The Slope

There are two things on my mind. One's good, and one's sad. Both are about life.

The first is a movie I watched called Cash Back. It's British and has Oliver Wood from Harry Potter as the main character.

There's a lot of nudity in it. It's about beauty though, and claiming the moment. It's pretty Bohemian, but it's definitely an inspiring movie - inspiring in the way I like it to be. Not in the Seabiscuit or Radio way, where they might as well put it in the "inspiring" genre, but something that lulls you in and makes you care about the characters, and then tells a human story.

I had to put that one first, because the second makes it seem trite. Someone that was a good friend of mine in high school, I just found out, was diagnosed with colon cancer in June. Apparently he has a fairly high chance of survival, but it's just so strange. Anyone past some certain point in life, I would think, would sympathize with this sentiment - but it is not quite scary and not quite sad to me...but just an altogether wordless feeling, to be confronted with death in such a real and immediate way.

I don't know if I've written this before, I may have, but it's worth repeating. It's both horribly tragic and terribly interesting that we should grow to know that we are - and to build relationships with people, to have love, and to have things we build, and accomplish, and overcome - and die. If we live long enough we will see everyone we love die, and die ourselves. And this is certain. That we would pass thru life like a blip on a radar screen, like a vapor, and we know, we know that everything will end. That we could understand this, and still slip toward it completely unable to stop it. Humanity is actually a tragedy.

To Embellish

I suppose it's high time for a post about my life, mainly for my mother and my sister - my mother, who I haven't called in a while, and my sister likewise. The thing about this job is you can only say so much, and then that sort of bleeds in to the rest of your life, like mud spreads. And all of the sudden your life is a gray mesh of classified information.

This is where I am.

I moved to a new squadron. So far I've been made to go on to a shift that's nights...which is awesome...but that includes a 4 hour shift on Saturday - which is decidedly not so. And I was volentold to do some duty at 6 am on a saturday. And I took part in a squadron-wide piss test in order to root our columbian drug lords or some other such nonsense. Welcome!

I hate it.

I'm trying to not be so negative. I remembered, from some previous "I can't talk about this" sort of training, that I had a nervous smile. I don't think I have that anymore. I have a nervous frown, and a calm frown, and a happy frown. Let's not go that far, but we're getting there. I tend to complain. I tend to whine. I should stop that, but then I'm looking for something really good - really good in my life. There are plenty of things I just have to grab hold of and shake and squirm like one of those tube blob things you can't really get a hold of. I'd rather not explain.

Otherwise...not much.

I read less, I write less. Here is a hilight. I'm taking drum lessons and practicing a lot. I've wanted to do this since I was young, but then, we always had guitars around. I play my electronic set and I do drills and etc. It's not ideal, but it's a light, for sure.

Side note. I remember when I used to go to church, in high school, in youth group...we were trying to come up with a new name for the youth group, rather that YOTM - Youth on the Move. My suggestion was B.U.T.T.E.R - Bound Undeniably To The Everlasting Rock. The one that ended up getting voted in to power was Luce or Luchay. The Italian word for light. Pronounced Loo-chay. It wasn't universally accepted. So a few of us painted the podium to say stuff about butter, and had verses about butter, etc. I really enjoyed that time.

Butter.

I'm trying to spend time with people, and I'm getting back in to creativity - being interesting - transcending. There are definitely bright points in my world.

Eat, Drink, and Be Merry, for Tomorrow, we Fly

Except I probably shouldn't eat anything crazy, I definitely shouldn't drink, and "crew rest" fairly prohibits me from being merry with anything more than what's already in my apartment - which, don't get me wrong, aint bad.

I'm fairly nervous, as I always am when going into something new or very different. Every time I go to a new place or start a new class or a new activity I get somewhat nervous the day or so before, so I guess this is expected. Thinking back in recent memory, I think the only things I was really justifiably nervous about were Survival School, and Basic Training. Everything else has been no big deal. This also, I'm sure, will be no big deal, and might end up being actually kind of cool.

There's some kind of psychological therapy that focuses on just thinking about things rationally. An example of this would be something like if your significant other was an hour or two late from work. Instead of automatically assuming the worst, it would have you stop, and think about all the more realistic possibilities (their phone died and they had to stay late, they had car trouble on the way home, they had some other appointment you forgot about or maybe they forgot to tell you) and realize the reality of your worst fear being true is pretty slim. In this situation, even though my worst fear isn't very solidified, the flight will probably, nevertheless, go by with a minimum of incident. I know the stuff I'm supposed to know, and I've never come across much of anything that I couldn't handle with relative ease - at least as far as these standardized things go.

I look at some of the people that have gone before me, and I figure they might as well skip the five flights and just graduate me after this one. Sorry if this post isn't exciting, it's more to myself. By 1630 tomorrow, hopefully, it'll all be done. And in three months or so it'll just be a dim memory.

Embracing the Absurd

There is no purpose. Imagine we're floating through this ether, oblivious to earth and sky. Imagine this utter absurdity, such that even rationality is a farce - a manifestation of our fear in the face of complete intellectual incoherence.

Imagine also, how this frees us. When we became conscious we stepped out of the prison of this world, and we became limitless.

This is existentialism.

Defibrillator

The last of the psychedelics boil in my blood. I am Sheeva the God of Death.

But really, what is percocet? Aspirin with a sprinkling of THC? I doubt it even goes that far. The lights remain lights and the music continues to enter my brain only through my ears, unfortunately.

These days, they grate by. Like the door in a horror movie. For now, though, the killer's already in the room and he's just swinging the door back and forth for effect I guess.

I'm tempted to hang all my paintings sideways. My furniture, I've keeled on the diagonal, almost all of it. It looks pretty strange in my bedroom, but at least it's interesting in a way that makes the word be able to describe itself. At least my furniture is doing something, and not just sitting there asking to be sat on. At least these rooms, they convey something. It might be just an aversion to fengshui, I'd show you the Chinese characters, but it seems I'm yet to install them on this computer, so great are my studying, maintaining, and prostrastinatory sins.

This is all an exercise, by the way. This is probably the first of the marshes a writer encounters that slogs him or her down and grabs for one's neck - writing when not particularly inspired to do so. I'm sure there were days when Beethoven didn't want to touch a piano, or when he sat down at it he just kept playing chopsticks over and over and hating that he was so un-genius-like. I refuse to believe there's truly something that sets apart Beethoven, Shakespeare, Einstein, and Aristotle. "Evolution, Morpheus...evolution. Like the dinosaur." We're all carved from the same wood. It's the same dust and god-breath what flows thru my veins, and if I'm naught but 2% estranged from chimps, from a genetic standpoint, some garbage about the way Da Vinci's brain might have been organized differently, I find rather unimpressive, to be frank.

But then, I'm young, and foolish, right?

I for one would rather never learn I have limitations, except for my ability to fall off a cliff on to a spike and die.

That's just good breeding.