Tee minus

At the start of my last night in Orlando, i was with my old work friends, drinking cold beers and chatting it up. It was wholly gratifying, i have forgotten what a social life can be like. But one by one they split, and by the end of the night i was surrounded by seemingly friendly young strangers with questionable morals. Hotties of both genders were grocery shopping for exploits. Everyone had apple eyes and they plied them around the room. The music was loud and suddenly i was drinking a lousy Budweiser and staring at the wall. I waved goodbye to the friend of a friend of a friend that i had given a ride downtown. I am sure that someone else took him back to Oviedo. I felt bad, but sticking around would have been a hyperbolic insult to myself. I listened to Bob Dylan on the way back to the hotel. Desolation rowed.

I got back north. On Saturday i watched the Sabres lose with Chad & Erin, but our pizza was good. I stayed overnight in the family house with no one else around. Maybe that's never happened before. It felt like an extended stay hotel. Linus kept avoiding me, fearing more car trips. I left for Canada.

For the last two months everything has been up in the air. Finally i have a plan. I wrote to my current boss, insinuating that he would be an ex-boss kinda soon, and the subject of the email was "My plan." I am leaving Canada in three weeks. Eh? Almost everything will go into storage. I will pack my car with essentials and drive to the suburbs north of Philadelphia. I will beg Jeff and Marcy and Nate for a spare bed or couch. They will allow me one, as long as i agree to pay tains nate (i.e. Play trains with Nate). I will commute to my company's office in Trenton New Jersey every weekday beginning March 24th, until my former boss comes to the rescue and enacts my official transfer, at which time i will once again become a field service engineer. I will travel and work and work and travel. And then i will come upon a vast field of greeen which represents several months of not doing any work whatsoever and still getting paid. This is when i will decide where my next apartment should be, and my employer will no longer care where i care to lay my head, because my job will be traveling a lot to work a lot for five or six or seven months per year. I am looking forward to it, but mostly the opportunity to have half-years off. This would not normally be possible, but they made a caveat for me. What a sweet gesture.

Someday i will only be a boring ghoststory.

Orlando

It is the leonardcohen afterworld. Everything is entirely fucked up at the moment, but now is not the time for details.

-

Twentythree months ago i left Orlando, and it made me glad to go. A lot of people i talk to about leaving Orlando do not understand why, and others wonder what would have possessed me to ever move there in the first place. Florida is so polarizing in everything it does.

The weather was very refreshing as soon as i got off of the plane. It was warm and humid. Fifteen minutes later i was sweating.

I went to lunch with my friend Peter. I explained that it is always nice to visit Orlando, the winters are nice and the sunshine is fine. But for some reason, i am just very glad that i do not live here.

Lots of people who do not like Florida blame it on soullessness of the environment and the people. I haven't thought a whole lot about that, but yeah.

Living in Florida might be akin to having to be best friends with Matthew McConaughey, needing to eat every meal with him, be roommates with him, having to watch television with him, etc. He is an attractive and charming man, i guess, but there is something about the guy and i am sure that after awhile i would want to kick him in the fucking ear.

That is what Florida is like.

-

The other night i was looking out of the window and there were two stars and they were twinkling madly. If the severity of a twinkle could be measured, and perhaps it can, then these particular twinkles were off of the charts. Meaning that they were unbelievably bright and then unbelievably dim and then unbelievably bright again and it was all happening a thousand times per second.

They were not aeroplanes, because i watched them for ten minutes and they did not move.

They were in the northwestern sky.

It was not a missile shooting down a satellite because that was a couple of nights later.

They were twinkling like mad, and then i did something else for awhile, and when i came back to the window they were gone and they have never come back.

Maybe they could have been pulsars, but what are the chances of two independent pulsars happening millions of lightyears apart all in the same ten minute span? And aren't pulsars supposed to last awhile? It's been too long since astronomy class.

It could be that i am losing my mind. I probably am losing my mind. But at least i am not the type of insane person who blames everything on aliens and their dumb ships.

Maybe it was things bu rning up in the at mos phere.

-

TSE2008

Path of 2008 Total Solar Eclipse
Originally uploaded by amnesoid

I have decided that it is healthy to give yourself things to look forward to, and i have subsequently decided that i would like to look forward to a total solar eclipse, which is an astronomical event of the likes that i have never seen yet.

I think that i have also never seen even a partial solar eclipse, but i will bet that if i did i would be disappointed and wished that i were seeing a TSE instead. TSE is what the experts and astronomers call a total solar eclipse. I will use their clever terminologies. Or acronyms.

Many regions of the Earth will be able to see a partial solar eclipse on August 1st 2008, but only a very special arcing swath will be treated to a few moments of complete solar obfuscation. Places such as nameless and remote arctic islands, or desolate areas of Siberia.

If i am able, i would like to travel into a piece of the swath and watch the eclipse from Tavan Bogd Uul, which is a mountain where China and Mongolia and Russia all converge in a rugged splendor of ex-communism.

Of course, there are no reasonable airports for about a thousand milesfrom Tavan Bogd Uul, so the logistics will be tricky. It will also be an expensive failure if there are clouds at Tavan Bogd Uul on August 1st 2008. But if clouds ruin everything then at least there are glaciers nearby, and glaciers are always worth it.

-

Right now it is 2:30 AM on a Monday. I have tried to go to bed four times over the last five hours, but it is called insomnia. Episodes of insomnia are good opportunities to listen to jazz. So i am listening to Miles Davis ('Kind of Blue'), and anticipating a most excellent Monday night sleeping.

I will actually be doing my Mondaysleeping in Orlando, because i am flying there in five hours. It will be the first time in two years that i've been back to Orlando, since i decided that i did not want to live there anymore. Orlando is nice for visits though, especially in February. I do not remember what the outside feels like without my coat.

Scraps of paper from inside boxes & seven-inch singles, part 1

Rochester

Today i visited the Rochester Institute of Technology. It is a group of buildings where i showed up from time to time over the course of several years when i was much younger than i am now. Eventually they gave me a nice shiny and thick blue bookcover with some calligraphy scribed on the inside and i have not really had to go back since.

RIT is not the place that you want to go when the weather is experimenting with subzero windchill temperatures, because the buildings have a very specific orange brick geometry, based on pagan rectangles, and they channel the wind in such a way that it becomes a concentrated sentient being, and it solidifies your earlobe, which cracks off and rolls back towards the residence halls.

But i braved it. I had a walk around. I had a latte at the library, which was surreal (both the latte itself, and the fact that i was getting one inside the library), and they were playing The Arcade Fire. It was so redeeming, i felt like i was finally fitting in ten years later.

All of the students looked young. They were like teenagers without braces.

I went to RIT in order to sit in on a presentation by a Peace Corps recruiter. It is one of the options i am looking into as i get closer and closer to flailing desperately in a quicksand or quagmire of directionlessness.

By the time i left the presentation, i was figuring that other people would do a better job with teaching english or planting agricultures or inoculating arms. I would like to do engineering projects because that is what i am good at. The recruiter said that these are up and coming, but not yet a mainstay in their offerings. She also said the application process would take 6-12 months. That is a bummer since i need something to do in no more than sixty days.

I left the meeting and walked slowly through the frigidd colds to my car. I started driving and played my ipod. That proverbial song began playing. You know, the one where you are disillusioned with everything and you are having a lack of meaning or direction in your life and you have just left a meeting for the Peace Corps at your old university that you graduated from eight years earlier and you get in your car and start driving and it comes on the radio. "New Slang", by The Shins, i mean. It is like a cookie cutter situation with fucking gothic chocolate chips, or something.

So that song was playing and naturally i began to navigate a sentimental course. It was all like a deleted scene from Garden State, spliced for being too sappy.

I took a couple of lefts and headed down Route 383. It follows the Genesee River very closely, i'm not sure if i appreciated the Genesee River as much back then, it may have just been a brown wet piece of scenery to me, but anyway then the road spins off into a lot of farmland, with barns and picket fences all covered in lots of chipped white paint. I drove it all a thousand times in the late 90's. It is the road to a home of mine at 191 Robert Quigley Drive, Apartment #1. "New Slang" by The Shins wasn't invented yet when i lived there, but it seemed to coexist alright, there in that moment, with me and my ex-window staring back at one another.

The blinds were closed though so i started to drive back west. It was dark and the moon was an upwards-facing crescent, a lone sodium vapour lamp sulking over the towns of Western New York. It looked exactly like a lemon wedge that had been squeezed dry and left on the kitchen counter, alone in the dark, to be thrown into the garbage sometime the next morning by someone who is hungover.

I thought about the Peace Corps recruiter girl. I am such a typical jackass kind of guy who thinks about generic cute girls i have just met. But i liked her vibe. I would have asked her on a date, but i foresaw our destiny in my head - a whirlwind relationship that sputters out in rancid uncomfortable silences after eight months, then finally an unbelievably vitriolic argument where we say things we cannot take back and then we don't speak to each other for the rest of our lives. I'm glad i did not ask her on a date. She lives in NYC anyways.

Then i thought about Renee for a little and wondered how she is doing. We went on our first date maybe thirteen years ago today or tomorrow or the next day. It was my first date ever. We went to Pizza Hut, because that was the fanciest possible option in Medina in 1995 on a ten dollar budget. We drank pops and had no food. Renee had been persistent for months until i finally believed that she was interested. I was trying to be charming for the first time ever, and it was easier to do because i was distracted, because our dog Buffy was hit by an old van three hours prior. I had stood in front of her body in the middle of the road so that no more cars would hit her. I was secretly daring cars to hit me instead. I told Kris to go get one of our sleds and a shovel and he did. I picked our dog up with a large snowshovel and placed her into the sled. There were intestines all over the place. I was simultaneously stoic and distraught. Then i pulled her out to the back yard, over the snow. Then i got ready for my date! So that was what happened on my first ever date. It was so emblematic or proverbial or whatever for my entire romantic existence.

It is stuff like this previous paragraph that always caused my english teachers to say that i was not very good at staying "on topic" in my reports and essays, i think.

Anyway

'How wonderful to be so profound!
When everything you are is dying underground.'

--

I don't know why, but there is a movie from 1975 called Picnic at Hanging Rock which has me completely spooked. I watched most of the film last week and its presence lingers in uneasy ways. It is about a group of schoolgirls who are choked with Victorian morality and then they go on a picnic by a small mountain which is a surreal lava formation. Some of the girls disappear for no good reason, and they never come back. There are no scenes of violence, no blood, no particularly scary parts. But on the whole it was unbelievably eerie. It is an eerie that lingers for days.

I think the secret is that the mystery is never solved, and you suspect unbelievably weird and supernatural and sinister causes but they are nothing more than faint notions, because you are given nothing to grab onto with your logicalstilts. Another secret is how the disappearing girls seem to be secretly possessed, in a secret frame of mind, whispering a cryptic script, which is secret. So cryptic.

I don't know if i will ever be able to fully trust geology again. How powerful films are.

--

I've transitioned directly from flu to cold. I feel like i will be full of viruses from now on, forever.

I have a whooping cough or tuberculosis.

I have thirty-eight days or perhaps a little more before i will be doing something else with my life, i wish i knew what it was. I am taking some vacation days on account of the necessary research, and on account of my questionable sanity and salinity.

Circulared means crimson circles.

Blue sleds

The Niagara Escarpment was created in a process that has taken millions of years, in order to provide me with a place to sled today.

Sledding is still fun. It has been well over a decade since i went sledding. Today we used a large blue sled-shaped sled, and also a blue saucer-style sled. Tom had an orange "magic carpet" sled, which is just a thin piece of plastic with two hand holes, but that one did not interest me because i am a traditionalist when it comes to sledding.

The most immediate sociological observation that we could make upon arriving at our particular portion of slope along the Niagara Escarpment was that we were the only people over the age of fifteen. Oh to live on Sugar Mountain.

On my first descent, i glanced against a small tree and became separated from the blue saucer, and i rolled down the hill the rest of the way in a flailing mess of arms and legs like a commercial for Tylenol.

My successive descents were almost as violent, but i did not become separated from the sled anymore. I think that my tailbone may have fled into the snowcover during an incident on my fourth descent, which involved a massive undulation. That one made all of the teenager eyes pop in amazement at my heroics. "You were airborn, dude!" they said. I would chuckle humbly. Oh, i'll pay for that later i would say, exaggerating my decades.

I have not considered teenagers in a very long time. I sort of forgot that they existed. I guess that i do not happen to stumble over teenagers since i stopped going to school buildings for a living. I only ever see old people, and unhappy fortysomethings. And sometimes i see people in their thirties and twenties. And i see babies and very young children. But i hardly ever see teenagers.

Teenagers are like smallish elfin people with braces. It is strange that they seem so odd-looking, considering that i was a teenager once myself. Gosh, they sure do look young. I wanted to point out to Tom, like i was observing wildlife on a safari, "Tom, look at that teenager! Look at how young it looks! Awww!"

The teenagers only made two or three descents before escaping en masse.

It is the same gravity which makes sledding so enjoyable that also makes the ascensions dubious and challenging to constitutions. Which is a fancy way of saying that it didn't take much hill-climbing to cause my lungs to start bleeding. I am all tuckered out, underclothings are thoroughly damp and cold, i am full of viruses and thirsty for earl grey tea.

etc.