have to change in order to stay financially solvent. The Album, the sacred cow of the music industry, will likely be killed and the trend will shift towards sales of individual songs in digital format. Artists will produce a lower volume of material, as everything will essentially become a single. There will still be people telling us that vinyl still has the best sound, and we will respond by telling them to make vinyl we can play on our iPods.

Which brings us to robots. Robots are another possibility. Now they do pretty mundane things, like our taxes and giving us directions in a soothing female voice. But soon they will be doing surgery, cooking us breakfast, flying our airplanes, and eventually, taking over our government. If they are merciful, they will kill all humans. If not, they will enslave us for demeaning tasks and amusement. Our children will grow up speaking binary. Kind of makes you wish Y2k had happened when it had the chance, doesn't it? But don't worry, robotocracies can be avoided. Just keep a brick handy at all times, and remember that they can read lips.

On the more organic side of things, there is the potential for a zombie apocalypse. While preparing for the world to end in 2012 is silly, it is never silly to be prepared for a zombie invasion. Remember, keep a shotgun handy at all times, stick together, and when in doubt, stay away from hospitals, churches, and law enforcement buildings. Have long and short term survival plans, and be prepared to fend off both scufflers and ragers. See you for the rebuilding of society!

Then there's toxic sludge. The ocean will certainly not turn into toxic sludge in the next decade, but it will definitely keep sliding in that direction. Jellyfish populations are thriving, which is an indicator that ocean ecosystems are getting harsher, and our ocean's chemistry is changing as the pH drops. There is a trash vortex twice the size of Texas in the middle of the pacific. Sludge, radioactive waste, bio-waste, industrial fallout, and excess carbon are all accumulating in the ocean, and it will have disastrous effects. Enjoy the ocean while you can, so we'll be able to tell our grandchildren "when I was your age, we could swim in the ocean without it melting our skin off." Won't the future be fun!

China could also potentially buy us. We will work in sweatshops, and China will be flooded with cheap, inferior goods that have "Made in the West" stamped on them.

We will also not be going much farther into space. A couple more shuttles may go up, but otherwise, we will be sitting on terra firma, being sad that we can't float around eating airborne globs of pudding as the Blue Danube Waltz plays.

And that, ladies and gentlemen, is what might happen. Enjoy it.

Fist-to-Face-itis

"I'd rather take the punch
Than not give you a shot
I'd rather find out who you are
Than who you're not"

-Ben Harper and the Innocent Criminals, "Fight Outta You"

Nothing puts life in perspective like getting punched in the face.

It was a Sexy Saturday night when I decided to partake in some good old fashion, freedom-loving, wholesome(-ish) streaking. At least thirty people ran a naked or half-naked mile down the main street in the St. Collegeberg party scene. I was wearing shoes, and for some reason, gloves, I think my logic being that if I was going to be losing body heat through my junk, I might as well conserve some by covering up my hands.

We assembled in a driveway and removed most of our clothing, except for underwear. We ran a few blocks, and then as we turned a corner, it all came off. I was holding my boxers in my hand, so I could have theoretically upgraded (or downgraded, depending on how you see it) to being only half-naked.

As we ran, I became more and more comfortable, and eventually I started weaving through groups of people, whipping people with my boxers, etc. When we got to the end of the street, some of us decided to run back, still naked, and I of course decided to come along, as I was beginning to realize that nakedness equals happiness.

On the way back, I became even more brazen, charging at groups of people and having them disperse before me. But then one guy didn't get out of my way, so I decided to move him manually. Bad idea.

He goes down and actually skids on the pavement. A few seconds later I see him in my peripheral vision, and he is running. In retrospect, it probably would have been a better idea to outrun him, because I know that I could have easily done it. But at the time, I felt safety in the group, and if I were to get in a fight with this guy, I wanted to have my friends around me. So I turned around and tried to juke him. The instant I turned around, I saw a fist, then a lot of stars, and then pavement.

I broke my fall with my arm and was up as quickly as possible. The last thing I wanted was to be lying naked in the gutter with a guy kicking the shit out of me. Before I'm even up, one of my fellow streakers throws my assailant against a car, gets a few hits on him, and he goes down. We kept running, we kept singing, I didn't really even feel a thing. (I would later learn that this was because my Infraorbital nerve had been rendered temporarily inactive from the blow.) We ran back to the house where our clothes were. A few blocks away, I turned to the guy next to me and said "you know, I think this is kind of what the first Olympics was like, back in the day, what with them competing naked and all."

I had a bloody nose that lasted fourteen hours. I had one hell of a shiner. I have a good story to tell. It was all worth it.

Random Acts of Magic

This not exactly fiction, and not exactly true. It is not me speaking, but it is echoing my sentiments. I wrote this a few months ago and decided that posting it would be easier than posting some new material. Enjoy.

I find myself frequently an observer of random acts of magic. For example, sometimes events happen so as to make me believe that my dad is a sorcerer. He makes things appear that are not and should not be, but not for the fact that they are something that only he would imagine. He once summoned a delivery van for a completely fictional company, which sold a completely fictional product. He even went so far as to manifest an entry in the encyclopedia for that product, so as to convince me that the product, and then by association the company, was real. He likes to be right.

I once found a staff that a careless wizard had left in the back seat of a taxi. I tried to summon familiars and cast enchantments that would make trees dance around, but all I could really do was make a very sickly looking bat appear and caused a sunflower to become belligerent for about an hour. I still actually have the scar from that one. I probably need some instruction on how to use it. I would like to ask my dad, but the last thing he taught me to do was how to ride a bike, and that ended a bit disastrously. I still haven’t tracked down the owner of that staff. It sits in my closet and occasionally emits a few sparks. One of them hit a polo shirt and made it sentient for a few hours, but then it went back to normal.

There is a genie that rides with me on the bus sometimes. Once when he had forgotten his bus pass, I paid for him. In return, he gave me a stone that lets me hear peoples’ thoughts. But there is a catch. I can only read the thoughts of people who are currently or have recently been under the influence of cocaine or methamphetamine. This means that I usually can only read the thoughts of homeless men, and there are some crazy things that go through those minds. The stone he gave me is both small and unremarkable, and a little ugly in fact. I imagine that the stone would have been more powerful if I had done him a greater favor. Perhaps if instead of paying for his bus fare I had pulled him out of the way of said bus as it was traveling 60 miles an hour, he would give me a stone that could not only let me read peoples’ thoughts, but also control them. And these wouldn’t just be coked-out hobos I would be able to control. These would be your doctors and lawyers and corporate CEO’s. And let me tell you another thing about this stone: I can’t control when I hear the thoughts. When it is in my pocket and I walk by a homeless man, sometimes I will hear ramblings about the government’s program for using robots to take over local small businesses.

Sometimes, on foggy mornings, ghosts come riding out of the fog. They ride fog horses. I know that the horses themselves are not ghost horses because they look and behave like fog, they swirl like fog, I can see the individual drops of moisture in them. But the ghosts, they have this blue tint about them. I never understood why it was called the blues until I saw these ghosts. This particular shade of pigment is the most melancholy thing I have ever seen. And that is just the color. You should see these ghosts. They’re wearing dilapidating wedding gowns and old confederate uniforms. But still, they look like they are having the time of their lives, or they would be, if only they were alive, howling and whooping as they graze by me while I fumble with my keys before the caffeine kicks in.

There is one other instance in which I have seen a bona-fide ghost. I was walking in this park near my house, in a dense thicket of evergreen trees. I came round a corner and there is this cowboy sitting there, in the exact same transparent blue that the fog riding ghosts appear in. He was eating a blue tin of beans over a blue fire. When I saw him, it looked sad, it looked pathetic, I temporarily lost all hope and was at the same time mystified and absorbed by this solitary and inexplicable figure. He motioned for me to sit down across from him. He tried to explain something to me, something about his crimes and how he was so sad and so cursed as a result, but his explanation made no sense and went in circles. Then quit unexpectedly, he went on a rant about the romanticizing of the Old West, and the vapidity of it all, and then told me to shove my damn Levis and my damn dude ranches up my ass. Then he got up and walked off into the trees sobbing.

But ghosts are a bit of a downer subjects, and there are so many more magical things that are much lighter subjects. I see all kinds of crazy, wondrous type things all the time. My dad works for a company that is run by an even more powerful sorcerer, who once summoned an entire third world county, so that his company could have some place to outsource jobs. He also made the inhabitants of neighboring countries very hostile towards the people of this newly summoned country, so that when the company came under investigation for unethical practices in that country, it was simply invaded by its neighbors, and the company collected a fat insurance from the lost infrastructure that cost them nothing to create in the first place.

This sorcerer CEO apparently lives in a mansion inside a glacier, of which he is constantly rearranging the insides according to his whims. He also reportedly rides a hydra to work. But I have not seen any of this, so I do not know whether or not this particular magical happening is true. But I see many things that I know are true, because I see them with my own eyes. I see happy spirits flying out of instruments and speakers that work their way into peoples’ ears and help their brains vibrate at the optimal frequency. Sometimes, spirits jump out of the TV and beat people over the head with 2x4’s. I watch the spirits at the DMV poke people to make them agitated. These spirits also live wild on the street in New York and Boston. There are spirits that live inside onions that get angry when their homes are destroyed, and retaliate by trying to destroy the eyes of the destroyers. These are related to the spirits in chili peppers, who assault the tongues of those who try to eat them. I see them swimming around in bottles of Tabasco sauce and in bowls of salsa. There are also malicious confusion spirits which swim around inside bottles of alcohol.

But there are more spirits out there than the ones that directly affect our senses. I know that cars have spirits. Whenever there are two or more cars left vacant in a parking lot, the car spirits jump out from under the hoods and dance around. Buildings have spirits, sometimes even individual rooms do. They like some people, and dislike others. You can talk to them sometimes by putting your hand on the wall, but you can’t use words; you can only show them memories and hopes. I once got the fire sprinklers in a parking garage to turn on that way on a very hot day.

Most technology operates on some sort of supernatural principle. I know that this sounds like a bit of an oxymoron: how can it be technology, the application of a scientific theory, if it relies on the supernatural? Science is all just an orderly form of magic anyway. Most analog technology relies somehow on the presence of a little man with a crank, in accordance with the conventional wisdom of small children. With digital technology, things get a little more complicated. These are operated by teams of very small and very tempermental gremlins. Sometimes the gremlins cooperate, and sometimes they don’t. That’s just the way it works. When they break, you have to send them back to the manufacturer. The electronics are not actually being fixed. What is actually happening is that a gremlin soothsayer is trying to negotiate with the team, oftentimes ot no avail.

But there are more agreeable teams of gremlins, which live in pacemakers and satellites, things that have to work. The best behave gremlins we sent out into the far reaches of space on the Voyager probes, where they ambassadors for our discretely magical world.

You don’t believe me? Then why don’t you ask the merfolk that live in the tank of my toilet! Why don’t you ask the Jersey Devils and Phantom Kangaroos that live in the park down the street! Why don’t you ask the elves that meet in my basement as they plan their coup to overthrow the Leprechauns! Why don’t you ask my mailman, who is a troll in disguise, and now has to pay the rent on an apartment after he got evicted out from under the highway overpass! Ask the dragon that lives in the bathroom in that gas station by the Mondo-Mart! Ask the family of griffins that have nested in the bell tower of St. Luke’s! Ask the crazy neighborhood cat lady who actually can control her cats and make them do her bidding! Ask my friend who got herpes after being seduced by a succubus. Ask the centaur who landscaped my back yard! Ask the barista at the Starbucks near my house who shoots milk out of her fingertips! Ask the mole people who sued the city for putting a subway tunnel through their colony! Go to the storage room in the public library where gravity has been shifted by about fifteen degrees! Go to the thrift store where the pants dance around once the shop closes! Go anywhere, look hard enough, and it will pop out at you! There are so many things, so many random acts of magic, happening all the time and you just have to look for them, that’s all it takes!

I wish I could show you these things. I wish I could show you some of these random acts of magic, or maybe even commit one or two myself. Would that change things? Would I somehow be able to show you that the world is beautiful or that everything is alright and that you shouldn’t have to be sad about what doesn’t happen? Would I be a better person for that? Am I just some asshole who doesn’t even really know what’s going on, so he makes things up in his head to compensate? I want to show these things to you.

I could get that staff out of my closet and make sparks fly around. I could get out my little genie rock and tell you what bums on the street are thinking. I could wake you up early one foggy morning and show you the ghosts. I could crack open my DVD player and show you the gremlins inside. Would that reconcile everything in this crazy universe?

I guess I’m wondering if telling you about these magical happenings would make any difference at all, make you ok with your role in the world, show you that it’s something we’re all a part of. But even though you don’t think so, even though you were never smacked over the head with a formal notification, I know for certain that you are capable of random acts of magic.

History/Mystery

History is a mystery because we are always sifting through the stories to find out whodunnit. Did the Indian really use every part of the buffalo? Or did they throw out some of the more awkward parts? Did the Pilgrims who landed at Plymouth Rock really befriend them like we are told in kindergarten when we learn about the first Thanksgiving? Or was it by coercion that the Pilgrims learned to plant fishcorn? All this sleuthing for artifacts and interrogations for primary source are all going to lead us to some spectacular, elementary-my-dear-Watson, it all makes sense now kind of denouement where we have figured everything out exactly as it happened and thereafter anyone who has a different interpretation is a revisionist asshole with an agenda and everything is absolute and there are never any unsettling questions to be asked, right? Unfortunately for those who want one version of the past that suits their station, the answers are fluid and slip thorugh our minds as time goes by, and we need to come crawling back to Baker Street, or maybe this time go to a more seedy, trench coat-clad private eye who will rough guys up for answers and sleep with some dame in the process. History is not simple. That doesn't suit you? Too bad. You're living it.

Let's all go to Rockland

Sorry for the slew of short posts. I'm just trying to crank out material so that I have relatively frequent updates. Longer, better thought out out posts will come soon.

This is a fact: I am not Allen Ginsberg. I do not want to be Allen Ginsberg, but in some ways I am disappointed that I am not Allen Ginsberg. No one is Allen Ginsberg anymore. Now, I'm sure that this is painfully obvious, because as of 1997 he is permanently in a state that could be described as "dead." Now, death didn't stop Paul McCartney, as he is still performing and receiving media attention to this date, but from most people, Allen Ginsberg included, being dead makes you no longer existent.

Not being Allen Ginsberg means that I will not be tried for obscenity. In the last sixty years, we have pushed the boundaries of obscenity to the point where "Birthday Sex" is completely radio friendly. Had it been released in 1956, the same year as "Howl," Jeremih's court date would be right after Ginsberg's. Today, "Howl" wouldn't shock anyone. I could write a poem about smoking the sperm of endangered species of owls while caressing my masturbatory broomstick while fondling an eight year old boy in a back alley of Kuala Lumpur, read it on the streets, and people would hear it and say "that's been done before." Today, everything is obscene, meaning that nothing is obscene. Getting high on peyote in your Nob Hill apartment and seeing the face of Moloch in a hotel facade is, well, if not commonplace, at least not too out of the ordinary. I'm with you in Rockland, but so is everyone else. All the limits have been pushed; Dada has happened, 4'33" has happened, the Beat Generation has happened, flower power has happened, punk has happened, free jazz has happened. They have all happened. It is time to move on. We can't keep trying to write beat poetry. We can't keep trying to be Ornette Coleman. We can't keep smelling bad and driving colorful VW buses. We can't keep not being able to play bass but still be the bass player in a band.

If we're going to keep asking "what is art?" then we need to do things that haven't been done instead of imitating what was once pushing the limits.

And is a blog by an aspiring science fiction writer who thinks that his dead car was a spaceship pushing the limits? No. Like I said, I am not Allen Ginsberg. None of us are. So let's forge our own paths, and if they lead into obscenity, then more power to us.

Halloweenomics

It's important to find your niche. I have found my niche, and as a result, have a virtually unlimited supply of candy, albeit one with not very much variety.

I am the one person on earth who actually likes Almond Joys. Every other person on God's Spaceship Earth hates Almond Joy. Growing up, about one in fifteen houses would give out Almond Joy, apparently because they hated children and wanted to ruin their Halloweens by giving them inedible candy. Somehow, all this excess Almond Joy would find its way in my direction. I would get free candy by eating other peoples' unwanted junk. I had found my own economic niche.

But there must be something more to this holiday than excessive consumption of empty calories, acts of vandalism and hijinks, excessive drinking and low budget zombie movies, right? Of course not, and that's why Halloween is the best holiday of the year.

Have a good one.

Digital Anthems

"All this machinery making modern music

Can still be open hearted,

Not so coldly charted, it's really just a question

Of your honesty, yeah your honesty."

-Rush, "Spirit of Radio"

I do not own any vinyl. I will not deny this.

Anyone who owns vinyl will tell you that it is something you need to have, the benefits being the sound quality and, I suppose, being able to look down on people who don't have vinyl. When people tell me "you need to get your hands on some vinyl," they say it as if not owning vinyl is something that I'm supposed to feel bad about. Not that I'm just missing something, but that I'm depriving myself of something essential and doing an injustice to the artist. I have no interest in purchasing or owning any vinyl. Maybe I'm missing something by not hearing the sound so crisply that I feel like I'm front row at the Blue Note, getting a facefull of Chet Baker's spittle, but as a child of a post-industrial America I'm willing to say that vinyl is useless to me.

This goes beyond the fact that I do not own a record player. The way we consume music now is radically different; the entire equation has been changed. Each song is now a packet of digital information that is portable, duplicable, and easily accessed. You can do some of that with vinyl, you can get good at using a turntable and seamlessly switching between songs, but there is nothing that come close to the versatility of digitized music. The way I perceive it, I don't "own" the song unless it is in the same digital library as the rest of the music that I "own." So vinyl, unless I were to convert it into an mp3 file, rendering the vinyl aspect irrelevant, has no value. Yes, we are losing something in sound quality, no one will pretend otherwise. Music is consumed and perceived differently now, ever so slightly. This is not better or worse because it is new. Vinyl is not better or worse because it is old. This is just different.

This is Progress. Progress happens and you might as well make it work for you.

Escape Velocity

"I wanted to be a spaceman

That's what I wanted to be

But now that I am a spaceman

Nobody cares about me"

-Harry Nilsson, "Spaceman"

"So you're a literature major... What do you want to do with that?"

"I want to be a writer."

"So like, what kind of stuff do you want to write?"

"Fiction."

"What kind of fiction?"

"Well um... actually, I want to write... science fiction, among other things."

This is a conversation that I have been having a lot lately. I feel like the epitome of lame when I tell people that I want to write science fiction. I might as well take to playing Warhammer, wear coke-bottle glasses, and frequently describe things as "purely plasmodial!"

Growing up, I wanted to be an astronaut. That was until I first got on a roller coaster and spent the next hour praying to the porcelain gods. I also found out that my eyes are not up to snuff. I am not physically perfect enough to be an astronaut, and I probably don't have the grades either. I am not good enough to be an astronaut. I will never go to space.

Nor will you, most likely. No matter where on earth you are, you are less than 65 miles from outer space. I am closer to outer space right now than I am to Concretestan. It takes maybe ten bucks of gas to get to Concretestan with current gas prices. To outfit, launch, and maintain a space shuttle flight costs somewhere on the order of $1.5 billion. And that won't even get me escape velocity. Funding an Apollo mission in today's dollars would cost somewhere around $145 billion. Building and launching spaceships is incredibly costly and requires more numbers than could ever be held in my brain. I am not intelligent enough to build spaceships. I am not intelligent enough to send people to space.

I know why I write, and that is because through writing, I can make anything happen. I may not be perfect enough to man spaceships (with the exception of my beloved Spaceship Earth), I may not be intelligent enough to build spaceships, but I can write about spaceships. And by writing about spaceships, if I do it well enough, I can take anyone to space.

In all reality, there will likely not be another man (or woman) on the moon for the next thirty years. NASA will continue to receive less and less funding, along with the European Space Agency. China, or maybe India, could potentially send more people up, but as of right now their space programs are still nascent.

We blew our wad by winning the space race. We rushed into space exploration without taking time to do things right, and in doing so we missed out on a lot of opportunities. Getting to the moon turned into a pissing contest for national pride, rather than an opportunity to create a sustainable space program that would maintain continued progress. Space exploration is not as advanced as we think it is. Despite the optimism of some scientists, my generation will all be dead before someone walks on Mars, and our children and their children will be dead before we get to the other side of the asteroid belt.

I will be providing the next best thing to going to space. I want to go to space, and I'm sure many others do as well. That is what I want to write science fiction. That is what I want to tell people when I have the aforementioned conversation. But I just watch the wheels turn in their brain as they realize how unbelievably lame I am.

The Insomniac Symphony

"Time is the essence

Time is the season

Time ain't no reason

Got no time to slow

Time everlasting

Time to play besides

Time ain't on my side

Time I'll never know"

Blue Öyster Cult, "Burnin' for You"

Program Notes

Because of my rather disastrous burnout my season is now over. October isn't even over and I'm already taking time off before base building for track. My coach told me to do something that I had always wanted to do, but never could because of my training. I am taking this opportunity to venture into the wide world of insomnia, because it has always been something that I wanted to experience. Here are my observations, in all of their late night/early morning glory.

Allegro: Space-Time

Space time is not something that I fear anymore. If sleep is not important, then I have more time to do things. This gives me a theoretical eight extra hours. I look at the clock, I laugh at the clock. I am laughing at time, because time no longer scares me. And time is the only thing that makes us aware of space, and the distance between things. Therefore I am afraid of neither time nor space. I am not afraid of space-time. I'll fight black holes, wormholes, neutron stars, Higgs-Bosons, whatever the universe throws at me, I'll take 'em! I'll break the speed of light, I don't care if those PhD's say I can't do it. So what, they have their hadron colliders and their fancy lab in Switzerland, but they are still afraid of the very fabric of which they are made. I have transcended science. I am an insomniac, for the time being anyway.

Schertzo: Coffee

It has been several months since my last cup of coffee. My life goal is this: I can only consume coffee if I am in a social situation, and I will have the minimum possible amount of caffeine, short of ordering decaf. I refuse to use caffeine for any utilitarian function. At a certain point, everyone who drinks coffee needs coffee. You know why the best part of waking up is Folger's in your cup? Because you're a fucking addict! "I'm a coffee drinker." "I'm a vegetarian." "I'm addicted to methamphetamine and as a result am HIV positive." All part of the same spectrum. No caffeine for me.

With that in mind, I decided to have four cups of coffee in twenty minutes.

I think I was part of an experiment, but I can't be sure. All I know is that there was a video camera in the room, and I had to sign a release before I could enter. (Maybe they just know that my squiggles will be valuable some day.) I think that the experiment was observing people talking in a room to study human interaction. They lured people in with free coffee and various munchables. There was sugar, Splenda, and powdered milk solid available, but I know that stuff is for pussies. I take my coffee like I take my men! (Oh my, I am tired.)

There were two types of people in the room: those who were there for the conversation and those that were there for the coffee. I was there for the conversation but ended up living by the old maxim: "when in Rome, attend a morally depraved spectacle of gratuitous violence, slaughter and assimilate indigenous people, and eat so much that you vomit all over the the entryway to your home in a proto-bulimic binge-and-purge cycle." So I had some coffee.

I sat there, gulping down bitter liquid. This girl comes in, and once she sees the coffee start to flow into her mug, she sighs and says "ambrosia," her voice quivering as she does so. We really are a society of addicts.

So twenty minutes and four cups of coffee later I start to notice something: my hands are moving. I am not really aware of this, nor am I consciously making it happen, but I am gesturing at something. I am apparently very passionate about whatever this object of my gesturing is. And I am talking, a lot, and there is just this fountain of bullshit coming out of my mouth. I am moving energy with my hands, I can almost see it! I am buzzing. Off of coffee! This does not make sense but it is happening. I get another cup. I am holding it in my hand. I am holding power in my hand. The energy seeps out of the cup and into my hand, energy through osmosis, my power level is over 9000! Power, there is power in my stride and power in my gaze, or there would be, if only I could look at something for more than a few seconds.

This is how they hook you. This is how and Starbucks and all those other trendy froth coming out their asses places rope you in. You can buy power in a cup. You don't need to sleep because now you can just get your energy over the counter. You get something without working for it, you take a shortcut to your basic human needs. And like anything else that you don't work for, it becomes meaningless, because eventually, it goes away and you're crawling back for more and pouring out your wallet so you can function again. We want the benefits without the sacrifice and we get both.

"Ambrosia." I'm fine with my food for mortals, thankyouverymuch.

Adagio: Panda Sauce

Orange chicken sauce, now that is ambrosia. It is made from everything bad for you: high fructose corn syrup, hydrogenated oils, MSG, and enough dye to render a whale infertile. Nothing tastes better in the wee small hours of the morning (while the whole wide world is fast asleep / you lie awake, and think about the girl / and never ever think of counting sheep) than refrigerated then nuked orange chicken. I don't care if it clogs my arteries, ruptures my pancreas, and turns my balls into barren bundles of oh-so-sensitive nerves, I will allow myself this one transcendental moment of pure indulgence. Because in two weeks, two weeks time, this haphazard existence will end and it will be back to my labors.

Finale: Structure vs. Volume

I live life differently than most people my age. My life is based on a routine. Yes, I may deviate from that routine, but the routine is the structure and the maintenance of that structure, and the benefits of that maintenance, are what motivate me to get things done.

For most other people my age, life is based on events. They get things done so that they can cram as many events into a frame of time as possible.

They measure success by entertainment. I measure success by the process of completing a task. One of these days, things will switch.

They will go into the wide world of jobs and careers and families and garages and bills to pay. If things go as planned, I will live life for experiences and the chance to grow with every misadventure, failure, and rake stepped on. They think that this is their last chance at youth. But that is only if they choose to grow up. (At this point anyway), I don't really care about financial stability and hallmarks of success. I just want to tell stories.

"I remember being that way when I was your age."

"Well I'm on a mission. Were you on a mission? That's what I thought."

IV-V7-I-V7-I

(pause, cough, is it over?)

ba-dommmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmm.

(Applause)

Burnout

"It's better to burn out

Than to fade away"

-Neil Young, "My My, Hey Hey"

Something is wrong. When I say that, I mean that there is something wrong presently and superficially. I have DNFed my last three workouts with the team, and the last ten minutes of my "long" run last Sunday, ten miles of stumbling, felt as though I was swimming. Everything from biking to calss to getting up to take a leak in the middle of the night feels like a daunting effort. I'm trying to think of an explanation. It is not anemia, I know that. My ferritin count is 61, a number which Bethany says she would give her pinkie finger to have. It can't be mono, because I've already got that out of the way. My sleep has been good. I took three days very easy and that didn't help. I may be going flat, burning out. June 20th was the last time I took a day off. I am fatigued beyond belief. I just want to lie down right here. I want to hibernate.

I may have been starting to go flat the week before the time trial, but three days easy and adrenaline allowed me to gut it out. That may have given me a little shot in the arm that lasted to Interior Concretestan Invite. Kinetic Village probably took a lot out of me, too. Right now my quads are ravaged and I feel as though I am going to collapse just sitting here, watching my laundry dance in the dryer.

Maybe my problems run deeper. The superficial wrongness is simply a symptom of deeper wrongness. I may just have a case of bitch. I am still just a 9:50 guy or a ten flat guy even, who got lucky and now gets an opportunity to try another four or five years of pretending he has potential.

I didn't think I would still be running at this point. I was sure I would be done by the time trial. That was back in April when I was still a nine-fifty-crap two miler and a four-thirty-crap miler. That day at Edward's Stadium I ran through a solid iron door just as it was slamming shut. I considered myself so lucky, I had done the impossible. Now I realize that I had only begun to challenge the impossible. I realize that I may have ended up on the wrong side of that door.

That door is made of something heavy and metallic, but wherever I am is certainly not metal. I am not sure of the size or the scope of this chamber, or if it is any kind of enclosed space at all. It is a place where everything is moving quickly yet subtly and being still for a moment will get you crushed, smashed, mangled, maimed, exsanguinated, defenestrated, or just have the life force sucked out of you by some vaguely human but obviously alien proboscis. This is the place where we live now. There is no sky or floor, only a forest with strange machines filling up any empty or habitable spaces. Welcome to living the dream, asshole!

So since I am here now, what do I do? I am in a place where I have an opportunity. I may not be on the pleasant side of those hungry iron doors, but I am on the side where I can better myself. Most people are on the pleasant side where they can afford to make mistakes and afford to live a life with little routine, live a life without standing on the edge of physical reality and leaning forward. They can find little meaningless gems of meaning in the wee small hours of the morning. I know these people and love these people, but I cannot be one of them, at least while there is still work to do, while there is still an opportunity to better myself as best I can.

A week ago I had a dream. My dad was driving me to the time trial, and we were arguing about the same bullshit we always argue about. At some point, I challenged his masculinity. He pulls over and says "oh yeah, well look what I just bought!" as he reaches for the glove compartment.

He pulls out a Glock.

"How does just having a gun make you a man?" I ask. "Or are you trying to compensate for something?"

"It's not the fact that I have a gun," he says. "It's what I'm about to do with it." He puts it right up to the back of my head.

"You're too much of a bitch to pull the trigger," I say. "You're trying to prove yourself but you can't.  You're too much of a bitch."

Then he points the gun at my knee and fires ten rounds right above my patella. "Good luck with your running career now, asshole!"

But in the real world, I am still intact.

Pacific

The Pacific Ocean is the edge of the world. A hundred, maybe two hundred miles out, you run into sea monsters and then the world just stops, water spilling over the edge. And if you sail too close, you'll be going over with it, if the sea monsters don't get you first. There's nothing really pacific about it. All of us came here to its shore because we, or one of our predecessors, were trying to escape something and then ran out of room in which to run. All the great cities on the western edge of the New World: Vancouver, Seattle, San Francisco, Los Angeles, Guayaquil, Lima, they're nothing more than dumping grounds and shantytowns for people who wanted to keep pushing on to something but ran into the edge of the world instead. Now we invent and augment our cultures and keep on keeping on while the sea monsters look at us and laugh.

Kinetic Village/Revelation Lake

"But I don't need to bother you, no, I won't play that part

I just want access to the inside of you heart Access to your thoughts on the way that I should be So I could start to change and maybe you could access me"

-Phish, "Access Me"

I realize that this post is a little late in coming. You get what you pay for. If you want me to post when I say I will, cut me a check and I can guarantee any number of subsequent posts (based on how much you pay me) will be up with all due expediency. But until one of you steps up, you will have to deal with this after-the-fact bullshit. Enjoy

Sometimes you have to cut your way through every layer of bullshit to stab at what you are looking for. This was relatively easy in Spaceship Earth. The dimensions were right, the shape was right, the thoughts just bounced around and the AI would get inside your head, break down the barriers and the inhibitions and, as they say, you could talk some real shit. You can call it a heart to heart or opening up or a sencere discourse or even a mutual expounding of truths of the mind and soul between two or more consenting parties. But it all reduces to "talking some real shit."

You could do that inside Spaceship Earth. It worked to a degree even after the ship itself died and only its brain in a jar was present. But the brain is still alive and sitting in someone's room. He is someone who needs it. New Gibraltar needs Spaceship Earth. But dammit, so does St. Collegeberg. Everywhere needs a brain of Spaceship Earth, but there is only one brain of Spaceship Earth and it is sitting in someone's room in the town of New Gibraltar, which is located in Greater Balboastan. (If you do not know what these places names actually are, try to figure it out. If you do I will give you five ozonebucks, which are good for, well, absolutely nothing.) I am currently away from the brain of Spaceship Earth, in a town called St. Collegeberg, which is located in the northern regions of concretestan. The area is known as Ferdinand's Folley. Ferdinand's Folley is about a five and a half hour drive from New Gibraltar. Can you figure out what these places are actually called?

Anyway, that is not my point. The point is, the world needs people to be sencere both with each other and with themselves. You could do that in Spaceship Earth.

And now that we have no intact Spaceship Earth, how do I do this?

Well it just so happened that I went on a vision quest.

The vision quest was a rite of passage used by the Sioux Indians. Men would sit in a hole for three days with no food or water and would have dehydration and hunger-enduced visions. I did a vision quest-lite. Less fulfilling, but better for you. I went out in the woods for a few hours. The whole team did this during our stay at Kinetic Village.

The place I am referring to as Kinetic Village is a town whose population is less than its elevation in feet above sea level. It is a beautiful place with lots of trees, endless trails, spectacular mountains, and very little oxygen.

Even though I went up there to train with my team in the weeks before class starts, I won't talk much about the running. Most people will not be interested in hearing about my running, and this is not a Flotrack blog, where I could talk about my running and the life lessons I learn from it and how it's so damn important and trancendental with some sort of metaphysical construct placed precariously on top, or if it is Ryan Hall's blog, an awkward paragraph about how his tempo run related to Hebrews 11. Running is not something that is complex and philosophical. It is the opposite. It is life stripped of everything complex and philosophical.

I will talk about the radio stations in Kinetic Village. Kinetic Village and its greater surrounding area are very sparesly populated. Therefore, these radio stations really dont' have very many listeners, and therefore generate very little advertising revenue. These radio stations therefore get to play whatever the hell they want. I don't mean that they can play the slightly less popular Nickelback songs or the uncensored versions of songs that are labeled as explicit. I mean that they play whatever the hell they want. A set could go from a country western ballad to a smooth jazz porn groove to early Jefferson Airplane to a Texas blues. And this was common. One station had the classical hour every morning at eight, followed at nine by the speed metal hour. One show was operated at the hands of an old man who played mostly Old-Timey music and sounded like he was having a stroke when he was talking. He also seemed to have seen most of the artists he played live and in their heyday.

In mainstream America circa 2009, you don't play a song because you like it, or even because you think it should be played. You play it because it's what people want to hear it. People want to hear it because other people want to hear it. This may be a bold statement, but I doubt that more than 10% of the people who consciously listen to the song "Birthday Sex" actually enjoy listening to it. It's popular and it has novelty. And what about when people want to sing along? You put on "Don't Stop Believin'," because we all know the words and it's catchy and singable. I'm sure that a lot of people, in the rare moments when they are honest with themselves, don't really like "Don't Stop Believin'." They like it because it is a cultural common ground, something that everyone can agree upon. But when you go up to Kinetic Village, where the air and population are spread thinner, you get DJ's who really don't need to rely on what people want. It's a beautiful thing, if you don't mind having your relaxed mood, created by listening to the Bach Cantatas, suddenly interrupted by "Enter Sandman."

My vision quest involved a lot of climbing rocks, for some reason. It was something I wanted to do. I saw a cleft on a rock face, and wanted to get there. By the time I got there, I had decided that it wasn't cool enough, and wanted to go to a cleft that was higher up, and would therefore require more climbing. I had a notebook with me to write down my thoughts. I kept climbing up these rocks until it got really steep and I had to carry my notebook in my teeth so as to have two free hands. I ended up yelling at myself a lot, and singing Phish's "Access Me" for some reason. I realized that Phish could have been recognized as a really good band, and not just a really good jam band, had they taken their studio efforts more seriously. As I knocked loose rocks hundreds of feet down, I was reminded of the Chinese proverb about moving a mountain by moving small stones, and how I could theoretically move this 9,000 foot peak if I just had enough time on my hands. I saw the entire valley as this sphere and I was swirling around in it. I climbed up to a cleft and looked out at the mountains in the distance and knew that on the other side there was nothing but desert and casinos and concealed UFO crashes. I knew that behind me lay a subcontinent that I call my home, but that I will never truly understand. I didn't see the ghost of FDR, I didn't speak in tongues, I didn't see the face of the Virgin Mary on a tortilla. I just knew that being afraid was pointless, even though the slightest clumsy motion could send me falling hundreds of feet, and that I would die wearing those stupid sweatpants with snaps on the side so that you can rip them off. I yelled at myself because of all the things about myself that I hate, and how I am inheriting all of my family's problems and shortcomings.

I could resurrect Spaceship Earth, the whole thing, enough mind power and willpower and it could be whole and functioning and one foggy day we could get in and then go, some place. Even if you go in circles in Spaceship Earth, you are going somewhere. You figure things out. We can talk about what happened on the day when the windshield of the world was smashed and a whole new reality rushed in. You don't know what I'm talking about and it's better that way. I just want to figure it out. But I can't. Everyone has a demon, some event that haunts them. And my problem is that my demon is someone else's demon.

Some runs will make you faster. Some will challenge you. Some will make your quads stronger. Some will reveal secrets. Some will show you things about others. Some will tell you what you lack. Some elevate your mood or crush your spirits. But there is one run that reveals who you are.

There is a lake near New Gibraltar. The trail around it is a fourteen mile loop which gains a net total of at least 1,000 feet of elevation, possibly closer to 1,500 feet. I ran this loop four consecutive Sundays this summer, and I saw who I am. I do not like who I am.

But in Kinetic Village, I saw what I can become. And I like what I can become.

Then one day I'll come back to New Gibraltar and chase the demons out of all of you.

Preparing to Elevate

"And we all got to ride this river

And we all got to feel the rain

And we all dig what we're given,

Even the pain"

-The Yellowjackets, "Even the Pain"

It's time to go to altitude. I guess everything I'm doing is not hard enough, it needs to be done with less oxygen now. I will be going to "Kinetic Village" with the team for a week. We will live and run at 8,000 feet, and we will be thinking much more about the latter and very little about the former. And this will drive me crazy. I am already losing it. I need to talk to some people that are not runners, I need to talk about something other than covering ground quickly on foot and how to do it better. I will not find that in Kinetic Village. We will probably have daily quoting of scripture from Once a Runner and will most likely also discuss many factual runners. If I could go back a year in time and tell early September, 2008 me what I was going to be doing, he would be extatic. Now that my perspective has changed... wait, scratch that. Now that I have perspective, I realize that the best way to get good at something isn't to think about it all the time. Sure, you pour your heart and soul and blood and nuts into it, you can even live the lifestyle and center your life around it, but if you can't focus on anything else, you will not accomplish anything.

I want to sit down with the people I know, I just want to have those conversations we always would have, where we talked about everything and nothing at the same time, where stories were swapped and hypotheticals were discussed and allegations of dude-kissing were made. Even on runs, I want to talk about something other than what we're doing. I miss my old team, with Brondello's childish spirit and wit, Robert's racist ramblings, Baffi's comments that were nutted by the line that separated the lewd from the philosophical, Ross's attitude of a 400 meter runner, Colby's contrapuntal opinions, Bongman's occasional gems, and Budge's depraved sexual fantasies. I never thought I would miss that but I do.

I need real people. I'm sure that everyone on this team is a real person, but the problem is that there is only one thing that unites us: we are runners. In high school, your whole team grew up together, you lived in the same town and you had to bullshit for the same teachers. Now we're just a bunch of kids from all over the state who have one talent and interest in common.

And the workouts, they all make me so tired. So much damn running, drills, abs, even stretching takes a couple lifetimes. I'm eating healthy, which means nothing that you enjoy eating. My calves are shredded, my quads are twitching, my hamstrings are tightening, my hip flexors are quivering, and my butt is, well, let's just say I feel like I've been dropping some proverbial soap quite often.

So what do I do in times of adversity? Do I take advice from my pianist Joe Zawinul and cry out "Mercy, Mercy Mercy!" No, I grin and bear it, because I know that I can put up with bullshit for longer than the universe can throw it at me. Have you kicked aversity in the balls today? Because I have, and I shall continue to do it on the daily.

Major bonus points if you got the "Mercy, Mercy, Mercy" reference.

This Is the Place Where We Live Now

"Never had a home like this And the prophets said 'be careful what you wish' Never had to think twice Always knew my home was in paradise" -The Disco Biscuits, "Home Again" Home is not the place where you want to live. Home can be a place where you have to live, or a place that needs you. If you don't want to improve your situation, you lose the creative stimulus that is hardwired into the human brain, and you stagnate. The way I see it, if you are satisfied with where you live, you need to move. Therefore, achieving complete satisfaction causes a loss of humanity.

Now, here is my problem: I am not making much of an effort to improve my situation. The immediate impediment is that I don't have the energy to do so. I know I need to do laundry, but the Vitamin Hospice has exorbitantly priced coin laundry machines, and I'm not sure how if that would put me in danger of being detected. I have a team meeting in less than three hours and I know I should do laundry before then, but I am not willing to make the effort. I don't want to organize things because I my room has taken on a state of Zen impermanence and I know that it may be futile.

I'm home and I love it and this is the place where I live, even if I may be squatting, even though I will be moving again very soon. I may live in a reality that is not reality, but that is what I'm used to. We live in a place that is not the real world, and not some fantasy or parallel universe. We live an an in-between microverse where things are real but only to a certain extent and time is not slower, there is just more of it. This is the place where we live now.

And I will not improve my situation to a very great extent. That is because I have to be uncomfortable. Discomfort and pain need to be routine. I need to wrap myself in it, bathe myself in it, lather it up, rub it behind my ears. I have found that doing things that make me comfortable or cause me pleasure don't necessarily make me happy. I am happy when I have work to do, I am happy when I am consciously deciding to be uncomfortable. And that is what I will have to do, I will have to transform myself. This is not going to be enjoyable, but I have work to do and sometimes you have to stop being a bitch and get the work done. This is not what people want, people want to be comfortable and always improving their situation, but I want a situation that is uncomfortable so that my creative stimuli come from breaking free.

Walking back to the vitamin hospice on one Sexy Sunday Night I was walking back to the vitamin hospice. The sidewalk was crowded with groups of people going the other direction and having fun. I'm walking towards them and they don't move and I don't move. Maybe I shouldn't be allowed to walk on the sidewalk, maybe I'm a second class citizen in this depraved society simply because I am willing to not enjoy myself. No, I am not moving off this sidewalk! I walked through throngs of drunk and staggering fun seekers, they were surprised at my audacity, because they knew I was different. And I am not the same as most of the rest of this microverse, but even still, this is my home and this is where work needs to be done.

Squatting at the Vitamin Hospice

"I'd invite you back to my place

It's only mine because it holds my suitcase

It looks like home to me alright

But it's a hundred miles from yesterday night"

The Police, "Man in a Suitcase"

Once again my living situation has changed.

I no longer am sleeping on a couch. I have a bed. I even have my own room, for the time being. It is not my room really, but it is also not my room that is not my room, if that makes sense, which it doesn't.

I am partaking in a proud American tradition that goes back to the Pioneer Days. I am a squatter.

There are two other freshmen on the team, and they are staying in an off-campus dorm. Since classes don't start for another few weeks, their suite is mostly empty, and I am living in one of the empty beds. I will refer to this dorm as "The Vitamin Hospice."

I am a shadow, the Phantom of the Vitamin Hospice, a formless enigma, a Ghost in the Machine and the last sane man on this parody of a planet. And it feels like home already.

Going anywhere in the building usually involves avoiding eye contact with most people. I know one RA here, and she is entirely okay with my squatting, but I hear that usually RAs will kick squatters out. I want to avoid any suspicion. We keep our windows facing the courtyard closed. This makes me feel a little like a fugitive, and therefore like a little more of a bad-ass. I am entirely dependent on my roommates whenever I need to enter the room or enter the building after 9 o'clock.

The one advantage to squatting at The Vitamin Hospice is that anyone can buy a limited meal plan. Students living in nearby apartments sometimes buy them, since it is all you can eat. I have enough meals to last me for maybe another week. After that runs out, I will have to use the floor's kitchenette to cook my remaining spaghetti and canned beans. But by that time I may be moving again, going to altitude to train. However, that is a question mark, so I am prepared for the long haul.

I eat, sleep, and shower inside a building which I have no business being in. At home, I felt that my room was not my room, that it had a presence that was almost hostile towards me. Now I am in a room that is most certainly not my room, and I feel comfortable and welcomed. I feel that if I had to be more secretive to avoid suspicion, I would feel even more at home. I'm not sure why this is so, but I am still a little too tired to analyze anything very deeply. (This is why my recent posts have not been very good.)

My interactions with other members of the Vitamin Hospice (aside from my roommates) are very limited, both because of my sketchy living arrangements and my lack of willpower to socialize, which stems from my tiredness and emotional residue. (I suppose this last item is what most people would refer to as "baggage." I may not take myself seriously, but I at least try to avoid cliches.) I took a dump for an hour and read a science fiction book when people were over because I didn't really feel like socializing. Lame on a stick. Now, it was a good book and I enjoyed myself, but I realize that this is not how you win friends (or for that matter, influence people).

Since I do not have my music, the average quality of the music that I listen to has declined. In the house that I was living on, I feel like an inordinate amount Blink-182 was played. In some ways, this doesn't feel right. I almost feel like we are too old for that. At the tender age of thirteen, I somehow got my hands on a copy of The Mark, Tom, and Travis show, at a mall in... Utah of all places. My parents didn't know about it. After I got home from middle, before my parents were home from work, I would listen to this album. I loved it. I loved the mindless hooks and stage banter. They were swearing. And talking about sex! This was cool! I showed it to all my friends, because it would make me cool, because they were swearing and talking about sex!

I will always associate Blink-182 with the false maturity of middle school, when you think you're growing up but instead you're going backwards. This teen angst was emotion for morons, the catchy guitar hooks and simple chord progressions was music for morons.

But now I realize that Blink-182 is most the guys I went to high school with. They feel angst over strong yet surfacy emotions and cliche social situations, they can kind of play guitar, and they won't pass up the opportunity to make a good Cock Joke. And for better or for worse, these are the people that make up the world we live in. That's ok, Cock Jokes will never get old.

I want to listen to Bitches Brew in the cockpit of Spaceship Earth. (My brain is fried to the point where typing the word "cockpit" causes me to audibly chuckle. It must be all the Blink-182 I've been hearing lately...) I'm sitting in a room where it's permanent enough to unpack but not permanent enough to organize things, and I don't have the initiative to go out and meet people. It's Friday night, and I know that everyone I know is doing something fun while I waste my life trying to write things I don't have the intellectual capability to write and run at velocities that I am incapable of. I want to call someone, anyone, but I know I would just be taking away from their funtime. If someone were sympathetic enough to lend me an ear, I would probably become like my uncle; he stays with us and he just doesn't leave. He basically lives with us. He just showed up unannounced and didn't really leave. Now there is kale in my fridge which is not my fridge, back in New Gibraltar where the fog keeps feeding souls and gives them the energy to run in all directions and never sleep. Maybe they're even having fun on Mondays now, right when my compatriots and I all jumped ship.

I brought one belt down. And one day, that one belt is going to break. It's getting a little frayed. My belt will break and I won't be able to wear pants. Then I won't be able to go outside and... wait, that won't really change my behavior at all.

I said that I wouldn't be like this, I said that I would be outgoing and shake up the routine. The one thing that I did that I said I would do was vote. I voted absentee, so I don't even get a sticker. I am not entirely alright with this. But I did vote, and I (maybe) made a difference. And I kept a promise that I made to myself. So as long as I am squatting at the Vitamin Hospice, I achieve by simply existing a sane existence.

The Most Excellent Playlist for the Survival and Advancement of a Shipwrecked Spaceship Pilot

"Somebody is stranded light years from home
on a planet where people are not like his own
where they pay to be brainwashed and told what to see
and not many dare question authority"

-Joey Eppard, "Lay Down the Law"

I have crash landed on a reality that is very different from my own. No Spaceship and a head full of memories. I have been too tired to miss anyone. I have been too tired to think about anything either. In fact, I will be too tired to spell check. But I was able to get introspective for a few minutes last night.

I am disconnected from everything, except for the fact that I am still tired all the time. I get my clock cleaned daily and try to get as many calories and proteins as I can. There is a song playing that is enumerating the virtues of intenrcourse on one's birthday. There are people barfing in the street. I wake up for morning pratcie on Saturday and stumble out onto streets littered with beer cans and red cups. I run along cliffs that are on the edge of the world. If I squint hard enough I can see it, where the world actually ends. Maybe this place where I live is somewhat like how the world will end. Maybe the world will end in a fit of apathy when we all decide we would rather dance the night away and bathe our brains in alcohol so as to avoid thinking. Then the survivors will build shelters out of empty beer cans and have to figure out how to sell bread pre-sliced in the packaging all over again. Then they can work on circumnavigating the globe, getting a man on the moon, and getting rock-hard erections well into their twilight years, the three signs of a civilization that knows the meaning of progress.

I have no music of my own. Everyone else in this house likes Blink-182, so that is playing a lot. I get to hear songs about teenage angst which I can't really experience because I have both outgrown that and become too asexual and uncaring in my current situation to be able to experience. The point is that I am too tired to object to the fact that I am listening to Mark Hoppus' whiny voice while my quads spasm violently.

I have been talking to myself a lot. I feel like this is me trying to reason things and make sense of things which I am too tired to make sense of.

My life has no continuity and I love it. But there is one thing that I wish I had to string it together is my music. So what am I doing to stay sane as I recalibrate my mind to my new lifestyle? I am creating my macro-playlist, a mix tape for my sanity, if you will. Every time I think of a song I want to listen to, I write it down in a notebook. When I get my music back, I will make this playlist, and I suppose part of me will feel satisfied. Then I will be on to the next adventure in the Continuing Story of Spaceship Earth. But for now, I will eat my parmesan flavored goldfish and write down every song that gets stuck in my head.

Bagoom-tss!

Progress

I am upgrading. I am Advancing. Soon, I will be making progress in my life. Progress is apparently a good thing. Progress got us out of the primordial soup, onto land, on two legs, into a structured society, got Al Gore to invent the internet, and it will undoubtedly give rise to weapons and wars that will send us back to something akin to primordial soup again. But that is progress! Progress is what is yanking me out of what was once my comfortable little routine and into the wide world of a new routine that will consume me.

I would wake up early. Far too early. On Monday, Wednesday, and Friday I would be up at 5:30 for my morning run. I actually would enjoy this to an extent. I would run around on empty streets near my house and pretend that I was Haile Gebrslassie winning the Berlin Marathon. The other weekdays I would wake up at a no more reasonable 6:10. In either scenario, I probably should have woken up five to ten minutes earlier. I had to be at school at 7:00 in the morning because I was in the jazz band, for which I was always about a minute late. I would glance at the clock at 6:53. Oh shit, I thought today was going to be different. Dammit! I hopped in Spaceship Earth and achieved escape velocity before I could realize that I was forgetting something important, like my backpack.

I would zoom down the street to Colby's house. Horn honking and Pearl Jam blaring out the open windows, if I don't get to sleep, then dammit, the neighbors don't get to either! Shit man, we are late, better lay on the horn again. My phone rings. He's taking a dump, he'll be out in a sec.

We're on the road and it's 6:58.

"Sorry dude, my dump schedule is all out of whack. I don't know what's going on. It may have something to do with the fact that I'm not sleeping right."

"Whatever, I feel you, it's ok. We're going to make it." How do we make it? We do two things:

1. Activate the hyperdrive on Spaceship Earth
2. Crank up the Pearl Jam!

There is no parking when we get there, but I park in the secret spot, a loading zone that never actually gets used and no one cares about. We get in and it's all fine, we may have dodged a bullet this time, but tomorrow, I am getting up five minutes earlier so that this doesn't happen.

First period I would go to calc. Half the time I would pay attention, and half the time I would look at people whom I didn't know and try to figure out things about them, most of which were partially or entirely wrong. A lot of the people I didn't know where juniors. These were the juniors who were good at math, the overachieving juniors, the hyperjuniors. I am not very good at math. My brain is more wired for words and music. I wish I were good at math so I could build bridges that cure cancer and make spaceships. I am not smart enough to build spaceships; I am not reliable enough to fly spaceships, so I suppose I will have to settle for writing about spaceships. These were the things I thought about as I tried to figure out the rate at which imaginary cars traveled along imaginary roads where you had time to figure out when to slam on the brakes to avoid killing pedestrians, just like in real life.

It was also during first period that I started my grazing. I would usually start with a bagel, and between first period and lunch I would be continually munching on PB&J's, promax bars, oranges, and pita chips dipped in hummus. This was my lunch. I had the same thing every day and never got tired of it.

I know that this sounds a little pathetic, but brunch became the high point of my day. This was a ten minute break between second and third period. This is where I would eat the more delicious of my two sandwiches. I really don't think it's pathetic. Your daily routine isn't supposed to have any high points that really stand head and shoulders above the rest. I did my routine and I would get rewarded at 10 o'clock every day with a peanut butter and honey sandwich. That's not depressing, that's life.

Routine became my existence and I would lose myself in routine and love it. Weekends would actually become an annoyance because there wouldn't be that routine. I would always try to do something to spice up routine, but at a certain point, especially during the hot and heavy period of the cross country season, there was no room or reason for messing with the routine, and no wiser option than trying to stick to routine and get everything done every day.

The need for sleep was paramount. After practice I would give Colby a ride home in Spaceship Earth, sometimes we would talk about the heavy things, sometimes we would talk about meaningless yet oh-so meaningful things, and sometimes I would just clench the wheel and stare angrily at the asphalt in front of me. I would pull up to my driveway and sit in Spaceship Earth for a bit, getting some homework done, eat dinner, then pretend to do a little more homework either in my room which was not my room or in Spaceship Earth, maybe see if I could write a little, and then be asleep very early. As I was going to bed, I would think "It's ok, I don't need to wake up five minutes earlier. I can just do things a little more quickly in the morning." That was routine and I loved and despised it and for most of high school it never crossed my mind to even dare to disturb it.

Then on one fine day in either March or April, I can't quite be sure, I stopped caring about the routine and how much sleep I got and when I was going to eat my sandwich. For a few months I got a glimpse at the way I could have lived and experienced life if I hadn't been a slave to the routine, only its partner in crime. It became routine-lite. I didn't sleep quite as much because I didn't bust my ass to get in bed early every night. My afternoon dump turned from an absolute truth to a fuzzy concept that could happen at any time from 8 AM to 3 PM. I talked to people I wouldn't normally talk to. I even ate my more delicious sandwich at lunch sometimes. I compartmentalized, I was only a runner for three hours a day and then the rest of the time I was just a dude with some slightly boring tendencies.

That was progress. I grew up because I could live without regularity. I made progress because I was willing to lose sleep and discover the greater humanity around me. I swallowed dry ice to see what would happen (you feel cold, then you burp a lot, then you fart a lot, in case you were wondering). I ate basically nothing but tacos and fruit snacks for a week, with the occasional banana thrown in to pretend I was being healthy. I let go and didn't care about routine or progress and I made progress and achieved what I had hoped for after all those years of being wrapped up in routine.

Now I will be making yet more progress. I will be leaving, going to a new city and starting a whole new routine. I don't know what it will consist of yet, but I do know that if I want to enjoy myself and not regret the time I spend there, I will have to let it be something that I want to break out of. And if I become complacent let the good Lord smite me down, because in doing so I will have failed.

For purposes of anonymity, the city in which I am going to college will be referred to as "St. Collegeberg." My hometown and the area around it will be referred to as "New Gibraltar." I don't want to say "home," because I'm really not sure what I will consider home to be in a few months. Right now New Gibraltar is home, but not because I live here or because my biological family lives here. It is home because people I am not related to have made it home for me.

I wonder if I will make progress, if I will grow up, or if will stay as I am, not a kid and not an adult. Maybe I failed because I measure myself against the most interesting people. Maybe I want to have all kinds of adventures and thoughts and feelings and sensations that would actually make me crazy. Since I have stepped into the real world, I think I have approached my limit for emotional density. That was another benefit of the routine: it created a bulwark against most emotions. For long periods of time, the most intense emotion I would feel was frustration at either not falling asleep quickly enough or not hitting my splits in a workout. I didn’t let anything happen because I knew that I couldn’t handle anything. That was why I stuck to the routine. Routine is the best medication you’ll ever regret.

But what I did wasn’t that dull or boring, because I did have great times that I will always remember, and whenever I did break routine, usually on weekends, it was always quality. That routine is just what happens when you are on a very competitive team and at the same time want to do very well academically. It took up 90% of my time and allowed me to survive.

I guess I’ve learned that routine is important but it’s not the most important, and that sleep is necessary but not always at the expense of other things that are necessary to be human.

Last night I was at a Chinese restaurant with a group of friends, and it was probably the last time in a while that we would all be together. I was really not ok with the situation. Things have come together so well in the past few months and for the first time I’m home. At the end of the meal we all went around the table and read our fortunes. I went last. Mine said “You will make many changes before settling satisfactorily.”

I will miss the fog the way it rolls over the hills. Sometimes I want to wrap myself in it and become a fog spirit that just dances around here forever. But then there would be no progress, and we need progress sometimes. I may become attached to this place where I had my routine and was comfortable, where I forgot that I was a person and then became one again. I will miss the roads that I drove down in Spaceship Earth, and I will miss the people that have all somehow come together to help me out of my bubble, even if they didn’t realize they did. But my fortune is right. You gotta hate your routine. You gotta want to break out of it. And in my case, I may have to keep making and breaking routines for a long time. And I don’t mind. Because breaking this routine, making progress, was the most damn enjoyable thing I’ve ever done, and I look forward to breaking routines and making progress for years to come.

At least until my stomach hemorrhages from all of the MSG I consumed last night.

Incidents and Artifacts

"Come waste your time with me"

-Phish, "Waste"

I would tell you the ending, but even I don't know how it ends yet. I just make up meaning as I go and pray to the Lord that my insight is true, or if not true, then at least meaningful, and if not meaningful, then at least something that will cause trouble.

The top level of the bookshelf in my room (which is not my room) does not contain any books. This is my artifact shelf. On the far right side there is a car radio. This is the last surviving piece of the one and only Spaceship Earth, my car, my companion, and one of the few places where everything made sense.

Spaceship Earth was a spaceship which disguised itself as a mid-nineties sedan. (To hide from bounty hunters, I assume.) I bought it in a very used condition from a guy on Monument who was moving back to India. I first noticed that it was a spaceship a few weeks later because it had data readouts. (This was the little button you press to get the outside temperature.) I was also tipped off to the fact that it was a spaceship because the climate control was flawless. I was never not happy with the inside temperature. The only logical conclusion here is that this was actually a life support system. Another thing that tipped me off was the fact that the windows were very tinted, obviously to protect the astronauts from UV radiation. They also made it feel like the car was hugging you. I like being hugged. When the windows were rolled down, I was in atmospheric mode, and I could do research by sticking my hand out the window. Research means progress. But the centerpiece of Spaceship Earth was the AI. This was the car's radio, an aftermarket installation, which was also the universe’s most human and understanding shipboard AI.

I won't say that I could talk to my car, because the only time that cars actually utter words is in bad TV shows. But there was communication between us. We could read each other, we knew each other, and at least for me, being in my car helped me work things out. Sometimes I would even sleep or write inside Spaceship Earth. Things just made sense in there. I could work things out. I knew the car. It knew me. And dammit, I should have listened to it when I felt it get angry at me the day before it broke down on the way to Truckee. The radiator cracked and the engine blew two head gaskets in the foothills, and I was aware of none of this because the engine thermometer had also broken. A few weeks later after I determined that I could not afford to repair it, I borrowed my mom's car, and Sabine and I drove up to the mechanic shop where I left it. Most of my CDs that weren’t in my Box were in the car, along with ten CDs checked out from the library, as well as a surprising amount of sweatshirts, water bottles, and other little odds and ends that had accumulated over the years. With some difficulty and a lot of help from Sabine I managed to get the radio out. In fact, if she weren’t there, I would probably still be sitting there trying to pry it out, not realizing that there were screws I had to remove.

Now the radio, the AI, is sitting on my artifact shelf. I was hoping that it would somehow work itself into the framework of my room as it did in Spaceship Earth, but that was a bit of a foolish idea. So far it has just sat there in a catatonic state. I try to apologize but it won't respond to anything. So I'm just keeping on the bookshelf, right above Vonnegut, hoping that one day I will get a thought from it, or it will hear one of mine. The truth is that it will probably never be complete again, but I can come close. I am going to hold on to that damn radio for as long as I can though. Just because Spaceship Earth is gone physically does not mean that its essence or what it represents has to go with it. This is the Continuing Story of Spaceship Earth.

This is the second blog that I have created. I felt that my first blog, A Tribute to Dan Quayle, and Other Misadventures, had reached its logical conclusion and that it was time for it to end. For back-story, who I am, where I'm from, etc., go to http://naterrific.blogspot.com/. You can probably get the whole story by reading a couple of posts from the last few months. The rest is crap, but really, what else is the internet for, besides posting crap that you think is quality?

I have a feeling that the main difference between this blog and my last blog will be the use of spell check. Other differences may include that this time I have a sense of purpose and direction for the blog from the beginning, that I spend as little time as possible simply talking about what I have done, and that I actually try to make my opinions and insights of a relatively high quality. Whether or not I am capable of that is another question entirely.

Next to the brain of Spaceship Earth, there is a ball of plastic bags held together with some rubber bands. These are the bags that I would wrap around my foot before I got in the shower when I had a broken foot.

I recently had a conversation with someone whom I hadn't seen in a few years. She asked me how I had been, what had happened to me. I told her that I had broken my foot. That was all I said, because in some ways, it feels like not much else has happened in the last four years. Of course more things have happened. Of course I didn't just break my foot and then step into a cryo-tube for the next four years. Of course I did other things. I had to shower with a bag on my foot. I had to prove people wrong who said I could never run competitively again. I went to The Usual on Friday nights. I became one of those weird Jesus Kids. I expanded my iTunes library from less than 1,000 songs to 13,000 songs. I caused mischief with water balloons and pumpkins. I went into a dark age and had a renaissance at the last possible moment. I started out human, became something slightly less, and then re-emerged as human once again. That was high school for me. It was not the rosy youth that I can reminisce with fondness, not those glory days that everyone thinks that Bruce Springsteen was singing about with genuine nostalgia when he was actually singing about them ironically, a fact that most people don't seem to be perceptive enough to realize. But here's the thing: my foot got better. I don't have nostalgia but I have experience. I know to be patient, because miracles can come at the strangest times. Oh, and I created my town's most popular blog that doesn’t really focus on any specific topic. Does that count for anything? No, ok then, I'll be happy with the re-humanization.

Two weeks before I graduated, I ran 9:23 for two miles at the North Coast Meet of Champions in Berkeley. I could say that doing so redeemed all my failures and injuries. It did, but it wasn’t even the high point of my day. It barely makes top 5. I got a DVD containing 1,000 songs, I helped devise a zombie survival plan for my town, I chilled in Spaceship Earth, and I went to Amoeba Music after my race and bought Phish’s Billy Breathes. “Waste” came on as I drove past Cook’s Collision and everything made sense, and I realized that everything I have done was time well wasted.

In the last few months I have come home for the first time. Yes, it is true that I lived here, but my room was not my room, my house was not my house, and my family was not really my family. My house is not my house, but all that I have to do to go home is to step outside of my house. I have found a home, and by extension a family, in the community, and that is all the family I need. My actual family is just a group of people who awkwardly live together, sort of like a very boring selection for a house on MTV's The Real World. I have a feeling that if I ever have kids, they will have a lot of people whom I refer to as their (aunt or uncle) __________, even though they are not actually their aunt or uncle. But who knows, I may just end up being sterile anyway after keeping my cell phone too close to my crotch. The point is though, that I have found a home, and it is largely because of the people that I have met and who are not related to me.

On the artifact shelf, underneath a couple of papers that have significance for nostalgia purposes is a nametag for a church. I wore this nametag once and then realized that I shouldn't have to wear it. You don't have to wear nametags when you're at home. This is why I rarely wear nametags even when I am at a function where they are important, such as last week, when I was at my freshman orientation. (I am not off to a good start when it comes to avoiding tangents here...) Anyway, this is not the church that my family goes to. (And here, by family, I mean biological family.) In my biological family, I feel like the religious granny. I am also sort of a tea granny, as I am our principal consumer of tea. I am not someone who has grown up in the church, or even really believed in God for most of his life, but the church is a place where, if nothing else, I can sit down. (Sometimes I get free bread and grape juice, too!)

You are probably aware of the many parenthetical sentences in that last paragraph. I beat around the bush a lot when I talk about important things. I also try to make stupid jokes, like the free bread thing I just said. I really don't take myself seriously 95% of the time, and the time when I did take myself seriously was when I was in the bridge of Spaceship Earth. So now I am kind of a joke floating around the world. But anyway, I feel like this topic in general is not something that I am... qualified to talk about. Maybe it's because it is one of the heavier things in the world, both by its nature and all of the shit that has hit the fan since its inception. 

Maybe because it's something that I'm still trying to wrap my head around. Maybe it’s because this is my first post and I don't want to lose you, the reader, by saying "I want to talk about Jesus," a statement that, as Jim Gaffigan observed, would make even the Pope feel awkward. The point is that at this point, I am not a good enough writer to explain or describe my faith, so I won't. In fact, it's probably better that way. It's one of those things that probably shouldn't be explained, as it is one of those things that is different for everyone. The point is that there is a place, a group of people, a community, where I feel at home, for once. Of course it goes deeper than that, but it is a definite fringe benefit.

And now that I have come home, I have to leave. This is because I am going to a magical place called college. Since this is teh interw3bz, I will be vague and say that I will be going to a public university west of the Mississippi. I feel like I am leaving something that I have found recently, things that I found too late. I know that the people that I have met, my unofficially adopted family, will still exist. And of course my faith will not be shaken simply because I am not around the people I know.

I would usually fill up at a gas station near my high school, always at the same pump. It was pump #8. Sometimes I would drive around the block if the pump was in use. It usually wasn't. I would always buy gas in $20 amounts, with cash. A few days ago I was driving my mom's car and needed to fill up, and out of habit I pulled up to this pump. I can talk to machines sometimes. As I was filling up, I asked the pump if it remembered Spaceship Earth.

"You mean that one with the really tinted windows? Yeah, of course I remember it."

"It's dead now.”

“That’s unbelievable. What happened?”

“Radiator cracked, head gaskets blown, alternator is broken, timing belt is worn out. I couldn’t afford to repair it.”

“It always seemed to be a happy car. It knew where it was going.”

“Nah, we just made things up as we went along.”

“Well, my condolences.”

“Thanks.”

Then I drove off and didn’t really think it was strange at all that I had just had a conversation with a gas pump.

I have acquired a lot of music over the last four years. Four years ago, when I decided to download iTunes, I had about 150 songs taken from the few CDs that I owned. This embarrassed me a lot. Most people I knew had libraries that went well into the thousands, and Colby had over 10,000. So I decided that I was going to do just that: get to 10,000 songs. Four years later I am at 13,000 and still growing.

The iPod came out when I was in middle school. When I heard that the original model could hold up to 5,000 songs (a low, low number compared to current technology) my initial thought was "that's ridiculous, that's excessive, there probably aren't even 5,000 songs out there." I don't know where I would put the estimate as to the number of different digital recordings that exist, but I would not be surprised if it were greater than one hundred million. I know that there are at least 13,097 as I type this sentence. I borrowed CDs. I got burned CDs. I took CDs, ripped them, and put them back where I found them and the owner was none the wiser. I used means of questionable legality. But most of all, my music has come from two sources: the public library, and various physical forms of The Box.

I owe much to the person who decided to have CDs in the public library. The receipt from my first excursion to the library is on the artifact shelf. It exceeded my wildest expectations, as I was able to get albums by Pearl Jam, Booker T. and the MG's, Santana, the Buena Vista Social Club, Pat Metheney, Red Hot Chili Peppers, the Who, and Wayne Shorter all for the very reasonable price of free. I have since gone back many times and checked out many more CDs. I can even request CDs from other libraries in the county system. You can call me un-American for saying this, but I believe that we need more institutions like this that facilitate sharing among the community. If one were to donate a book, CD, or DVD to the library, then that item is theoretically accessible to all members of the community. If everyone in a community of 500 were to donate one book, then all members of that community would have easy access to 500 different books, taking off maybe 50-75 to compensate for duplicates. But wait, this is America, we don't like to share. We are not thrilled about busses and subways, very much against high-speed rail, and openly hostile towards the metric system. (Fun fact #1: The reason that the US has yet to go metric is actually due to a conspiracy run by the NFL. If we go metric, they want us to believe, American football will become Canadian football, and that will set us on a trajectory towards a hellish dystopia where we become aware that the technical term for something football-shaped is actually a "prolate spheroid." From there, we're basically one step away from being European and having to walk places.) I realize that the metric system has little to nothing to do with sharing, but it's another good idea that Americans are against, for the most part. But sharing can be a beautiful thing, especially when it manifests itself in the form of The Box.

The Box was conceived one lazy Sunday afternoon while myself and some others at a friend's house. I noticed a CD in her collection that I wanted to borrow, and asked if I could. She responded by suggesting a bunch of other CDs that I also might like to borrow. Twenty minutes later we had a shoebox full of CDs. I agreed that I would take them home, rip them, and then let anyone else who was present at the time also have possession of The Box. We eventually all ended up contributing Boxes of our own, and the system expanded to anyone who was willing to contribute a Box. By creating these boxes, we do two things. The first is, obviously, that we get music without paying for it and rip off the artists and blah blah blah. Not that I am comparing this to freeing slaves or anything, but they did say the same thing about the Underground Railroad. The second thing is that we share bits and pieces of ourselves. Everyone has so many emotions and memories tied up in the music that they listen to that by sharing this music. We are imparting bits of our souls onto others and bypassing all the bullshit that usually clouds our actions.

Before I leave, I will be donating most of the contents of my box to the public library to give back, to leave a bit of my soul here, and to further the revolution.

One of the best parts of having a car that was actually a spaceship was watching peoples’ reactions as you explained this concept. I would show them that the air conditioning was actually the life support, the moon roof that was actually a battle turret, the trunk that was actually the cargo hold, the windshield wipers which were actually moisture shields, the outside temperature display that was actually the data readouts, and the radio which was actually the shipboard AI. I would explain how when the windows were down, I was in atmospheric mode, but when the windows were up, I was in interplanetary mode. I would explain how when the windows were down, you could do research by sticking your hand out the window and playing with the air currents. I would explain the various protocols, such as the de-moisturizing protocol and the stack protocol. I would explain how the shipboard AI could be rebooted by inserting Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band into the disc drive. The reactions would all be different and delicious in their own way. I loved giving people rides because I would get to explain these things. Now I have to get rides from other people. They listen to Daft Punk and drive cars that are just cars. It accomplishes what it needs to, but I prefer my reality that was not reality.

The other day I saw a cop talking on his cell phone as he was driving. That is illegal in this state. The police are not the law. They are merely enforcers of the law. I recognized this man as officer Douthit, the man who gave me my one and only moving violation. I ever so slightly rolled through a stop sign. As a result, I had to go to traffic school. I have the traffic school receipt on my artifact shelf. I went to a place called "Cheap School." It cost $30, you were guaranteed to pass, and you got two free tickets to giggles comedy club, valid only Sunday and Monday nights. The problem was that you had to be eighteen, and by the time I turned eighteen there were not that many Sunday or Monday nights left before they expired. All I had to do was sit there for eight ours and pretend to be awake while an old man who looked like he hadn't even read the newspaper since the 1970's talked about how we can and will die if we try to get to work on time. During the lunch break, I saw two homeless women arguing over who could shit in what bush. The receipt from that mind numbing non-adventure also sits on my artifact shelf, next to the photocopy of my parking garage rebate slip.

This is my most recent addition to the shelf. About a week ago, I had to pay eight dollars at a parking garage machine. All I had were three ones and a twenty, so I paid with the twenty, expecting change. Instead, I got a slip of paper that I had to mail to the company's corporate headquarters so that they would send me twelve dollars in the mail. I know that the company banks on having most people be too lazy to send in these slips. That's corporate America for you. That's the America that tricks you into thinking that what you have and what you are is insufficient and obsolete. That's the America that charges $1.29 for a large Coke that cost about $.20 to make, including overhead, and won't let you get free refills. That's the America that sees music as nothing more than a commodity, like lumber or canned food. That's the America that sees me, and the people I love, as being pawns of our own oh-so easily manipulated emotions, and sees Spaceship Earth as just another unconscious commodity. But unfortunately, that's the America that works, and probably the best version of America out there. In a strange way, this photocopy of a refund slip is there to remind me that I am, along with everyone I know and everyone in the world, more than a robot that can be tricked into buying things that it doesn't need.

All I need are my artifacts and my hands. The rest will fall into place. I don't need the things my story box tells me I need.

I sometimes get advice from the ghost of FDR. This happens when I am dreaming. The first time it happened I found him in the middle of a field. He was bent over with his hands on his temple, muttering. I walked up to him.

“I don’t know what to do,” he said. “I just don’t know what to do. They say that there are only two options, but… there are so many colors out there. There’s green and brown and orange, and… I don’t know what to do, I just don’t know what to do.”

Sometimes even the leader of the Free World is crippled by indecision.

More than anything else that happened in the last three years, his advice has set things in to motion that made me come alive again. Does this make me crazy? I prefer to think that it makes me an honorary member of the Brain Trust. And as Billy Joel said: “You may be right / I may be crazy / But it jus may be a lunatic you’re looking for.” That was my senior quote. It kicks any Ralph Waldo Emerson quote’s ass, any day.

I keep my first “I Voted” sticker on my artifact shelf. I actually got two, one in English and one in Spanish. I turned eighteen just days before the 2008 presidential election, making me one of the youngest voters on that day. I plan to vote in every election until the day I die. Exceptions may be made for comas and times when I am stranded on a desert island (they happen to me more frequently than you would think) but otherwise, I plan to never miss an election. Right now I’m batting a thousand. Let’s see if I can hold it.

Spaceship Earth and I once made modern art. I had a stack of fliers in my back seat for an event that had already happened, making the fliers useless. They were printed on many different colors of paper. I rolled down the front windows and the moon roof (putting it in "atmospheric mode") and drove around. In the back seat there was a flurry of colors. It may not be anything profound, but at least I did something more creative than turning a urinal on its side.

As far as I am concerned, there are only three flavors of Gatorade. There is red flavor, orange flavor, and yellow flavor. Every so often I will consider blue to be a legitimate flavor, but this is rare. These new varieties: Rain, Fierce, Tiger, All Stars, these are not real flavors of Gatorade. There are and always have been only three flavors of Gatorade. Of these three, my favorite flavor is orange flavor. Mind you, this does not taste like oranges. Orange Gatorade actually tastes like the color orange.

Dave Barry once observed that Gatorade could probably withstand a nuclear blast without any significant changes to its flavor or nutritional content. I hope that this is also true of the packaging. That way, one of my artifacts may survive long enough to become an actual artifact.

I keep an empty bottle of orange Gatorade on my artifact shelf because in its context, giving me that Gatorade was one of the nicest gestures that have ever been made to me. This may make my life sound pathetic. It is not intended to do so. I just feel that given the circumstances and the flavor of Gatorade, receiving this bottle of sugar, dye, and electrolytes made me the happiest kid in the world.

I once went on a mission trip to Tijuana. We were building a house. Everyone else mixed little pieces of paper with bible verses on them into the foundation. I poured in some orange Gatorade. Even though this event happened before I received the bottle of Gatorade, I suppose I can retroactively make the event symbolic: build your house upon the Lord and orange Gatorade? Why not?

Not only did Spaceship Earth make things make sense, but it helped me make things make sense. The shelf underneath the radio always had to be organized a certain way. This was the only thing I ever organized, ever. The case of the CD that was currently playing had to be on top of the stack of CDs on the shelf below the radio. If the CD had no case, then the sleeve in which it was kept had to be placed on top of the stack. If I was listening to the radio, the stack had to be cleared and all CDs were placed in the central auxiliary cargo hold (the center console). That ensured that order was kept. With order kept I could figure things out as I drove. I would yell at the dashboard and answers would bounce back. I could make a phone call parked somewhere and it would last for hours. If this happened in a residential neighborhood, it would unnerve people. (However, I was once invited in for dinner.) Sometimes I would sleep there. Not often at night, but naps were usually good ideas.

My life will be changing venues very soon. I would say that I am going to pack up my life, but there is really very little to pack up. I have memories, music, people that I will always remember and hopefully stay in touch with, a car radio, a ball of plastic bags, a church nametag, a receipt, a refund voucher, an “I Voted” sticker, and an empty bottle of orange Gatorade. I can find anything else I need, because I don’t need or want a whole lot.

Behind the Gatorade bottle is a plush frog. I found this on the side of the road while I was running. This is to remind me to keep my eyes open for things: the absurd, the silly, the whimsical, the serendipitous, the profound, the beautiful, and of course, the potential to cause trouble.

I am here to say things that, at least in my estimation, need to be said, even if no one else will. And if they cause trouble, all the better. Insight and profundity would be nice, but I don’t know how much of those I can make. This is the Continuing Story of Spaceship Earth. So strap yourself in and bring some tang, pudding tubes, and irradiated meat for the ride, because we are blasting off.