do I?

1) i'm "'typing" this on a wii whilst drunk.
2) i'm supposed to be here in TN, but have yet to discover why. I've been having fun, but fun's not what I'm about. Scott's got shit existential, Leslie's got shit physical, and others seem to have shit personal... and I'm on vacation? Michael and I talked about being "on" all the time, but is there ever, in my world-view, time to be "off"?

Before I left here for the last time last year, I blogged, 'I don't belong here any more.' Do I belong here now?

Court Anonymous fights dirty. Fights with teeth. Fights girls.

"I hope you're as bruised as I am," she said when I came into work on Tuesday, and I have to admit that was hot. But the bruises were reminders of a different kind of gratification. I didn't remember the details, I just remember this girl at the beach wanting to start something. And I remember getting hit. A lot. And I remember ultimately taking her down.

"Throwing sand, that's dirty." Talking about it here-and-there throughout the day brought it back enough that I was able to piece together bits of the brawl. "Eventually my fists started hurting, and I had to use my elbows to hit you anywhere I could, to hit you where it counts." I didn't remember that at all. How does someone forget an elbow to the groin? "When I did that, did it really knock you down, or were you just faking it toget me?" Oh, yeah, now I remembered. I don't remember the impact of the elbow, I just remember the sound of the air exiting my body, and then my face hitting the sand, and the sound of the sand in my ear. And as soon as I realized she was standing right next to me ("Are you okay? Here, let me help you up."), that's when I threw the sand. I couldn't see, but as soon as I heard her sputter, I tackled her, held her wrist and she yelled as my teeth met the skin of her neck.

Then, my arm tight around her neck, choking her: "Who won this fight?"
"We both did."
"No, who won this fight?"
"We both did."
"No, who won this fight?"
"You did. You won."

fin

Pay Attention to the Man Behind the Curtain

[this is going to be a rough blog, best to be considered a first-draft... more a collection of statements than a cohesive work...]

If you hold on to the handle, she said, it's easier to maintain the illusion of control. But it's more fun if you just let the wind carry you. -- Brian Andreas

In the book The Way Out, Dirk Vaughn recounts waiting in line for a backcountry permit. He listened as the people ahead of him asked questions about "which trails had toilets, wooden steps, shade, cell phone reception." He goes on a rant from there, and it's one that I agree with (heck, it might be one I've had myself). He makes his point: "We're so addicted to information and knowing everything a person can possibly know that we can't just say oh, here's a nature trail, let's go check it out."

Now allow me to reintroduce myself. I am an advocate for giving up control. I don't need air conditioning--I can survive without it (and have, for almost half my life). I don't need television, I don't need computers, I don't need my car, I don't need anything I don't have, and neither do I need most of what I have.

And yet I have a hard time giving up control. I doubt any half-hour of the day goes by that I don't check my phone for missed calls or text messages. I didn't even see how deeply this addiction ran, because I didn't see it as such until I read that passage from the book. That really brought some things together for me.

I like it when I forget my phone somewhere. BAM! It's out of my hands. It's not good enough to lack coverage--then, I just check the signal status constantly. But that made me realize that not having the phone took more than the physical object out of my hands--it took the control it allowed me out of my hands.
Which made me thing of traffic. I typically don't mind traffic, and when I would drive from Murfreesboro to Nashville to work I would actually enjoy it... because it took control out of my hands. I have to bust my ass to get to work on time (not that I did, really), but as soon as I hit traffic, sorry, nothing I could do.

And this tied to my appreciation of disaster. That is perhaps hard to explain, but another example is a microcosm of the situation: They say that if you want to hear God laugh, make a plan. I make plans with the actual hope that they'll fall through. Traffic? Flight delayed? Car broke down? Power outage resulted in a reset alarm clock? Hurricane destroyed your house? Bliss.
A couple of years ago, hearing the Post Secret guy talk (I can remember his name any other time, of course), he read a postcard, Everybody who knew me before 9/11 thinks I'm dead. It sent chills down my spine, and I think that feeling was a combination of horror and exhiliration.
The only thing that seems to feel good to me is to give up control, I'm starting to realize. (This isn't even a new thought; I'm just experiencing a more full realization of what I've always known... that Andreas quote up there is from a print I've had on my wall for years, and I've always known it was right.)
But check this out: I could be am described as having self-destructive behaviour. I took this into great consideration when planning to leave Tennessee and, rather than making a plan that couldn't fail to get me out, I simply sabotaged all the plans that could keep me there. Now, if this is self-destructive behaviour, would that imply that these plans, this control, is our concept of self?

I advocate giving up control, and yet I go on controling my life. As I mentioned in a previous blog, I won't allow myself into a management position at my job, because I know what a control freak I am. We're taught to believe we should be in control. We're taught to be in control, and never even question whether we should be. It's not even acknowledged that we could not be.
But we "have to" be in control... the only other option is chaos, we're given to believe. Except that's not true... that's the backdrop painted by people who want to be in control. One more tapestry in the story we tell ourselves we need to perpetuate. L. Frank Baum tells us if we look past the curtains, you'll find the Wizard. Daniel Quinn calls it Animism. Buddhas call it Nirvana. Jesus calls it Heaven. I call it Life. It's all there really is, but for the illusions of control we've made to distract ourselves from it.

Books

I first heard of Jeffrey Ford around the end of January, when Leslie told me about a collection of his short stories. What she told me was amazing enough on its own, but when I looked into the author and found out his first novel was titled The Physiognomy, I got really excited... Physiognomy is one of my favorite words, and it was actually the subject of what could be considered my first blog entry (before the term 'blog even existed).
The book was out of print, and of course the Himmel Park library in Tucson didn't have it (the library only stocks books I'm not looking for, as best I can tell). But at Seattle's Central Library, I found it. In large-print only, but I wasn't going to be picky (although the large type did give me headaches for the first few days of reading).
ANYWAY, I finally finished the book the other day. It was a really cool story set in a really interesting sci-fi world. The narration is from Cley, Physiognomist First-Class (physiognomy refers to the study and reading of faces, and in this world physiognomists are basically detectives), and follows him to a mining town, where he's been sent by Master Drachton Below to find out who stole... a piece of fruit. Cley sees it as a punishment after being overheard mentioning that the Master's own facial features suggest an over-abundance of pride. After the crime is solved, the story follows Cley to an island for extended punishment, and in the last third of the book he tells of what happened once he was restored to his esteemed position in the Master's Well-Built City.

The book and the story were great, but I didn't see where it was going. There was no mystery to solve (even though Cley spent a third of the book assigned to such a task, the investigation consisted of looking at faces, so we're not given many clues to go on), and no gaining momentum throughout. For the majority of the reading, I felt these were missing elements, however the last chapter proved that everything in the book was just as it should have been. I don't know if I've ever been so satisfied by a final chapter in a book as this. There are two other books that follow, but they are both out-of-print, and my magical library does not have them. Luckily, The Physiognomy is being reprinted in October, and Memoranda and The Beyond are being reprinted for November.

So after I finished off the book, I still couldn't sleep, primarily due to an abundance of painful bruises (yeah, just wait for the blog about that story...), so I scanned the stacks of books around my room, trying to feel out what I ought read next. I picked up Round the Bend, thinking it was the right time to re-read it, but no. Other things that weren't right include The Martian Chronicles, Living Buddha, Living Christ, Salt of the Air, Days of War, Nights of Love, The Holy Bible, Oryx and Crake...
When Christmas shopping in 2006, a book caught my eye and at a glance I knew it was Scott's gift. A couple of months later he handed it back to me and told me I ought to read it. The book is The Way Out by Craig Childs. From the back cover: this taut, intensely dramatic narrative immerses us in a labyrinth of canyons in the American Southwest where virtually nothing is alive... and where we pay witness as two men confront not just immutable forces of nature but the limits of their own sanity.
And when I saw the book on the shelf there was no way to have known that a year later, Scott and I would have been living in the same desert for months having faced our own issues with nature and sanity. Craziness.

At this point I realize I wrote more than I anticipated about these books. This was meant to be a short introduction to a very different subject, and to go down that path now would seem really out of place... so I'll make it a new entry instead.