BoldUlysses.com

Why would I be surprised that things don’t change?

I remember being in southern France back in ’04 with Aaron and Donald, and although some things had changed—new stores, parking lots, buildings, altered roads—I still knew the area like the back of my hand. And I loved it. I was buoyed by the thrill of rediscovering familiar paths, and the largest part of the emotion was the quasi-surprise derived from the fact that area had changed so little that finding my way around was no challenge.

I think because my life had changed so much in the ten-year span since my family lived there, I expected the area to change in lockstep with my own evolution. How it would have changed, I had no clue—it just would have felt more natural for it to have altered in some way. Don’t misunderstand—I love that the area remained the same; the surprise was entirely subconscious. All I knew at the time was that I was back home.

The environment I was living in didn’t help. The pace of development in RTP was—and is—so breakneck that it far outpaced what I was comfortable with. Call it mapping one’s emotional state onto an area: It happens, and the areas we love best change as much or as little as we want them to, in the ways we want them to.

• I really should be in bed. There’s a soft, gray, nearly 1-year-old kitten in my lap, though, that makes it hard to get up. He’s sliding off; hang on… OK; now we’re good.
• Well, the Mac Mini arrived yesterday, and…it won’t work. Despite the fact that the eBay listing clearly stated the computer would come with 10.5 preinstalled, it had 10.7, which is too new to run FormZ. I really should upgrade to the latest version of the software at some point, but that’s over a grand for the package I need, and the version I have does everything I need it to—except run on the latest Mac OS. Hopefully the eBay conflict resolution service will come through for me.
• Diane and I have been trying to make it through the LOTR Extended Edition again, but we’ve stalled out in Lothlórien. I suppose there are worse places to be stuck.
• Pen and I discovered a cardinal’s nest earlier in the evening. We were jumping on the trampoline in the backyard when we heard a mother cardinal doing her angry chirp. A little investigation and we found a low-hanging nest with a chick and two eggs in it. Phoebe was nearby, but fortunately she wasn’t aware of the nest.
• I’ve been playing Escape Velocity: Nova in fits and starts. It’s nice but not quite as engrossing as its predecessor (EV:Override) that I used to play during my junior year of college. I got into it, but Mark (my roommate at the time) didn’t dig it quite as much. I can’t remember whether that was during my straight-A semester or not. I think it was. Wish I had had that balance of focus and enjoyment all throughout college. So, so much time wasted in so many ways. I’m still so ashamed when I think about it.
• I want to freelance full-time. I’m tired of the 9-to-5 (aren’t we all?). Too risky, though, at this point in our family life. Maybe later.

New Mac Mini’s coming tomorrow. Since the old one’s HD died, I haven’t been able to slave it to the iMac and run FormZ, so I’ve had to do all my freelance and after-hours CAD work on the MacBook. That’s really clunky since my copies of Photoshop and Illustrator are on the iMac, so there’s been a lot of back and forth, switching keyboards and mice, etc etc. Look forward to having everything in one place again, so to speak.

I really miss the old LJ group. We had a good crew, and a good thing going for quite some time. Disappointed that so many folks, including myself from time to time, have gravitated toward outlets like FB and Twitter. I know a big part of LJ’s appeal was the social aspect, but to me, the larger part was the journaling aspect, the writing.

I’ve been enjoying Kacy Hill’s music quite a bit lately.

My favorite:

When I was 14 years old, I was very interested in business jets. My favorite at the time was the British Aerospace BAe 1000, an intercontinental development of the smaller BAe 800, and before it the H.S. 125. I sent a letter to British Aerospace asking for information, and they replied with a package of glossy brochures and fact sheets (they’re still at my parents’ house somewhere). On one page of the brochure was an ad for the aircraft, a single page image of the plane flying at night with the cabin lights visible through the darkness. I don’t remember the copy; just the visual. It made an impression on me. I imagined myself at the helm of the plane, flying over the Atlantic at night, in command of that multi-million piece of hardware and the lives of the passengers in my capable hands. I didn’t have many “hero moments” as a kid, but that was one of them.

I still think about that image every time I see the lights of an airliner blinking overhead in the darkness, and I feel a twinge of what I felt then when I drive my family through the night on a long road trip. It resonates.

Never gets old:

Happy new year?

I drive Penelope to school most mornings, and we listen to music on the way. The drive only lasts around 8 minutes, so we only have time for a song and a half. I’ve made a series of “New Music” cds (haven’t gotten an AUX input installed yet for the BMW) and we’ve been listening to random songs on those.

She asked me the other day what my favorite song was. I honestly couldn’t say. I made a compilation cd of “Daddy’s Favorites” in response, but couldn’t pick one in particular. Angie Aparo’s “Spaceship” is on the cd. I get lost in the menacing surreality of its lyrics—it reads exactly like a dream with its emphasis on random objects and their jumbled juxtaposition next to verbs that describe longing, or other strong emotions.

One song I didn’t include, and probably won’t even though it’s one of my favorites, is Dar Williams’ “Iowa (Traveling III).” I struggle to explain how that song affects me every time I listen to it. In my mind, the lyrics alternately originate from the wife, then the husband, from the man, then the woman in a kind of dialogue that makes sense in my mind but that I would have difficulty describing. I think what gets me about it is that it touches on the contradictions in our long-term relationships that mushroom as the years go by. It’s another form of the “can’t stand you but need you” lyrical trope, but one that holds particular weight with me.

Loving the Pet Shop Boys’ newest album, Super.

Turns out Luke likely has some form of diabetes. Diagnosed last week. D made dietary changes and he’s doing fine, praise God. To say that we’re feeling overwhelmed is an understatement. Would like a success story. Every new and existing thing in our lives seems like it follows the same trajectory from bad to worse and we’re just hanging on by the skin of our teeth.

We had another epic meltdown last night. In fairness, he was hit with a few disappointing events, but his inability to control his anger or process his disappointment is so integral to his personality that it feels like things will never change. The Lord can do anything, but…just another area where it feels like we’ve gone ages—years—without any sustained, measurable improvement. I’m 37. Is this how it is indefinitely?

I’ve been running on fumes the past couple of weeks. No time for existential or nostalgic reflection.

Happy Bastille Day, by the way.

Iona’s “Everything Changes” took me back to our trip out west in 1996. I miss that little Walkman and the case of tapes I took along. There were only a dozen or so slots, so I had to select my traveling music very carefully. The album wasn’t that great overall, but “Everything Changes” stood out for its slightly more industrial, electronic feel. The hotel in Jackson Hole had orange curtains and high ceilings and felt like something out of Jackie Brown. I don’t remember what I was reading then. The wheels of our eventual breakup were turning 1,500 miles away, unbeknownst to me. I was immersed in blue skies, clear air, idealistic pinings and long, long car rides.

I knew I wasn’t secure. I told myself I should buy something for her during the trip. I wanted to, but the thought that it’s something I should do—a sense of duty, almost—weighed on me more heavily. It was almost the idea that “This is what you do in a relationship,” and I went through the motions. Odd, though, because I did want to; it was a bizarre combination of obligation and effortlessness. I was confident; I didn’t feel like an imposter, a fraud, but I think I had a kind of subconscious awareness of the ephemeral quality of it, like it could be snatched away from me at any moment at the same time my conscious mind very much believed, if not that it would last forever, that at least it was open-ended. That probably stemmed from the quasi-unintentional way it started, how I backed myself into it and then slowly came to realize what an absolute treasure had fallen into my lap. It’s ironic that it was that lack of self-consciousness that fostered the attraction in the first place, and as my affection and insecurity increased in lockstep, the demeanor I first showed her withered away. And there was nothing I could do about it.

yesterday, today, forever the same
you are

the dust has only just begun to form
crop circles in the carpet

Back in a different life I used to work at GNC. While on a shift, when things were especially slow (or even when they weren’t and I could sneak a spare second), I jotted down journal entry ideas or poetry fragments on bits of register tape. I need to do that again—not with register tape, mind you, but on any of the assorted stacks of blank post-its I have here in my cube.

I’m frustrated with and disappointed that as much as I told myself otherwise, it appears that a huge source of motivation for me to write, back when I did write frequently, was the attention of an audience. It takes the roof off a bit, metaphorically speaking, forcing me to admit to myself that maybe my online persona didn’t completely match my real-life one. As soon as I say that, though, the retort is that I didn’t write or discuss anything that was ever contrary to the way I really felt or thought. So it wasn’t a qualitative difference so much as a quantitative one. The quality is still there, albeit somewhat atrophied from lack of exercise, but I don’t believe it’s anything that can’t be resuscitated (triple negative?).

So, status check:

• 37, still 6’4″, still have red hair (with a bit of gray now), still have the same rectangular glasses Leslie helped me pick out in Durham in early 2004.
• Diane and I will celebrate our 10th wedding anniversary this November.
• Luke is 12; Penelope is 8.
• Still out here in Chattanooga.

Those are the all-unimportant (for the purposes of this journal) facts. Hopefully the daily anecdotes will serve as springboards for the recording of the internal dialogue. Which is how it ever was.

blood and tears
they were here first

Remembered Sarah Masen a day or two ago, and binged on a whole bunch of songs from her self-titled debut album (admittedly the only one I owned). I remember buying that all the way back in 1996. I was a rising senior, if I remember correctly, and we were still attending South Durham Bible Church in Parkwood. It must’ve been the waning days of that church (my dad locked the door the day it folded), and I let Leslie borrow the album, and she really liked it. It’s a shame Masen didn’t go on to greater success; she was (and is) a very talented songwriter, with a kind of diary-like quality to her lyrics.

Absolutely exhausted. I should be in bed now, and I’ll head that direction as soon as I finish this and take care of a few other things.

Productive day at work. The air conditioning died in the office (happened with my last job as well) so it was sweltering in there near the end of the workday. At least it’s not July. I tried to articulate to Marie what makes the nature of the design work I do at my new job so much more fulfilling than what I did previously, and I think it comes down to the fact that the types of displays I design now are one step closer to actual objects (being smaller in scale) and have less of a built-in, architectural quality to them. It sounds simplistic, and it probably is, but most industrial designers go to school to design thimble-to-vehicle-sized things; if we wanted to be involved with larger, environmental-type structures we would have been architects or landscape architects. And of course there’s more to it than that (a boss that acts like a normal human being helps a lot), but that’s part of it. Eh.

• We sang “He Who Is Mighty” in church on Sunday. I’ve had it going through my head all day. I’m not complaining. It’s Christmas-ish and beautiful.
• This site is live again. I’m trying an experiment, much like I did when I had that rash of posting a few years ago, of trying to write something, no matter how trivial, at least once a day, and hoping that will spark the habit. The fact that the first page on here spans more than 2 years is really sad, but… I can’t do anything but move on from that. I’ve privatized a bunch of entries, so there are about a dozen additional posts in that period, and…I’m the only one who’s really bothered by this, aren’t I? Stop talking about it? Probably a good idea.
• Hunter is curled up on a blanket behind me. Oddly, Phoebe isn’t on my lap. She’s the newest addition to our three-cat collection and is a lap cat par excellence. She normally takes up residence here when I work in the evening, which is most nights, but she must’ve found another cozy spot somewhere else in the house.
• My new job isn’t without its quirks, but it’s light-years beyond my old position. It’s been a breathtaking answer to prayer. I feel productive, valued, like my contributions are appreciated and matter, and (this is huge) I don’t dread going to work any more. Sunday evenings aren’t the slow emotional downward spiral of anticipation they used to be. It’s taken me a while to get used to the new mindset, and I hope it will only improve from here, to hopefully where I was, emotionally, when I worked at my job in NC. I’m actively trying to put the pieces in place.

Stumbled upon my repository of old poetry while looking for Halloween pictures for Diane. I flipped through a few. Some are okay; some are pretty bad; but my overarching feeling when reading them was a strange feeling of detachment. Most were ostensibly written with a specific subject in mind, and now I realize that they weren’t really written for that person at all, but were in large part a kind of exercise of my own romanticism. I hesitate to call them vanity projects, although I suppose, like most of my writing endeavors, I feel an added stab of motivation when I have an audience; my private journaling has never been consistent. Still—I don’t feel any connection to or longing for the subject of the poems’ words. They’re strangely mechanical. There’s a feeling of wastefulness, too, but who really knows in those moments what will last? You give of yourself because you want to believe, and because the idea of being in love is easier to wrap your mind around than the jigsaw puzzle reality. So it is with my formulaic expressions of romance, recently rediscovered.

1. I love the word “mend.”
2. I don’t know whether to be excited or depressed that retropop is growing in popularity. I guess I should be pleased the style is getting more exposure and inspiring more bands to create music in that vein. Is there more crap? Sure, but there’s also more quality music. Can’t have one without the other I suppose.
3. I’ve got the White Horse Inn podcasts since the beginning of the year loaded up on the iPod in preparation for the trip back to NC for the weekend. Not really looking forward to the driving and being away from the family, but all in all it should be alright.
4. D found this link a few weeks ago, and I haven’t been able to get enough of listening to the sermons online.

How did I end up here, stumbling at the end like Pip and Estella? Only not quite the same—la seule chose contre qui je cogne, c’est moi-même. It just works better that way.

Maybe I do better with an audience? I don’t know. And it’s not that I didn’t chronicle anything privately—I did—but the consistency was lacking, to say the least. I think the slight restriction of nominal anonymity is worth enduring for the added motivation of public exposure. Regular (I won’t say good) writing requires a comfort zone, and I cultivated one over the years here. It would be easy to maintain that the consistency was a function of the audience, but the two-month burst of quality posting 5 or so years ago belies that. Quoi qu’il en soit, me voiçi.

After my run last night, I held my arm out to block out the neighborhood below and reminded myself that it’s the same sky I saw 10, 20, 25 years ago when I first read the H.A. Rey book and learned the constellations in Auron. If at least one of my senses can experience that familiarity for a moment, that’s a good thing.

Funny to think about the ebb and flow of LJ. It was really the only game in town during its early years, the only semi-permanent alternative to instant messaging. Folks who wouldn’t otherwise have written anything felt shoehorned into the blogging mold. Then Facebook, Twitter and other social media sites arrive on the scene and offer users what they really want: Cheap, disposable communication. Don’t get me wrong; those things have their place. I think it was just nice to see folks, for a year or two at least, forced into expressing themselves longhand, so to speak, however reluctantly. And after the diaspora, here I am again.

I sold the red RX-7 last Saturday. With the departure of the Datsun (tentatively scheduled for Labor Day weekend when my parents will be in town), I’ll be fun car-less for the first time in about five years.

The truth is that I never really wanted the red car in the first place. I want to go to marriage counseling with Diane, and the car was an effort to find emotional solace in something, even though I knew full well, even going in, that it’s a piss-poor substitute for actually fixing the dysfunction in our marriage. And it was enjoyable to work on, and yes, I did get excited about it when it crossed my mind, so that provide some measure of relief, but in the end it was an exercise in futility. And I knew it. So now it’s gone, so at least that part of my life is simplified.

I’ve been actively looking for a new job. I’ve called a number of recruiters, and one responded with what looks like a really good opportunity in San Fransisco. Diane doesn’t want to even think about it, but I would really like to consider it. Sure, the cost of living is higher, but I would be paid much better, and it would be something different. She’s already too far from her family as it is, though. We got into a fight the other day over it, and she said the only way I would get the job would be if I moved out there by myself and sent money back. These days, I’d be lying if I said it hasn’t crossed my mind…

I’m emotionally exhausted every day. On top of the turmoil our marriage generates, there’s the stress of my job, and the stress of my son’s behavior problems, compounded by the double temptations of spending money irresponsibly on another car and trying to fight back the desire to reach out to any number of former female acquaintances (lately it’s been Heather P.) in hopes of making a connection, any connection. I have to fight that, but good Lord it’s hard.

I guess this is a pretty typical mood for a post. I remember feeling this way writing LJ posts back in the day; the more coherent and thoughtful ones seemed to emerge from this state of mind.

I don’t even know what the hell is going on. I do know I’m pretty tired of sleeping on the couch downstairs like I have been since mid-December (going on nine months now). It’s all choices; it all comes down to the choices she and I make. She doesn’t love me, doesn’t understand me and from what I can tell has no desire to improve upon either.

I still have old e-mails in my dormant Lycos account. I’ve purged the inbox, but the “sent” folder is still stocked with replies I wrote to people I connected with via my old journal. I miss that feeling of connection, of initiative being taken in my direction based on something intellectual or verbal that I offered… Initiative being taken in my direction: How long has it been since I’ve felt that? But I digress.

I’m so conflicted about writing in here. I feel like I need an audience for motivation, but I’m hamstrung by the fact that I have to be selective about what I share publicly for the sake of my family. It certainly was easier when I was single. Maybe I should go back to LJ, even though that place is a commercial sinkhole compared to what it used to be.

And the days, weeks and months slip by, unrecorded. My children grow and my thoughts age, and I feel like my capacity to even set things down in words atrophies, which is probably the truth. I’ve got to do something. This is too important not to.

Yes, I have the unfortunately-named Charli XCX’s latest going through my head these days. It’s a good pop song, though, and I’m not above embracing the occasional dose of plebeian music; heck, most (all?) of my enthusiasm for ’80s tunes encompasses music that would fit comfortably under the “pop” label.

I had some good themes in my head earlier today, but they’re gone now. I’m downstairs, typing on the netbook with the TV muted, kittens scampering around the room. They’re full, so they have energy to burn at the moment.

More soon.

I suppose they could all be interchangeable in the end, all these girls in my dreams. They have unique features and are associated with real-life acquaintances, obviously, but the common thread between all of them is that they exhibit a certain kind of interest in me. I don’t recall them individually well enough to remember whether that interest takes on a particular tone or nuance depending on the girl, but the interest, however manifested, is the constant.

And I know they’re all caricatures; they have no connection whatsoever to their real-life counterparts except a few superficial features and a name, along with perhaps a couple of overarching personality traits I may be aware of, if my mind should choose to fit those in, but I still get swept away. That touches on a longstanding question about my feelings vis-a-vis dreams: Is it the situation itself in the dream that causes me to feel so strongly, or are my emotions “hypercharged” by the dream state, magnified out of proportion to the situation that creates them? I have hunch it’s a bit of both. Whatever the case, yet again, I carry it with me throughout the day, and it provides a nice counterpoint to the fact that my life is in shambles at the moment.

What happened? How did I end up here, in a house I dislike, with a job I hate, with a wife who no longer respects or loves me and has one foot out the door, with a son who has no understanding of discipline or self-control, and in a somewhat (though not totally) precarious financial position? I don’t want this to turn into another self-pity session, but when is something going to change, Lord? Just one thing.

Probably me, huh?

1. Had a great visit to McConnell Elementary today…followed by an awful phone call from Diane to a lady at the Hamilton County Schools central office, essentially stonewalling our attempt to get the kids moved from Daisy (where we’re districted) to McConnell. I will be visiting Daisy next week, but my initial drive-by didn’t look too promising: Tacked on to a high school, looking very small and run-down, with a large dumpster right next to the front playground, and having to drive that terrible gully-ed road to get there… No thanks.

2. If you haven’t seen them, do yourself a favor and check out the series of Shirley Manson / Craig Ferguson interviews on YouTube. Their repartee, the dueling Scottish accents… They’re hilarious. I wonder if Penelope will look like her? If she grew up and could be a mix of KT Tunstall and Shirley Manson I wouldn’t object a bit.

3. The extended stay I’m presently in reminds me a lot of a dorm, with its paper thin walls and hustle and bustle this time of the evening.

we don’t need a big fanfare
this is just my heart laid bare
for anyone who might care

I can see why Emily and Lindsey and Susan were angry with me, to a degree. Even as I struggled against the pull of complacency and the gravity of the Standard Trajectory’s comfort zone, everything seem to indicate I would buck the trend. I talked big. I patted myself on the back for having the audacity to step away from a decent job and familiar environment and embark on an “adventure,” never mind the fact that the US government (student loans) was footing the bill for almost all of that. It’s easy to take a chance on something new when others are paying your way. Hell, I’d have already been to France and back if I’d had a sponsor.

Even so, I created myself a kind of crusader-philosopher, married to a particular path in life instead of a relationship.  And for whatever it’s worth, in the midst of all my confessions, I never consciously misrepresented myself. What was written was genuinely what went through my head on a daily basis; none of those musings were plagiarized in any way, and there wasn’t, nor has there ever been, any “dark underbelly” to my thoughts on romance; what I want and have always wanted is exactly what I shared: The good, the true, the straightforward, the hand-holding over glasses of wine, the slow dancing to quiet music, the hesitant disrobing, the white ____, the open-eyed, face-to-face lovemaking, the closeness; the ordinary—if a specific flavor of ordinary…

In this, I wrote:

I don’t want the white picket fences. I don’t want the American dream. I don’t want to be some nut-brown, overweight, greased-up tycoon sitting on the deck of his fishing boat, knocking back another beer and checking the reels; I don’t want to be the five-time award-winning district manager for Burger King in the southwest region of whatever state, coming home to his blue-shuttered home in Suburbia, USA. I don’t want to be like anybody I know; I want to be like myself, which works because I hardly know myself.

Lindsey commented on that; it was one of her first comments on my journal. She understood.

And I failed. Miserably. I gave in. I succumbed to the American dream. No, I’m not a district manager for Burger King, but what’s the difference between that and a display designer in a crappy company when you’re coming home every night to your 3 bed, 2 bath beige box in a named subdivision, with no ambitions (at least none that would be supported by your wife) beyond making more money so that our family can buy more stuff? We live in the center of the bullseye and we’re burrowing down into the yellow…

They saw it coming. They saw my decision to date Diane, such as she was, as a capitulation to the gravity of our culture. I fell back to earth, figuratively and literally. And even then, I knew it. I knew what they said made sense. They never came outright and gave me a taking-to, but I heard their unspoken criticisms and knew they stood a very good chance of being right. They knew me; they wouldn’t have followed my journal if there hadn’t been some level of understanding there, and their intuition was closer to the mark than I wanted to believe. Even my superficial dismissal of it all as a necessary step in “forsaking all others” left a residue in the pit of my stomach, a seed of doubt.

The sad truth is that she’s never understood me. I was blinded by my ambition to “rescue” her and Luke, and she overlooked incompatibilities in a rush to get herself and Luke out of her parents’ house’s toxic environment. She’s admitted as much to my face, several times. She did things with me while we were dating that she’s never done since, and I now know are so far out of sync with her character that it’s jarring to think about the fact that she actually did them.

To this day, the best thing she’s ever said to me was in the aftermath of reading my journal, such as it was, from beginning to end, and telling me that she wanted to print it all out and keep it forever. What I heard then was that she understood and accepted me, that she valued my thoughts, my dreams, that she admired my creative output. What I know now is that more than likely she was just looking for any writings about ex-girlfriends or romantic interests. She’s never been interested in reading anything I had to write subsequent to that. Sure, Spannerhead was a bit esoteric, but even when I was writing in our regular journal, or during the brief resurrection of my LJ blog, she never commented, verbally or electronically, on anything I wrote.

For all that, though, my dad is right when he reminds me (as he does nearly continually) that the Lord did put us together. There’s intentionality, there’s purpose behind it in spite of our muddled motives. There are principles that transcend our situation, no matter how we arrived here. I just wish I knew how to get through it. I can’t tell you how long it’s been since I’ve felt a response from her to my attempts at emotional connection, understanding, appreciation; hell, I’d settle for halfhearted interest at this point. I wish this part of me would either die outright or recover, but it clings like a festering wound, and I hurt, and I hurt, day after day after day. I’m fucking miserable; even the simple of act of hanging up after a phone call is another twist of the knife, when I don’t hear the words from her I haven’t heard in fully 2 years, and now know she never meant them even when they were commonplace. She is the one I have, and yet I am me and she is her. How do people go through life in a state of perpetual emotional starvation? Her dad’s done it for 35 years, and my parents are dissimilar in significant ways too. I just don’t know.

Rest stop by the Autoroute, sometime over the summer, 2000. On the way back from Sanremo where we saw the Ferrari and I had awful tiramisu and that shaggy picture of Erin and me was taken at the restaurant. Sun casting sharp shadows, solid blue sky, Ferrari merchandise in the store. Sheer cliffs of white stone down toward the ocean, no beach. John, David, Stephen and Paul carrying on in the convenience store.

What a waste. Whole years of my life thrown away, twisting in my memory. The trip wasn’t; if nothing else it served as a placeholder until the next in 2004 and provided a slice-of-life demo of city life in Nice, but I should never have been involved with her. Never. I cringe when I think about specific moments on that trip, and there were more than a handful. She was gone for the last two days, and as much as I missed her at the time I’m glad for that brief respite.

During prayer time Wednesday night, John prayed for hope for me. I have none. Absolutely none. I can augur nothing but a downward path at this point… I just don’t know what, if anything, will ever happen, could ever happen.

I am so, so tired of the indifference, the disdain and just the utter contempt… I’m tired of walking on pins and needles every time I’m around her, wondering if I’ll say too much and set her off. I’m tired of repeating myself 3 times to catch her attention when she has her headphones on and then brooking the inevitable, boundless annoyance when I share whatever it was I had to say…

I have not the smallest grain of hope.

On the edge of the weekend and so mind-bendingly disillusioned with the level of incompleteness in my life. I know we’re all “in process” to some degree or another, and usually I can repress that to the point where it’s nothing more than a background murmur in my thought life, but every once in a while it breaks through, like a sudden crevasse in an ice floe.

Didn’t help today, either, that I downloaded Duncan Sheik’s “On A High,” and, in listening to the electronic version, caught aural whiffs of Andain’s “Beautiful Things,” which of course took me back about 10 years to Design Services and all the attendant uncertainty and relational flux of that time…

When are things going to be…? I don’t even know.

Wilson Phillips, “Ooh You’re Gold.” An incredibly cheesy bit of filler pop from their debut album. Listened to it on my Walkman in a hotel room somewhere in Italy. Tall wooden shutters on the window overlooking a semi-busy street. Mild fall or spring day. Como, perhaps?

Downloaded Ivy’s latest, All Hours, earlier today, and I absolutely love it. It’s more synth-driven than their previous stuff, which is completely fine and welcome given the retro-’80s music kick I’ve been on. “Fascinated” and “I Still Want You” are two early favorites.

Listening to “Wait for Me,” Blade Runner soundtrack.

Memory of the McDonald’s in Northgate mall, late 1986; I was 7 years old. Sun streaming in the window as we sat and had dinner. Discussed the fact that we’d soon be moving to France; I had no idea what to expect or any apprehension of the magnitude of what was about to happen, but I felt it in the pit of my stomach. I felt the alterations in our routine more than anything, the way things seemed to be hanging, affairs packed, at the edge of the precipice…

In her mother’s large house, I sat on the floor, leaning on the ottoman. The front room, or den, whatever it was, had speakers for the sound system built into the walls, which were painted green, though a different shade than the upholstery on the couch and chairs. Our parents conversed at a table in a different rooms; my brothers and her brother and sister were elsewhere, watching TV or carrying on. We discussed music, and movie stars and celebrities, and friends and it was easy. Somehow, and I’m not sure, the conversation took a turn for the serious. We were young, and just hearing ourselves say these words, as if we were kids watching adults when the words fell from our lips made the experience positively electric. I knew she wanted to tell me she liked me, an admission that up until that point hadn’t even been on my radar, somehow not having seen her for who she was—a breathtaking beauty who looked 5 years older than her age, a lack of apprehension which most likely played in my favor since it allowed me to converse with her more easily… But I made her say it. I did. I looked at her intently with some kind of ridiculous notion that she would “draw strength from my eyes,” when actually I was probably having precisely the opposite effect. By and by she made her confession, and I returned it, shocked that she liked me but determined not to leave her hanging.

Every subsequent relationship of mine that began without intentionality on my part utterly crumbled as my emotions, not having been present from the beginning, easily wandered away. But not this one—it grew stronger as the realization of what I’d been given dawned on me day by day. And the eventual breakup six months later was exceedingly acrimonious.

(spring ’96)

Pen’s 5th birthday today. Diane bought cupcakes yesterday, which I brought to school with her. She was decked out in a Brave shirt and “birthday girl” badge and very very excited. She’s acclimating as well as can be expected—Mrs. Matthews says she’s very bright, but has been having trouble with the rules. That’s understandable, though; Luke spent the better part of a couple of months learning the rules once he entered kindergarten as well.

I should mention as well that yesterday, as we were leaving for school, she ceremonially and deliberately left her beloved doggie on the stairs, declaring that she was a big girl and wouldn’t need it at school any more. And then she said the same about sucking her thumb. That was a bit painful to hear…even if she’s not entirely “there” yet. Little girl growing up.

I want to record my swiftly-receding pre-journal memories. Fortunately, by the grace of God, I’ve “nailed down” at least a third of my life in some form or fashion, having kept this journal somewhat alive—the last year or two notwithstanding—for the past 11 years. I’ve got to get the earlier stuff on (virtual) paper, though. There’s so much that flits through my mind on a typical day, powerful memories, even, evoked by a random sound or smell, and I don’t want to lose them.

I want to remember how I felt then

Went to Pen and Luke’s open house last night. Felt the ever-present twinge of trepidation knowing my children will be under the auspices of another for the bulk of the day. But it’s a good school, and both kids’ teachers look to be fantastic (Luke has Mrs Joyce for the second year in a row, so she’s a known quantity—great for him).

Did I listen to pop music because I was miserable?
Or was I miserable because I listened to pop music?

I wish I could place this one in time.

Hotel room. Wide awake, staring at the popcorn texture on the pale blue ceiling. Headphones on. Richard Marx, “Endless Summer Nights.” Promise Keepers conference. Atlanta. Had just a man enter a hotel room with what looked like a prostitute a few minutes before, and had that disturbing image flitting around my mind. But I remember wishing, wanting, feeling. Trying to let myself fall into the emotion of loving someone, and capture that for as long as I could.

When was it? Who did I love? Who was I then?

so raise your hands to heaven and pray
that we’ll be back together someday

Rereading my (spotty) recollection of our Europe adventure back in ’04, I closed my eyes and surprised myself with a sigh of audible relief: “I am so glad I recorded that.” How can I have such a visceral reaction when it comes to my memories? Do others have them? They truly are my most prized possessions. Come to think of it, if anything happened to this online journal where I lost all my data, I would be inconsolable. Devastated. Ripped asunder. I have got to back this up.

* * * * * *

Thinking about being a Den Leader for Luke’s Cub Scout den this fall. He’ll be in his second year, a Wolf Scout. It’s a fairly big commitment, having to attend all the meetings as well as planning activities for the boys twice a month, but…it would be a great opportunity for L to get socialized, and for us to make some friends in the pack.

Thinking about potential activities with the boys and how to keep their attention while talking got me thinking about incentives. Candy immediately popped into my head, which reminded me of the prodigious numbers of Werthers caramels my junior year Odyssey of the Mind team consumed as we brainstormed. “Brain food,” we called it, and downed bag after bag. We didn’t make it past third place during State Finals that year, and thus didn’t earn a slot at World Finals, but it was a good group nonetheless: Aaron, Greg Adams, Cara, myself and a few others whose names it kills me that I can’t recollect out of hand. The highlight of our final performance at States was an ad-libbed line by Greg, playing the bad guy, Mugsy. The car Aaron was driving as “Da Boss” (a nickname he still sports to this day) was supposed to trip a sequence of event that would cause a large-ish papier-mache boulder to roll down a ramp and accomplish something plot-significant. During the performance, Mugsy would yodel and “cause” the landslide, but during the actual skit, the mechanism jammed and we had trouble freeing it, and the performers had to stall for time while Aaron and I worked it out, allowing Greg to deliver the utterly improvised, brilliant line, “Hurry Boss! I think the rocks is building up an immunity!” The judges and audience all laughed, and the rest of the performers had trouble keeping straight faces during the remainder of the skit.

she was physically forgotten as she slipped into my pocket with my car keys

Let’s talk about the camping trip a month ago. There is absolutely nothing my son would rather do than camp. He loves everything about it, from the sleeping in a tent, to eating different food, and especially the hiking and Standing Atop Tall Things™. Although, truth be told, he didn’t much care for the tubing or canoeing, being constrained as he was and at the mercy of the river (tubing) or Granddad and me (canoeing). And he got upset when everyone was watersliding through the table rocks. Nice that that coincided with his medication comedown… But that evening we went on the sunset hike past the Magic Tree, and all was well in his world.

I had a great time with the parents, too. They’re just…I dunno. People that I want to be friends with, maybe? Or perhaps I’ve been so friendship-starved lately that I made more of it than it was? I’m still on the fence about whether or not to volunteer as a den leader this fall. I’m leaning toward “yes” at the moment.

as if everybody here would know exactly what I was talking about

Lloyd Dobler: You used to be fun. You used to be warped and twisted and hilarious… and I mean that in the best way – I mean it as a compliment!
Constance: I was hilarious once, wasn’t I?

In the daily grind of family life, it can be so incredibly easy for me to forget how awesome Diane was (and is). Or even me. There are so many musings and trains of thought I’ve just buried for fear of upsetting her, and worthwhile things, expositions that I should have recorded, events, times, places, impressions…just lumped into some kind of tenuous category and dismissed. Or suppressed.

Have we ever had electric, scintillating chemistry? No. But we used to dream together, and we mused, and we spoke to each other in hushed tones about those things which excited us, and the color wasn’t drained from our days and weeks.

And you know what? As much as anything, this journal was a catalyst for those dreams. The act of recording and remembering those things that lit a fire under me anchored them in time and space, gave them fertile soil to grow, take root and attach themselves to my identity, and hers. Rather than being a passive observer of events, the journal was a mirror, a foil, a structural part of an identity under construction, and without it…time whips by, unchecked and I so quickly put my head down again and narrow the focus.

So…I’m taking a break (perhaps indefinite) from Bimmerforums. Since I started posting in earnest in late 2009, I’ve amassed almost 6,000 posts, and as with my slight, albeit present attraction to returning to Facebook, I can feel that permanent desire to record, connect, create, searching for an outlet. I’m hopeful the BF.C pause will help redirect that impulse over here, where it belongs.

he was born a pauper to a pawn
on a Christmas day
when the New York Times said
God is dead and the war’s begun

Luke’s recently taken to calling me “Dad” instead of “Daddy.” Pen had done it off and on for a while, but now it’s solidifying too. The transition has begun…

On Brandon’s recommendation, I recently bought The Avalanches’ Since I Left You and FSOL’s ISDN. Both are more ambient than my usual fare, but very interesting. Since I Left You in particular is fascinating in that it shifts many times from upbeat, dance-oriented tracks to sound collages in mid-song. It’s varied; I’ll give it that.

Penelope killed a bug downstairs yesterday. I was cleaning the kitchen after breakfast when she approached me with a slightly concerned and serious look on her face. She held up a yellow Angry Birds box and told me “There was a bug downstairs but I beat him, because no bugs downstairs.” I inspected the contents of the box: Inside was a rather large cricket-like bug, dead. She was evidently worried about my reaction, but when I expressed approval, she was very proud of herself. I was too; think about it: She saw a large bug in the basement, but rather than scream and run away (as most kids her age, male or female) would have done, she assessed the situation, located a suitable “beating” implement, whacked the bug, picked it up with her fingers, placed it in the box, and presented it to me. That’s my girl.

such are promises
all lies and jests
still a man hears what he wants to hear
and disregards the rest

I have a headful of buzzing bees, never pleasant when I should be sleeping.  It’s been a long day, and I’m especially tired after having run this morning.  Some days unfold such that the intervening hours dampen the tiredness, but tonight the effect has stretched its long arm across the length of the day to reach me here.

I feel like I have so much to say but it’s all fragmented.  I rarely figure things out by talking about them–I’ve never been that kind of person, at least not initially.  What tends to work the best is retreating, pondering the situation for a little while until I’ve figured out how I’m feeling and tied those emotions to specific causes, at which point I may "present my findings" to a willing ear and they can then assist in sorting the rest of it out (if they’re so inclined).  The alternative to all that, or at least something which helps a great deal, is simply to find someone who understands how I’m feeling–it saves the trouble of having to explain myself (not that I mind under most circumstances but when there’s something weighing on me the stakes are a bit higher) and I can just focus on the particulars of the situation.

This is all very vague; I know.  Normally at this point I would hide behind some hackneyed poetry or half-prose, but it feels like ages since I’ve done any of either and, well, I dunno…  I think I’m staying in the meta-data tonight.

We drove around as a family and looked at some houses in Lewisville yesterday.  It’s not the first time we’ve done this.  Even before we moved out of the old house, Diane would find a house or two online and we’d drive through its neighborhood on the way home from the store or church or wherever.

We’ve always known the apartment was a temporary situation, a stepping stone to the next place.  When exactly that’ll happen, we’re not sure, but it’s definitely in the cards, Lord willing.  Pen and Luke aren’t going to be able to share a room indefinitely, and the kids definitely need some free range area a little more accessible than the apartment complex playground, as nice as it is.  Luke has been very interested in gardening lately–his Grandad and him planted a garden at their house and he looks forward to checking on the plants every week.  He’s gotten to the point where he’s "planted" apple seeds and popcorn kernels in the flower beds next to the parking lot outside, in hopes of growing an apple tree and a "popcorn plant" (he doesn’t seem to believe our explanation about popcorn being made from plain ol’ corn).  So a yard would certainly do him good.

Diane’s parents are local, and while I was initially a little resistant to the idea of living so close to them, the particular suburb of Winston-Salem they live in is the best, the most small-town-ish and has the most active community.  In terms of living too close, what with easy transportation all over the area, there’s little practical difference between living five minutes or fifteen minutes away.  So if I’m not going to change jobs, which I’m not planning on doing for the foreseeable future (I really like my job and it supports us), why not live in the best area available, regardless of how close it is to her parents?  That’s been my line of reasoning.

So we’ll see what happens.  In terms of taking more chances life-wise, this is very much the path of least resistance; however, Diane and I remind each other to keep a proper perspective on the things we’re given, since we’re just stewards of everything anyway (even our children–and that’s hard to apprehend).  I think if the Lord has a more far-ranging opportunity in our future, we’ll be ready for it, or at least as ready as we can be.  I certainly intend to pray for that attitude to take firm root in our family.

Changed the oil in the van for the first time earlier this evening.  That was a messy job.  My tools are residing at my in-laws’ while we have the apartment so I used my father-in-law’s ramps and performed the task over there while the kids were running around and everyone else was preparing for dinner.  The oil pan bolt was easy to remove, but the oil was still hot from driving, so I let the bolt fall into the pan and couldn’t find my magnetic wand to pull it out easily.  And the oil filter was at the perfect angle to dump several cups of oil on the gravel driveway before I got the pan completely underneath it.  Messy, messy, or as my daughter would say, "Oh no!  Shoowie!"

Still, I got it done, and it feels good to have crossed that off the list.  The rest of our time there was fun as well, with barbeque chicken, baked beans and fixins’ for the meal and el-cheapo fireworks for the after-dinner entertainment.  After our Memorial Day fireworks experience, in which they were more subdued than they normally are (no huge pyrotechnics or screechy loud noises), Luke has really started to enjoy fireworks, where before he was quite afraid of them.  He ran back and forth, delivering them to his Uncle Chris to light, then standing back with Uncle Josh and watching the show.  His favorite thing to do, however, was to run through the smoke–don’t know what that means for his penchants later in life.  And the pack of smokebombs we purchased was naturally a big hit.

 Yep.

Happy Fourth!

That is all.

One of my guilty pleasures is Ace of Base.  I’m not even going to try to justify my penchant, defending them on the grounds that they just make smooth, well-crafted, lightweight pop/dance (which they do) or something like that.  For a change of pace, I just like their music, and lately at work I’ve been listening to their album The Bridge.

I definitely think we, as Americans (and possibly you other Anglophones as well) take it for granted that almost all of the popular songs we listen to are in English.  I mean, here’s a Swedish pop band, and to have any hope of success not just on the international scene, but likely also in their own country, they have to write their *cough* lyrically profound *cough* songs and sing them in a language that’s not their native tongue.  How odd would it be if 95% of the songs we heard on the radio were, say, in Swahili?

Anyway, I just thought that was worth recording for posterity.  It sounded more profound in my head when I was listening to the music.  Maybe I’ve discovered an unpleasant side effect?

Recent verbal/grammatical pet peeves:

– Madonna lyric: "Don’t underestimate my point of view."  This is from her song "Cherish," one of her early hits, I believe.  Heard it over the P.A. system in a store recently.  The grammatical construction is tenuous at best.  I mean, does one’s point of view have value that can be something besides either true or false, valid or invalid?  I guess there are points of view that lends themselves better to perceiving the situation at hand as it truly is, but I still don’t think of them as able to be over- or underestimated.  The word just seems to intersect the sentence at a right angle, like a container sticking out of the fridge, keeping you from fully closing the door.

– "It begs the question…"  Okay, this is a big one, and difficult to explain.  There’s a logical fallacy called "begging the question," which means, basically, to assume or anticipate a particular answer in the formulation of a question.  However, in 90% of the instances where I see the phrase used, it has absolutely no connection to the logical fallacy, but seems to be simply used to mean something like, "the question that naturally follows from the preceding statement is…"  It’s a tip-off to me that the writer probably has little, if any, awareness of logical pitfalls, since the fallacy mentioned above is a pretty basic one, and is using the phase in a misguided attempt to sound more intelligent.  Or it could just be that language is changing to accommodate the new meaning (kind of like how "eager" is being replaced by "anxious"), which is, to put it mildly, unfortunate.  Preserve the richness of the language, people!

Still here.  Busy days combined with lack of inspiration conspire against me.  The closest I’ve come lately is when I was picking up a take-out order of hot wings at Ronni’s Restaurant in Clemmons and felt oddly compelled, in a Carson McCullers / Flannery O’Connor way, to record the collage of semi-rural America around me as I sat there and waited for my food.  I pieced together a couple of sentences in my mind but nothing serious came of it.

We’re getting a minivan.  It’s a 2005 Mazda MPV and we got a good deal on it.  I’m finalizing all the paperwork tomorrow so, Lord willing, it should be sitting outside our door tomorrow night.  Diane’s very excited about it, as am I, but not quite as much as her.  We looked for a couple of weeks, and were locked into the Odyssey / Sienna thing for a while.  Once we opened ourselves up to other possibilities, though, the Mazda appeared and ended up being a very appealing alternative.  We’re psyched.

Luke and Pen are excited to be sharing a room.  They keep each other up frequently in the evenings, bantering back and forth in their way and just generally carrying on.  This has the side effect that it keeps their energy levels artificially high (read: it makes them overtired).  In Luke’s case, when this sets in, he gets well-nigh unbearably antsy and has trouble staying in his bed.  He’s been told many times he needs to stay in his bed at nighttime, and that if he needs something he can come out and get us.  Of course, to Luke this means letting himself out of the room, running in ours and gleefully announcing, "Daddy, I need something."  I reply, "What do you need?"  He says, "I don’t know," and I put him back in bed.  Lather, rinse, repeat.

Earlier this evening, while putting him to bed initially, I told him that if he came out he needed to have a reason, that just saying "I need something" wasn’t a reason and that if he couldn’t come up with one, he’d be disciplined for not staying in his bed.  And true to form, within a few minutes of shutting the door, I heard it open again, and Luke came around the corner to find us in the living room.  He drew himself up to his full height and proclaimed, very seriously, very deliberately, "Daddy, I need to go to bed."  I managed somehow not to laugh aloud and said "Yes, you do need to go to bed," before leading him in there again.  If there’s a loophole, he’ll find it…

In other news, I’m teaching myself to play guitar.  I’m four days in and my fingers are still hurting (even as I type).  I wonder when this goes away?  My brother-in-law Josh (who lives just a couple of apartments over) is letting me borrow one of his guitars.  It’s slow going but I’m going to stick with it.  I want to be able to accompany Diane one day as she sings; that’s the goal.

 When it comes to privacy and the internet, these guys and I really see eye to eye.

Great commentary by Al Mohler on the Newsweek article.  I liked this paragraph especially:

Mr. Meacham also suggests that this new situation is perhaps healthy for the church.  To this extent I agree — the church gains a necessary knowledge any time the distinction between the church and the world is made more evident.  Our first concern is and must be the Gospel.  It is good that non-Christians know that they are not Christians and that Christians be reminded of that fact that what sinners need is the Gospel of Christ, not merely the lingering morality of the Christian memory.