Archive for the ‘ Writing ’ Category
A great white-golden light
in the sat-feed from the west
the technological wonders of my home glowing bright.
The brighter white stars
of the uncluttered east over my head
as I glance up from the
gee-ar-gee on my
right wrist.
On my left a gee-pee-ess
the blue-force-tracker:
a corded bracelet…
new world and old
encompassed on my flesh
should I but face North.
I find some small solace
in the irony.
I find myself,
as if awoken from,
a dream of gilded,
lamps and golden mirrors.
There is steel found here,
this desert,
this sandstormed reality,
of space and time.
The gilded dream is,
programmed, conditioned –
all constructed,
for you.
Only my real ones smell of copper and
cordite; gunpowder and blood.
Awakened,
the colors are a mere shade,
of what I know they should be,
you see, that’s the way…
the way they conditioned,
me.
“In the beginning the Universe was created. This has made a lot of people very angry and been widely regarded as a bad move.”
-Douglas Adams
There comes a time in every man’s life when he will be faced with a choice. There is no warning, there is no long buildup leading to the moment the choice presents itself. It simply arrives. No fanfare, no epic music, just a moment when you realize that no matter what you decide your life will never be the same again.
Some of these types moments happen to some men more than once. To live a life filled with defining moments is both blessing and curse.
They change you. They change the way you view the world. They change the way you view life. They change the way you view yourself. They change the very things that make you you.
Some of the choices are big, easily recognized when they burst into the room. Others are much more subtle; little things that only become apparent when they are added together.
They are all the same. And yet they can be so very different on the surface.
To be honest, I cannot complain. While there have been some very difficult moments, hard choices, I would not trade it. Because my life has been wildly exciting – with a serious relentlessness to the pace of the thrill-ride that I have been gifted.
But such a life comes with a price. There are many, too many, empty seats.
I don’t refill those chairs.
Occasionally someone will pull a new seat up to the circle, but the fireside is a much quieter place than it once was. Loss is a part of life, our universe of dualities requires that there be death to offset life. For every action an equal and opposite reaction. This is the way our reality functions.
I’ve experienced enough for any one man, and yet I still move through the world with the same hunger, the same fire that has driven me since I could form thoughts from the chaos of my evolving mind.
For the longest time, that fire was pure rage.
It drove me ever forward, pushed me further than I thought I could go, kept me warm when I froze, kept my feet moving long after I should have fallen down. It pushed me through things that should have ended me. Rage is a hell of an anesthetic.
But it is a poor substitute for life. Rage has no real future, has nothing positive to add to the world.
It’s fires burn hot and bright and then go nova. It consumes you, if you’re lucky you aren’t forced to survive that process.
After the nova comes the steel, you’ve been burned, hammered into a blade, tempered and forged by the hate that has driven you. It makes a wonderful weapon, a tool for vengeance.
But again, there is no future in that. There is no legacy, nothing eternal about hate except that it will always exist, long after those that hate turn to dust. The concept is all that survives.
Legacy was not something that was important to me as a young man. When asked what I wanted to do with my life as a teen I replied with: “I just need to live long enough to accomplish some specifics.” I refused to explain what I meant. I still don’t know that I really understood what I was saying at the time that I said it.
I get it now. But that was many years, many hard choices, many moments ago.
I am no longer that boy.
I am something forged from his ashes. Tempered by experience, now driven by something he would never, could never, understand.
I have always wondered about the why of things. About purpose and place.
I don’t pretend to understand the nature of life, of earth, of the universe itself. It only makes sense in the mathematical realm of thought. This is very little, and very cold, comfort. Math never explains why, only how and how has never been good enough of an answer for me.
I wonder why and how people can be so sure of purpose and place. I have never found any comfort in any of the places or purposes I have encountered on my path. That is not to say I am unhappy, just that I probably think more than is good for me and I wonder about things that do not have answers.
To me, those are the only questions that actually matter. I can’t just gloss over them and move on to answerable problems. I have this need, this burning desire to understand this here and now, to know why it’s all here and for what purpose it was designed.
Maybe that’s the answer.
Maybe there isn’t one. Maybe one of those defining moments I speak of is to force myself to stop asking why and just enjoy what time I’ve been given.
I’m not sure how to do that. Maybe there are just too many ghosts, too many echoes of hard places to let me coast through without the answers that will let them rest.
Maybe I’m crazy. Maybe I think too much. Maybe I took all the wrong classes in college. Maybe I read all the wrong books. Maybe I walked down all the wrong paths. Maybe I made all the wrong choices when those moments found me. Maybe I… maybe, maybe, maybe…
❤
Sitting in the dark, letting the air of many fans wash over me. It dries out my contact lenses. But I can’t hear the air moving or the noise the fans make over the music pouring into my ears from the very phone I’m typing this on.
I have been trying to pour my writing into something other than this, my personal and public blog. I have a need to be more than just verbose but creative.
I can’t shake the feeling that having an ability, a talent, is a responsibility. A contract you’ve unknowingly signed to use that to make things better for yourself and for others.
Maybe I’m just crazy.
❤
I wrote a really long post.
I deleted all of it.
All you get is the vague hint that I wrote something I didn’t want to share.
Something that I never wanted to be able to revise or revisit.
Odd feeling that.
❤
I am sometimes confusing. Confused and/or confusion.
I wonder what goes unsaid. I wonder what is between the lines I read and why those words aren’t in bold.
I wonder often of late at my complete inability to concentrate.
I am in a place, a place I don’t want to be, surrounded by people I do not particularly care for and some of whom I fervently wish I’d never met.
I think that the world is sometimes very dark.
I sometimes hear a sentence in my mind, a line from a book I once loved:
“…holding their swords with the ease of trained warriors and the sorrow of awakened dreamers…”
I identified with that line long before I was a trained warrior – I’ve always held the sorrow of an awakened dreamer just beneath the surface, where it is invisible to onlookers.
I prefer it so, I know not (now) why.
I am sometimes unquantifiable; I cross lines, blur boundaries, I am an odd amalgamate of often mutually exclusive qualities – I am the exception to many rules.
I don’t quite know what to make of that.
❤
I just realized that I went about three months without posting anything – only posting when I was able to start running again.
Apparently the amount of free time I have had has declined drastically, because there is hardly ever (read: never) a time when I don’t have something to say – even if I’m just commenting on my lack of something to say.
I’m not quite certain that qualifies as a paradox but for the purposes of this post let us suspend the rules, or perhaps merely bend them a bit.
I’m actually not certain where I was originally going with this post so I’ll be back later to finish it.
Back about 2 days later: some combination of earth rotations and movement on its orbit of Sol, and you’ve been deceived readers – I still have nothing much of interest.
Running, that’s interesting, I level design in my head sometimes when I run, it’s math mostly so I can do two things at once (and enjoy it) that most people hate to do period, and while we’re on that I’ll paraphrase Dawkins, I’m not super into polarizing figures but I like this one: why is it so shameful to admit to a lack in literacy but perfectly acceptable to admit to deficiencies in science and a compete inability to handle mathematics of any level above basic arithmetic?
I’m just saying, if someone tells me that matrix theory makes no sense or that they can’t wrap their mind around string theory or super-symmetries that’s one thing but I’ve run into a startling (and disheartening) number of people who don’t even know what the order of operations in (very) basic algebra is.
Algebra. That was sixth grade. Seriously I always loved to solve for y – if you know me or read this blog then you know why I like Y.
Be back again to finish this later-ish.
Annnnnnnd another eight or nine days later: it’s the playoffs, my beard is actually coming in quite nicely (for me anyway) and one of my teams has advanced to the second round. Once again, if you know anything about me (chances are, if you’re reading this you’ve stumbled here because of my categories and/or post tags) then you know that I love hockey. Playoff hockey in particular. It’s the best month of the year and not just because I don’t have to shave.
Aren’t artists and intellectuals and pseudo-intellectuals (read, hipsters) supposed to have beards? I feel like I’ve read that somewhere.
This post has been completely disjointed. Broken up into its constituent atoms it retains only the barest semblance of coherence.
I rather enjoy that. It’s my blog I don’t have to make sense if I don’t want to, now do I?
I thought not.
❤
There’s a website called reddit – you may have heard of it.
At any rate I read a comment about running that resonates and I thought I’d share it:
This is sort of how I started running too. When my life was falling apart and I thought nothing else could go right I started going to the gym to force myself into something social everday. Just to interact with people. Just to do SOMETHING.
And then I started running. And then it started being about me. And that feeling. And the act. And how free it was. How independent. How strong. How I didn’t have to hold back anything like I did with the rest of the world. On the treadmill, on the trails, on the track, in my running shoes I was allowed to be raw anger and pain and frustration and loneliness and strength, too, because fuck the world that doesn’t think it takes strength to be alone.
Fast forward six months – my first 5k. Six more – half marathon. A year – marathon. I’m still the only one I know who’s done it. I’m about to start training for the triathlon. And yeah, I like my body a lot better now, not so much because of the way it looks but because it is a powerful, independent, free extension of the strength I carry and I can show that any time.
So you, more power to you. Run. Run for as long as it makes you happy. There’s nothing like that first ten miler that you take in the middle of the night without your phone or telling anyone where you went and you think it’s never going to end and when you finally finish your legs are fucked for the next three days, but fuckitall if it wasn’t worth it.
Running’s like that. Welcome to the family.
Actual post on reddit with comment.
A little off-topic but ever in my heart and thoughts – to my best friend holding down that bar, keeping my seat open: I’ll see you again someday buddy, but not yet.
David R. Greenslade
Kandahar City, Afghanistan
04/08/07
As the title says…at any rate 2012 is almost gone and it has been a year filled with both normalcy and insanity.
I rather like that.
I deleted my Facebook. Absolutely liberating that.
I dissolved the LLC I was partnered in, the short of the long – my partner never held up anything remotely resembling a fraction of a portion of a workload.
But out of that experience came my company. I’ve begun to build it ground up; bootstraps firmly held. Only gravity holds my feet on the ground these days it seems.
I’m learning several new programming languages concurrently…I wish I could say that it were easy to do so, but it’s real work.
I’ve thought rather intensely when I’ve got some free time about the major events of my life, many of which have been the kinds of things that can break people.
I tend to jump back and forth on the idea that things happen for a reason. If you asked me today I’d tell you that they do, and that they have built me into something that can take almost any hit right on the chin and grin through it.
Somedays I feel it more than others but I’m still looking up and that is pure encouragement.
I’m building worlds, some with words, some with pixels but I’m making dreams real, my own for the moment and hopefully someday I’ll be able to build it into something so big it can make other people’s dreams become real and tangible – to make those secret hopes they cling to in the deepest hidey-holes in their hearts become their lives.
I know that in person I can “come off” as arrogant, egotistical, hard, irreverent and sometimes (more than) a little crazy.
I am wild. I am unapologetic. I am the me I am because I was molded by time and experiences: in that I am just like you.
Underneath all of that still lives the little boy that looked up into the night sky and dreamt of setting foot on the planets that orbited those visible stars.
Well, failing that, the man that encapsulates that boy will do his best to bring those stars down here where we can all marvel at them.
❤
Ah, well I got a new iPhone and all of my locally-saved, not-quite posts were deleted.
Almost a relief it is.
❤
curro ergo sum 