Bedlam's Folly

Oh, yeah...

Wed, 17 Sep 2003 11:36:59 GMT

Journal. It's hard to remember I have a journal. I have a healthy little publishing empire to run and a book to finish, make that two books. I have to work in a quickly rewrite of a manual next month sometime between breakfast and lunch, which is about how much time I'll have to devote to that. Too much writing to make flopping stray thoughts down any fun at all now. Token entry!

This is my first thoroughly sickeningly academic book. I don't do academia really. It just made sense to follow the American Psychological Association Style on this one so academia will do it. It could be my PhD thesis. It is going somewhat slower than I am accustomed to for dotting all my t's and crossing all my i's. I've just been browsing random Psychiatric Times articles while trying to grok in my head how to express the generic summation of contemporary social ideals as they relate to relationships, preferably succinctly, flowingly, profoundly and in one reasonable length paragraph. I am reminded my contemptuous disdain for the profession of psychology. Some of these articles are about as cleverly observant as "Look! We discovered people have two eyes!"

It's not every day

Sat, 26 Jul 2003 03:43:45 GMT

It's not every day you get to loose a cool ten grand in a puff of smoke, vanishing from your ledgers before your eyes like it never existed. It doesn't happen all that often. Today is in fact only the second day of my life that, ts has ever happened. Fucking shity day. Insolvent bastard middle men.

I'm getting very drunk right now for the record. It just seems the thing to do. I'm a damage control zombie strung out on adrenaline. I need to do just a little bit of unwinding thirty eight hours into my otherwise would've been uneventful day if i hadn't had to save the world while the bad guys made off with the bags of loot.

Wasn't I supposed to be the bad guy this time? Who's got the fucking script? Can I get a writer in here?

I am just a smidgen and a chigger and maybe a pinch inebriated, wobbling like a bobble head on he dashboard of a 1974 Pinto driving down the interstate in reverse.

Oh yeah...

Mon, 14 Jul 2003 09:12:11 GMT

I have this journal thingie. With everything I write, I keep forgetting to write anything here. I broke myself of the habit, and the habit hasn't quite come back. Here's a token entry. I'm working on it. I'll get back to you later. Have your people call my people... they'll be back in touch with you.

Bitch and moan

Tue, 01 Jul 2003 07:23:27 GMT

I think I'm in the mood to bitch and moan. There is a positive overtone of angst, only I'm not sure why. Perhaps it has something to do with playing sysadmin all day. That always makes you want to smack things.

Perhaps it's cabin fever. I've not been amok for a while. I'm overdue for a vacation from my reclusive norm. Perhaps it's something else. Perhaps it's just because I don't think anyone actually gives a damn what mood I'm in tonight. Everyone that might is asleep.

Dusting

Tue, 24 Jun 2003 09:54:52 GMT

It's very difficult to remember exactly what you were thinking six years ago. The dust is thick, and I cough at the task at hand stirring it up. Code rots.

The real question isn't whether I can dust it off and polish it up. I can and that's going pretty well despite the dust. The real question is whether I can revive the empire from its ruins of neglect and attrition.

For now, I need a conversation break, though.

Pets that ran away

Thu, 19 Jun 2003 13:21:19 GMT

My mind is troubled now, wandering back to bygone times best not remembered. The circumstances of today remind me of them, though. The past is inescapable. One's history defines them, molds them, makes them who they are. My past was harsh, so am I. The episode in my past haunting me today began in 1987, and arguably ended in 1989, which was the year I last saw Rae, my ex-wife. She was dressed well but frumpily and out of fashion in a blue business suit. Her attorney and her lover were also there. It was a courtroom. It was a temporary custody hearing, which I being male, lost by default. A battle, not a war, though. I never loose wars. It would be unlike me to miss enough details or fail to have the persistence to win in the end, no matter how long the end takes.

Rae was never seen again after that by me or by her attorney or by the judge. I found her, not in person or I would have seen her, but with the long reach of an excellent staff of investigators some months later in Florida where she was strung out and pregnant living with a man who's rap sheet took three reams of paper to copy at the court house. My young son caught in that ghastly scene.

She failed to appear at any more court hearings, she dug her own grave more well than I ever could have. In the end. I won. What I won was less certain. That has troubled me every year since. On paper it was clear, all property and soul legal custody of our child. In practice things are never so clear.

I have no kind words to say about Rae, but she taught me much of life through an experience no one would choose to live. I do owe her that, and did love her, the stray I took in because she had no other place to go after tragic events in life left her without parents. I was sympathetic, and then when she became pregnant I was responsible.

I was still being responsible six years later as it occurred to me, rather like a bolt out of the blue, "Why the fuck am I still feeding her cat?" Baxter was the cat's name. He was an ugly, scruffy yellow and white cat found in a parking lot half starved and three quarters feral, which never changed.

It was a very unpleasant cat. Five minutes later it was a very dead cat, too. It ran away.

Six years after that is today. I'm going to the hospital now for my son to have his eighth major surgery. This time to fuse the vertebra in his back and fix the scoliosis that developed from spending all his life in a wheel chair. It's been a hard life for him without legs that work, one made no better by a mother that has never come to visit once.

I'd have given her, her damned cat if she had.

Superman Lunch Box

Tue, 17 Jun 2003 07:38:29 GMT

I'm listening to Superman Lunch Box by Dust Radio, an obscure never-been band from Canada, so the one mention of them I find on a Web page says. I like the song, not because of the band, because it's a Superman song. I collect those.

Superman saves the world, and so do I. Not the great big world, but my little own world. I save it again and again. I do the impossible well, never pausing for the thought that I might fail in a strange effect of naive invincibility.

I'm listening to the Superman songs trying to convince myself I am invincible again so I will be one more time.

Objectivity

Sun, 15 Jun 2003 11:55:27 GMT

I'm reading a book on Objective C. It isn't objective, or even written well. The book has about the same effect on me as a hand full of Valium. My eyes droop and I start to drool on myself predictably each time I read another chapter.

Objectivity is difficult, and I don't mean object oriented programming, which is mostly just boring, useless jargon to all but a few. On the other hand political correctness comes all too easily to most. It's easy to agree blindly. It's easy to shut up. It's easy to be fashionable.

Objectively there are many benefits to that, it frees the mind from so much work that would otherwise prevent the idle enjoyment of popular television shows, not to mention shopping malls. There are more benefits still. It is most of all safe to be politically correct, or safer I should say. Nothing is ever risk free. You can avoid most individual dangers by running with the largest herd.

I can be objective, I just can't be politically correct. There are too many more disadvantages to it than there are benefits, too many opportunities lost.

With that resolve long resolved in my mind, I can say with confidence what needs to be said. Right now that is "Jane, you ignorant slut."

Jane in this case actually goes by the handle of crimsonbagonia, and is an all too typical poster child for moral panic and Gap jeans she bought at the mall.

Trail

Sat, 14 Jun 2003 13:04:58 GMT

"Is my trail bigger or is it simply left to see as the unabashed facts of a life lived, instead of swept away, conveniently forgotten, buried in shallow graves like the evidence of crimes?" I said that once, but I said it before I dug a shallow grave this morning and washed the red from my own guilty hands.

After some contemplation I've decided to resurrect my journal, leaving only the very last post I made before abandoning it to a seemingly wiser course of muted silence nearly a year ago.

Those sorted crimes of the past need not be remembered now. The future is bright and full of many more to fill the pages up again. I've surely not changed any of my wicked, wordy ways...

Dribbling

Mon, 05 Aug 2002 11:38:57 GMT

I pop my knuckles and stretch my arms and lean back in my chair. I type. I type all the fucking time. I wear groves in keyboards and rub the letters off. I've been typing all night again in cryptic bits that do not make words. I got a lot done. Now, I'm thinking.

Like a limp dick dribbling piss into the pot of life, I'm thinking. That line, sans the part past the comma, I found in a folder of writing. I'd jotted that down years ago. It sounded witty when I though it. Meant to use it later and never did like so many ideas. They age like cheese in the cellar. Some get better. Some mold.

This journal thing, it's been molding under the wax, growing green, fuzzy stuff like a slice of last month's pizza forgotten in the box. I forsake my fans with long silences. Maybe I still have two of them.