The silent song

I went to the doctor today. The doctor was new to me, but he had obviously been doing his job for a long time because his office was very humble. He had a good bedside manner and I was relieved when he told me that I was in good health. I told him: "Thanks for the external validation," and he laughed.

Here's a picture of a cool tree from two streets over. I suspect it has been in this town longer than the doctor.

Move along

Today was a productive day. I woke up and cleaned my room and some other parts of the house, and then headed outside where I braved scorching heat and humidity to paint the gas tank on my motorcycle. This is my second attempt at painting this, and I hope it goes better than the first. The key to a good paint job is good surface preparation, latex or neoprene gloves (to prevent oil on your hands from touching the surface), several light coats, and a light sanding between coats. I decided to paint the gas tank a dark metallic blue, which is fitting because blue is usually the color of Suzuki racing bikes. Everyone can dream!

I also got a chance to hang out with my friend Sean who I haven't seen in several months. We went to the beach and flew kites and skipped stones, although I only have photographic proof of the first activity. I'm stilling lugging my new camera around everywhere I go, and I have made an impression on most of the people who have seen it. Life certainly looks different through the viewfinder! I'm ordering chemicals this week so that I can begin to develop photos on my own. This will save money (definitely) and put me in control of the whole process (potentially).

I'm also going to include some photos of my weekend on the lake with a few friends. The boat is a "testament to American excess", but it was really fun to ride in and I wasn't paying for the fuel which was an extra bonus.

I can't take my eyes off of you

One of the things that I miss, well perhaps miss is the wrong word (yes, it definitely is), more like intrigued at the appearance or in this case disappearance of, is music. I use to listen to so much music. Maybe its a generational thing. Or perhaps its just growing up. I've moved through too many computers, and my Windows Music Player library became a smaller iTunes library became a smaller playlist on my mp3 player became a smaller playlist on my smartphone became listening to Pandora became listening to the occasional music video on YouTube.

I'm not too sure what happened. I've moved music from something I "own" to something I "use". At the same time, I've increased the amount of music that I play and create myself. All of this together doesn't sound like a bad thing at all, but I still feel like there is something missing and when I listen to my old songs I am hit by a wave of nostalgia.

In other news, I have decided to take some time this summer to learn more about photography. I was inspired to pick up a cheap film SLR camera from Amazon and experiment with taking pictures using manual controls. My first three rolls of film turned out pretty well. Which sounds self-serving. Suffice it to say that I was impressed with the results I was able to achieve with relatively modest equipment. And by modest, I mean a $20 camera with some cheap Fuji film. Getting someone to develop it was the hard part, but Walgreens has proved to be a time machine of sorts. I'm also looking into buying the chemicals and equipment to develop film on my own which save a lot of money (90%) as well as provide an intriguing level of control and creativity over the whole process. Plus, its fun to learn something new. Here's some of the photos I took over the last week:

The walk to work

The man walked down the street. As he walked, he stuffed his hands deeper into the pockets of his coat. A scraggly looking cat with long gray hair stared out at the man from underneath a pick up truck. The truck had chrome wheels and a dented side panel. The street was grey as well.

The wind was always strong in the morning, and the man lowered his chin to his chest and hunched against the cold air. He hunched and hunched until he no longer resembled a man, but rather a shapeless moving pile of clothing. As he walked, small drops of water began to hit the sidewalk. This was a spring rain, but it was early spring, and it was too cold to be pleasant. The man continued to walk.

He turned onto a quiet street with houses on both sides. In this area of Queens, cars were allowed to park on both sides of the streets, and so the man walked down a tunnel lined with houses and cars on both sides. The cars began to look like houses, and the houses disappeared.

Over his left shoulder, the man carried a medium sized khaki bag. The only notable feature of the bag was a water bottle sticking out from underneath a folded cloth cover.

As he walked, the houses changed gradually. At first, they were well kept and orderly. As he walked, they began to fall into a state of disrepair. The houses seemed to stay in place it was just the quality of the houses that changed. As he walked, the houses grew worse and worse. Finally, when it seemed like they couldn’t get any worse, they started to get better.

Now these houses were covered in blue and white paint. And they seemed much better than before, and the small weed-covered yards were filled with cracked clay planter jars, and there was at least an attempt to grow flowers. And the beauty of this short row of trying-to-be-nice houses stood in stark contrast to the not-trying-so-hard houses on the previous street. The man stood straighter as he passed these homes.

Now, more cats were staring at him. And a few children were staring out from between the blinds on the windows facing the streets. The children looked briefly and then, without removing themselves from the window, would turn their necks and look inwards and some unseen figure, most likely parental. And this unseen guardian or legally responsible individual would say something to the children, although it was impossible to hear. And the children would say something back, also impossible to hear. But it was easy to see their mouths moving.

Actually, the response of the children affirmed the possibility of the unseen parent inside the house. And this possibility solidified into a probability and then froze in place as a reality. The man did not turn to see this. The man had seen it many times before. The children used to look for longer, but now they only glanced outside of the window briefly when the man walked past. And then they turned back into their homes.

The only people left watching the man were the cats. The cats never turned back into their homes because their homes were underneath cars and pickup trucks. It is hard to imagine turning around in something that has no walls. 

Thursdays

I was struck by something recently; the realization of how dramatically different my life is now. Rereading old posts, I came across a self-searching expose on the meaning of life (#42/515). In this expose was a hidden gem: "I think I will read a lot today."

This may seem completely innocuous to you, but WAIT! There's more! The post was dated from January 2009. On a Thursday. A Thursday! The fourth day of the work week! The day before Friday! My Thursdays now are fantastic simply because they are one of the few days (along with the illustrious Friday) when I have no after-work obligations. And my Fridays have been historically spent in migration. So, when you talk about relaxing, Thursdays are really where its at. I cannot imagine waking up on a Thursday and commenting, "I think I will read a lot today." My commentaries usually involve, "What will I teach my students today?" or "I wonder how many empty plastic bottles I will be able to kick on my walk to work?"

I love reading and I fear that I have not done enough of it during the last seven months.

My life, as I have known it, is ending later today.

The empty vacuum waits just beyond the reaches of 9:00PM.

What strangeness sits on those distant shores?

Can I read books there?

On the Road

I was often inspired by the story of Jack Keroauc, and how he wrote his famous book, “On the Road”. I never read, “On the Road”, although I had always meant to. I do remember vividly listening to a friend describe Jack’s writing process. On a cloudy and milk-neutral day I was on a bus with a good friend and she told me that Jack had written “On the Road” all at once. In one fell swoop. On a single roll of paper that stretched out for hundreds of feet. What inspiration, I remember thinking, what drive. This man had it. Was it due to some inherent nature, some basic and fundamental aspect of his character? Did he unwind the story from his inner tissues like a spider drawing out a glistening strand of silk?

Or was there some specific environmental variable? In other words, was there something special about the time or the place? Some calm breeze that blew from the West and carried with it the essence of ingenuity? Or, and this was my personal favorite, was it perhaps a song he heard? I imagined Jack cruising down the highway in a beat up Plymouth with the windows open, passing some forgotten dusty town wherefrom within the haunted bowels of a shimmering saloon carried forth the mystical notes of a banjo or fiddle. A folksy and earthy and intoxicating answer to life’s impenetrable riddle. And that melody hit Jack square in the face and made his nose bleed and when he came back to his senses the world was rushing and roaring around him in violent and unending fury and he was compelled, no, forced, to write down this transcript of his journeys. This was the sort of catalyst that I imagined appropriate for such a powerful eruption of literary catharsis.

As much as I’ve tried, I’ve never been hit by that kind of melody. I’ve struggled my entire life to express myself as best as I could, but I never managed to get…quite…there. I think the problem lay not in ability, nor in source material (for it is a universal truth of mine that everyone possesses an awe-inspiring imagination). No, the problem was simply one of inverted priorities.

Inversion. How simple an idea. Flipping something upside down. 

The Death of Steve Jobs

There was a strange period of time in my life where I got a used Apple laptop from an uncle, and I used it constantly. I shaped my mindset around this computer and used it to apply to college. Since then I have started using a PC and I have trouble remembering the kind of person I was, when, for a few years, I used a Mac almost exclusively. Steve Jobs is dead, so I doubt I will ever be able to access that person again.

Funny how that works, isn't it?