Theremin interlude

The summer solstice dawns on Stonehenge, but i am far away, perched on a scaffold in northern British Columbia, peering with depthless and undeterminable sorrows into turbine #46S8120. Such an old wise man, 31 years old. There is a safety official named Julia watching over the crew as they work. Julia is from Calgary and all of a sudden we are talking about the failures of the human race, disillusionment via capitalism, faithlessness in the human race, the pursuit of arboriculture, the art of pagan celebration. Awfully heady material for a turbine deck. In my opinion, i say quick things to facilitate the drawing out of her thoughts, rather than actually contribute anything in particular, myself. I have come to the conclusion that that is the only thing i can do. Julia shakes my hand and says how nice it was to talk everytime i leave. She doesn't do that with anyone else around so i get the feeling that Julia is interested in me, but i do not ask her to
go on a date with me. I am not the confident type. I am a fellow of only a few words, and numbered breaths.

Stuff like this is happening with so much more frequency, lately. It is awfully disconcerting and downsidereal and maddening. What has changed? Maybe i am wearing my hair in a more impressive fashion these days. Like that dude from The Office.

Most of the time i am able to justify my inaction, because i am certain that it was bound to become awful. For instance, Julia talked about her miserable childhood and seemed to be severely discontent with the state of everything around her. I do not doubt it, and i empathize and everything, but it's the stuff like that which always seems to tweak behaviors and help to make a thoroughly miserable environment, eventually. For me, as well. I am severely discontent, but i am good about never showing it in any manner outside of my dumb blog. Also, i remember being miserable too much as a young person, but i have been able to forget everything, just about all of it, and any leftover resonance has certainly been chalked up to hormonal effects. I had a stable family and one or two friends, i cannot think of what could have been so bad anymore, and so it is baggage that i think i am not carrying. A tongueless bitterness that cannot prove itself or anything else,
so.

I listen to one of three radio stations in the car. One. It is the one which is the CBC, so it cannot be as terrible as the other two. They played some Dave Brubeck Quartet yesterday because he is coming to Vancouver. Dave Brubeck is 87, a jazz legend still on tour. Then the radio has christians talking about how sex is ruining young people. "Abstinence is an honor of your future spouse". Unprecedented.

Romance is in decline, after centuries of over-representation in storybooks and fairytales. A contribution from the Olde Worlde, rusted and sombre, unable to facilitate magics henceforth. The minstrel slurs his words at the bar.

Oh, blessed wisdom, let's go for ice cream.

-

The world is much more Dystopian this summer.

--

I was released from my present job assignment this morning. June 22nd. I am finished. My next assignment is in mid-October. I owe nothing between now and then. I have fulfilled my obligations.

Normally, i would need to summon an airplane and get back home. But i have no home, and i have no obligations. So i think i will stay for a few days, and find a kayak, and see the northern Rockies. Maybe i will drive to Muncho Lake. Maybe i will drive to Whitehorse. Maybe i will see a bear. Maybe i will see a caribou.

Maybe i will take a picture of a cloud.

There is no one around. Trees. There is a slight wind. There is a slight yellow glow in the northern sky until almost midnight. And then, maybe i will see an aurora.

Aurora, you're all i need.

Derive, unfacilitated.

Theremin interlude

The summer solstice dawns on Stonehenge, but i am far away, perched on a scaffold in northern British Columbia, peering with depthless and undeterminable sorrows into turbine #46S8120. Such an old wise man, 31 years old. There is a safety official named Julia watching over the crew as they work. Julia is from Calgary and all of a sudden we are talking about the failures of modern civilization, disillusionment via capitalism, faithlessness in the human race, the pursuit of arboriculture, the art of pagan celebration. Awfully heady material for a turbine deck. In my opinion, i say quick things to facilitate the drawing out of her thoughts, rather than actually contribute anything in particular, myself. I have come to the conclusion that that is the only thing i can do. Julia shakes my hand and says how nice it was to talk everytime i leave. She doesn't do that with anyone else around so i get the feeling that Julia is interested in me, but i do not ask her to go on a date with me. I am not the confident type. I am a fellow of only a few words, and numbered breaths.

Stuff like this is happening with so much more frequency, lately. It is awfully disconcerting and downsidereal and maddening. What has changed? Maybe i am wearing my hair in a more impressive fashion these days. Like that dude from The Office.

Most of the time i am able to justify my inaction, because i am certain that it was bound to become awful. For instance, Julia talked about her miserable childhood and seemed to be severely discontent with the state of everything around her. I do not doubt it, and i empathize and everything, but it's the stuff like that which always seems to tweak behaviors and help to make a thoroughly miserable environment, eventually. For me, as well. I am severely discontent, but i am good about never showing it in any manner outside of my dumb blog. Also, i remember being miserable too much as a young person, but i have been able to forget everything, just about all of it, and any leftover resonance has certainly been chalked up to hormonal effects. I had a stable family and one or two friends, i cannot think of what could have been so bad anymore, and so it is baggage that i think i am not carrying. A tongueless bitterness that cannot prove itself or anything else, so.

I listen to one of three radio stations in the car. One. It is the one which is the CBC, so it cannot be as terrible as the other two. They played some Dave Brubeck Quartet yesterday because he is coming to Vancouver. Dave Brubeck is 87, a jazz legend still on tour. Then the radio has christians talking about how sex is ruining young people. "Abstinence is an honor of your future spouse". Unprecedented.

Romance is in decline, after centuries of over-representation in storybooks and fairytales. A contribution from the Olde Worlde, rusted and sombre, unable to facilitate magics henceforth. The minstrel slurs his words at the bar.

Oh, blessed wisdom, let's go for ice cream.

-

The world is much more Dystopian this summer.


--

I was released from my present job assignment this morning. June 22nd. I am finished. My next assignment is in mid-October. I owe nothing between now and then. I have fulfilled my obligations.

Normally, i would need to summon an airplane and get back home. But i have no home, and i have no obligations. So i think i will stay for a few days, and find a kayak, and see the northern Rockies. Maybe i will drive to Muncho Lake. Maybe i will drive to Whitehorse. Maybe i will see a bear. Maybe i will see a caribou.

Maybe i will take a picture of a cloud.

There is no one around. Trees. There is a slight wind. There is a slight yellow glow in the northern sky until almost midnight. And then, maybe i will see an aurora.

Aurora, you're all i need.

Derive, unfacilitated.

Prelude to theremin

Last Saturday night i found myself sitting on a stool at a dance club. The stool was an awkward place to be because it was overlooking five other much shorter chairs. We were all surrounding a table whose surface was at an appropriate height for short chairs, and not stools. A very small explorer on the table top would observe large mountains in the shapes of bottles of beer and martini glasses, and over the edge of the plateau the small explorer would observe the heads and upper torsos of five giant people, and then the crotch of a sixth, because that giant had decided that there were no more chairs so a goddamn stool would do.

We six were the relatively young and unmarried folks from the wedding that we had all just attended, which was a nice and small wedding for my friends Matt & Barbara. After the receptions were over, the relatively young and unmarried folks from the wedding collectively decide that they do not want to go home yet, and they convince the other relatively young and unmarried ones to go into the city, to a dance club, because they really really want to dance. To 80's music, like Michael Jackson and Cyndi Lauper.

This sounded fine to me, because i like 80's music too, but i do not really feel like expressing myself in dance very often, so i remained at my stool, and soon the scene was very surreal and executive and morose, and would have looked good in slow motion while performing a zoom in or zoom out, because i was dressed in my nice clothes and tie, perched on a stool, overlooking an empty table with its empty chairs.

But then that thing that has never happened before happened, and that is that a girl in the club came up to me and i guess she was wanting to "hit on" me. She came up to my stool and she said "Hi!" and then i realized that there is a strange girl standing right in front of me and staring at me and she has just greeted me, and so i said "Oh, hi!". And then there was at least three seconds of silence. And then she decided to say "My name is _____! [I forgot the name] What's yours?", and then i said that i was Tim. And then she asked me if i had a wife or girlfriend and that's when i could be sure that she wasn't scrounging for a cigarette or lighter that i wouldn't have had in my possession anyway. Then we talked about the wedding that i had just gone to, and about what we did for a living, and then about four minutes later i guess she had noticed that i had not been able to break loose from my stool, so she went back to sit with her friends. It was nice of her to come over and talk for awhile, though.

But then Steph came back to the table and we talked for awhile. I even moved into an actual chair. Steph is one of Barbara's friends and she is relatively young and unmarried and she recently moved to Houston, which was a bad choice but she seemed very bright regardless. She is 34 and an animal behaviorist. Apparently there are living animals around the Houston area, and not just those longhorn bull skulls that are laying all over the place in the desert and also fastened to the grills of very large trucks. I liked Steph but then she flew back to Texas, so.

Matt and Barbara are in France, now. Last night, i purchased a wedge of brie cheese and a stale french baguette and i ate them on my smelly hotel bed, in their honor. Matt and i are both supposed to have an unreasonable amount of spare time for the second half of the year, so we are probably going to make a music project that will amount to low fidelity psychedelia and will be unlistenable to the bulk of the human population, and that will be all right.

--

June has been busier than i thought it should be, but soon i will navigate highways northward. Route 15, through sunset and the middle of the night. I will check in on Rochester. I will reintroduce a plush cat to a plush household. I will board a plane in Toronto on Monday morning, and i will fly northwest. I will be back in Rochester by the Fourth of July, because that is when Chad and Erin are having a Rock Band party at their new house, and i am to be the drummer.

Welcome to summer. Are you comfortable?

Ghent

808 West Thirty-Sixth Street
Originally uploaded by amnesoid

In 1952 and maybe 1951 too, my grandfather was in the Navy and he and my grandmother lived at 808 West 36th Street. Here is a picture i took of 808 West 36th Street. I will send it along to my grandmother and she can let me know if this house matches what she remembers.

I would guess that the ADT system and the chainlink fence are new features.

My grandparent's old neighborhood is many blocks north of the Ghent area, which is apparently the only portion of Hampton Roads which could qualify as being somewhat hip. Somewhat walkable.

It was mutually decided that some random girl and i should meet for a coffee-ish beverage in Ghent during the afternoon of this past weekend. All evidence of sentience on her part seemed to disappear upon our meeting. I talked to her about how my grandparents used to live close by, and other things more about me, but it was like talking to a stuffed animal, who did make carefully planned movements. Like a Teddy Ruxpin, i guess. I took it to mean that she was not at all impressed with what she had ended up finding herself with. Not one bit. Suits me. Any further emotional investment would seem like such a bother.

I'm not sure why i trouble myself with meeting strange people. Especially ones who lose all of their sentiences. I guess it is the undefeatable romantic inside me, parasiting itself upon some innard or other. Oh, bother.

Tomorrow i am packing my stagecoach and taking it back to Richmond. Next week i am taking it back to Western New York, and then it will all be disassembled for awhile.

Two scabs, one per elbow

Fuck. I have done what i said i would do. Exclamation points!

I packed my shit and i threw it in a cold and unlit storage compartment. I had been feeling uncentered and doomed. In Canada, even! I felt trapped in a routine that was never intended to break. So i drove south and took back my old job under new conditions and guidelines. I worked thirteen hours and more hours per day for 55 of the last 61 days. I received glowing reviews. Everyone agreed: i did an outstanding job, never better. I am exhausted, and now it is over. No obligations. Now i am up at 3AM, wide awake. It is the old deceleration blues.

I am faced with a summer of limitless possibilities. I have no bills, no rent, no employment obligations, no personal obligations except to keep my cat taken care of. I have no particular ties to anywhere.

I am in a hotel room in Chesapeake, Virginia that i need to gather the ambition to tear myself out of.

I have been watching a documentary about Mark Twain. Apparently, his life was a wreck. Or became one. A lot of the time. All the brilliant ones, huh? Mark Twain is a pseudonym, and is a steamboating term. It means 'two fathoms'. It is a measurement taken with maybe a lead ball and a cable, off of the side of the boat. It indicates safe water to drive a boat over. It is depthy enough, at least for the moment. The man with the line would shout out "mark twain!", and the steamboat captain would breathe easy.

I do not feel depthy enough, but i have gotten used to the feeling.

My tentative summer plans wane, and then they wax again. Currently, i am looking into an Amtrak Rail Pass. It would give me unlimited train rides in the United States of America, and Canada also. Trains offer the most excellent environs for the reading of books, which i am not accustomed to doing much of, unless i find myself on a train. So i will read books on trains, and the trains might take me through Chicago, through Minnesota, and soon enough the train would dump me at the edge of Glacier National Park, which seems like a place i would enjoy, and its simplest glimpse would cause me to feel some sort of fulfillment, one hundred and eighty degrees from this spiderweb-caught post-assignment syndrome. Homeless and unloved feeling.

Maybe after that, the train could take me to the Grand Canyon. Or to Jasper. Or to Portland, Oregon. Portland, Oregon has always seemed like exactly my sort of city, even though i feel absolutely no particular urge to move there. I am an eastern lad, i think. Although maybe i am not that, either.

If i were in my twenties, i would fancy myself some sort of neo- Jack Kerouac. But i am not in my twenties anymore, and i do not. I am just a Tim Miller. One of thousands, maybe. It is not my assignment to impress anyone. It is not my place to woo anyone. I understand!

But you should've been in my shoes yesterday.