Category: Chapters

The distance to the moon is around 250,000 miles, and took the Apollo astronauts around 4 days (I think) to make it one way. Their travel to that world cost around $1 million per minute they were there. I traveled to another world last Friday. It wasn’t more than a miles away, and it only took me about 10-15 minutes to walk there. It cost nothing, and the inhabitants were glad I could make it. I entered into a world of the non-technics, a world of feeling, and a world of minds. I entered the world of poetry.

I volunteered to help out in the College Unions Invitational national Poetry Slam. There were 10 schools in attendance, including Case. The first person I saw had the most intricate and numerous piercings I have ever seen with my own eyes. Other people wandered in, all strange in incredibly interesting ways.

I was an imposter, hiding in a sea of poets! What was this engineer doing with these people? I hid along the corners, pretending I belonged in their world. They would stand and spout such creative poetry that touched me and made me rise up out of my chair to float through the room from the emotion they were exerting on the audience. They shouted and cried and wailed and sang and said such things that I would dream of saying, and still I stayed.

I had not written a poem, I had not given a performance, and I certainly didn’t help them in any great way, but these poets talked to me. Normally random people talking to me doesn’t affect me much, they are just people. But these were poets! I had poets thanking me! I had poets following me around, looking for directions on how to get somewhere! I was leading a pack of poets!

I was on a backpack once with one of my dads old work buddies. He was a really smart guy, and at the end of our 4 day pack he walked next to me. He told me he had figured me out. I was the Pragmatist. Nothing could faze me, I would just keep walking. If something was wrong, I would deal with it, and that I didn’t ever seem to mind. My other brother Ed was on this trip too. My dad’s friend also told Ed that he had him figured out. Ed was the poet. He noticed when things weren’t the way they were supposed to be, and didn’t like it. He did things for the sake of doing them, and said things for the sake of saying them.

I agree with what my dad’s friend said. I am happy to be the pragmatist. But my taste of the other side tickled my tongue, and every once in a while I wish I was a poet.

I was contemplating doing some free writing for my research paper I have yet to do when something occurred to me. The goal of free writing is to just write whatever pops into you head, take a break, then come back and read it. You can gain insight into the subject just by examining what you know already, and sometimes just trying to arbitrarily pull up facts from your brain doesn’t do the trick. Hmm, just spouting out what you are thinking and then contemplating what that was. Why does that sound familiar?

Recently a friend of mine who will remain nameless admitted that he talks to himself. He takes long walks late at night and will talk to himself about whatever is on his mind. I would make fun of him if I didn’t do it too.

There are two types of conversations you can have with yourself. There is the one where you are really just talking to someone who isn’t there, and listening to what you say, and there is the one where you are actually holding a conversation with yourself. The latter is something that is best left for psychiatrists, so I’ll deal only with the former.

I read a statistic somewhere that talked about what you remember about a speaker. It said something along the lines that you remember 70% of what they look like, 20% of how they say it and 10% of what they say. If you take this idea to your brain it works along the same way. Compare what you remember thinking to what you remember seeing or hearing. Thoughts are so ethereal that they can vanish into thin air, and you have no idea that you even thought them unless something prompts you back.

It sounds silly, talking to yourself, as if it was only available to crazy people and those big black guys who walk down Euclid all the time. If I were religious I could say I was having a conversation with God, and that I was just telling him about my day. But for reasons that I won’t get into I’m not, so talking to myself has to be justified in another way.

I am the perfect listener for myself. I am always thinking about what’s being said, I think faster than the words come out, if I get bored listening the speaking stops, and I’m free to interrupt any time I have a question.

Knowing this, don’t be ashamed to talk to yourself. Socially it’s unacceptable, but so are many things that are commonly done. You read your papers aloud before turning them in, why not sometimes read your thoughts?

I am Jack’s hatred of Instant Messanger:

Like so many others I had fallen victim to the AOL Instant Messanger syndrome. I would often sit at home thinking what kind of profile defines me as a person? And in some sick distorted way I am supposed to define who I am in less than 1024 characters. I would force myself into a text file.

I did this so people whom I have never met could “understand me”. Or I would put something clever and witty and make people laugh. These people would laugh with a sick desperation.

I would make a profile so that my friends would not have to wonder how I am doing and satisfy thier idle curiosity. This way they can feel okay not talking to me, content that they are updated on every aspect of my life.

I say fuck Instant Messanger with its smiley faces, buddy icons, and its profiles, fuck 1024 characters.

I am not my fucking profile.

When I drove to Wal-Mart four times a week for all of junior year to work, I would always have the radio on. I’d alternate between the oldies station and The X, Pittsburgh’s local alternative rock station. I’d sing along, get weird looks from other cars watching me, and generally have a good time.

Until last summer my musical tastes hadn’t matured much, I hadn’t discovered a genre that wasn’t introduced to me by my parents. That’s a long time for this normally, but classic rock and old school R and B (Etta James, Aretha Franklin) are quite excellent, and as Matt Farmer would say of almost all classic rock, “File this under awesome!”

Two summers ago my brother brought home a movie he had heard was wild, called Pi. It’s about a brilliant mathematician whose goal is to find a pattern in nature, more specifically the stock market. He eventually goes insane and nearly kills himself. It’s a brilliant movie, with an amazing ambiance. That ambiance is what first took me to search for the songs on the soundtrack on Napster, then still a viable entity. I came up with Aphex Twin.

For the uninitiated, Aphex Twin is a guy from Britain who makes techno. He’s not a DJ, he doesn’t do clubs like the stereotypical techno person would. I downloaded around 15 of his songs at random, not having listened to any of it before, put it on shuffle, and sat back to one of most mind expanding evenings of my life.

Music didn’t sound like this. Music didn’t play with me like this. This wasn’t music. This was something beyond music. It was someone playing with patterns in sound, playing with patterns in rhythm, playing with me. It wasn’t a cardboard cutout of an earlier hit designed to sell records, it was . . . words still fail me to describe it.

Admittedly I don’t move through music extremely fast, it takes me a couple of runs through before I get fully hit with the significance of a track. I bought techno CD’s, downloaded mp3’s, and slowly expanded my archive of techno until, at least in my group of friends, I WAS the source. I didn’t and still don’t like trance very much, it’s too repetitive. Someone told me that Chemical Brothers and Aphex Twin were kind of old, and that I wasn’t exactly discovering anything, just finding some oldies.

Today I was walking between declaring my major and trying to get paid for the tutoring I was doing, and I passed a couple of people listening to music in the head phones. I recognized both genres, country and metal. I smiled and pulled out my brand spanking new mp3 player, and brought Chemical Brothers – Dig Your Own Hole up to speed. For the next 15 minutes I was in another world.

Rock and pop might be good for a tune, but I trip the fuck out to old school techno.

I was home schooled until 8th grade. My mom taught me math, history and writing while we moved to the multitudes of places that we did. When I walked into Ellenvale middle school I thought I was a normal kid. I was wrong.

Being brought up in a fairly isolated environment, I dealt a lot with my brothers. I have two little brothers, Edwin who is 2 years younger, and Monty who is 6 years younger. When combined, they are quite a team at working to get a rise out of me. The smartest thing that avoided drawn out fights or awkward living situations in our little apartments in Alaska or our houses in the lower 48 was to just roll with the punches. I didn’t think this was weird until I got to Ellenvale. People didn’t roll with it; the insults stuck and caught them at every turn. The first time I heard a serious your mom joke I burst out laughing, even though the person was trying to genuinely insult me (again this was middle school). This general not caring about abuse pattern has followed since.

I heard the other day that they are trying to ban dodge ball in American schools. I shudder to hear this. Abuse is a part of everyday life to me, and you have to learn from it. If I was an only child entering 8th grade from home schooling, I have a feeling I would have gotten really angry much too frequently. The ability to shrug off the arrows of life is a very valuable ability.

Paintball is one of the single most abusive sports I’ve ever played (with the possible exception of padless street hockey). To get a feeling for this I’ll tell of one match that stays in my mind.

It was 4 on 4, the only person I knew was my buddy from high school named Austin, and he was playing on the other team. It was a standard spread of 3 front x 1 back, and I was front and center. Through several lucky shots, my 3 teammates were eliminated, leaving me nearly surrounded by all 4 of them. In the silence after the last one of my men walks out I hear Austin’s lone voice yell, “Let’s bunker him!” To the uninitiated, to bunker someone is to run at their bunker or obstacle they are hiding behind. You run strait at it knowing they probably don’t know you’re there or you are heading towards them, then you lean around the side and shoot them at point blank range until they scream “I’M OUT!” The 4 players who I faced were good, and after I heard Austin yell that comment this big sick feeling crept into me.

I was going to go home with welts all over my body.

This isn’t abuse in the typical sense of the word. I was scared, expecting pain and expecting to lose. Well, if I am going to lose, I might as well do it in style? I got on my knees and made myself comfy. They came from both sides. The BAM BAM BAM BAM rapid fire machine gun sound of paint hitting metal a foot from your head shook my eardrums. Pop out, take a few shots, here the balls in the air coming towards me, pop back in. Repeat. Two men went down. I leaned around the corner as one was running towards me, ready to bunker. It was Austin. One shot clean in the chest, paint splatting on his mask and gun. He’s out. The other guy ran around the side as I spun to catch him. We both shot each other 10 times before the refs whistle caught us. I was dead, I was jittery from being scared shitless, and I was walking on clouds from saving all the respect my team had lost.

Abuse is part of life. I get yelled at at work, bad grades in college, denied jobs, turned down by girls, ignored by friends, and snubbed by my cat. If I took all this personally I would explode. Nietzsche say that which does not kill you makes you stronger. I use abuse not as in child abuse or spousal abuse, which both are wrong, but as the constant conflict you face in any day. Where’s the fun in a day where everything goes your way?