I received a mailing from my phone company with an extraordinary offer:

Five years of high-speed internet for $19.95 a month.

Well, maybe not that amazing. Experience tells me this would be for the slowest speed. I’d be willing to pay more for real high-speed, to escape from a cable-company-that-won’t-be-named, but experience also suggests faster DSL speeds aren’t available in my area.

But! This isn’t about my internet options. It’s about the fine print on the $19.95 offer:

“When you bundle with Unlimited Nationwide Calling.”

I laughed. It’s like they can’t let go, these phone companies. The flyer has pictures of smiling young people, and all I can think is, who under the age of 60 still has or wants a long-distance calling plan?

But then, I’m the kind of dinosaur that still has a landline. Maybe they can be forgiven for thinking this might appeal to me. They have all this data that says we haven’t had long distance in, like, forever. They must be scratching their head and saying, “How do these people stay in touch with people outside of his area code? I bet they’ll jump at this opportunity.”

Update, a couple of days later:

It was pointed out to me that not everybody lives in a major metropolitan area with good cell coverage, and that some of these people may reasonably be expected to desire long distance calling plans.

Point taken.

I still think it’s an odd bundling juxtaposition.

Ezra Klein pointed me to a blog, “This Is a Blog Post. It Is Not a ‘Blog.’”, quoting from the blog, “Trust me. I’m a blogger. I blog blogs all the time.”

The blog snippet entertained me, even though I disagree with the premise of the blog itself. My own preference is likewise to call these things “blog posts,” and yes, I flinched the first few times I ran across “blog” for a blog post.

But I quickly got over it. Language evolves, and who are we to set into stone so quickly all of these new words and concepts?

Then again, I’m all in favor of arguing about language and complaining about language misdeeds. I persist in my own hopeless campaign of railing against the over-utilization of the word, “utilize.” (Although I grow weary of it.)

At the same time, I actively root for the further debasement of some idioms, like, “Begging the question.”

In the case of “blog = blog post”, I’m indifferent. I don’t care who wins. The author of the Slate piece says that you’ll look dumb if you do it wrong, and nobody will take you seriously, and maybe it’s true that keepers of the blogging lexicon may look down on you, now, but I think this harsh judgement will soon be overwhelmed by common usage.

Can you imagine at one time a similar irritation when the word “letter” came to be used for the collection of letters on a page? I’m sure much angst was spilled in the verblogs* of the day.

* Verbal blogs.

Although nonpartisan in this case, I should disclose that I have my own peculiar thoughts about blog terminology.

Sam and her friends were talking about Justin Bieber, so I informed them that he’s a robot.

As might be expected from a group of seven-year-olds, there was a desire to believe, but also skepticism. They’ve been tricked before.

They’re smart enough to know that this would have to be confirmed on Google. I entered the search exactly as they specified:

is justin bieber a robot

And look at the top two results:

Is Justin Bieber a Robot or Cyborg? ? JUSTIN BIEBER ZONE …
www.justinbieberzone.com ? Weird

Justin Bieber is Actually a Robot – RobotShop Blog
www.robotshop.com/blog/en/justin-bieber-is-actually-a-robot-1509

Google totally backed me up!

I said, “Well there you go. It’s on the internet so it must be true.”

(Postscript: As I wrote this post, I showed them the image above from Wikipedia, and told them it was an early Justin Bieber prototype.)

The job’s going…

Okay?

That new job I have. You may have heard about it when I was in the early euphoric phase of finally moving on to something new.

Now I’m going through a bit of a rocky transitional phase.

Lots of stuff I like about this place, and there are good people, but I’m struggling with parts of it. I love that I’m working with technology that I want to work with, and learning lots of new stuff. There are many things about the office culture that I like.

There are some things I’m not so excited about. The time pressure is stressful. But it’s early. I’m not going to panic like the time I tried a different job at my last company and decided after about 7 minutes and 20 seconds that it wasn’t right for me.

And I’ll think about what I might write about. I’ve been consumed by computer stuff in my free time. But it would be good to write, still.

About something.

And more often.

NEVER AGAIN.

I’m going to keep blogging FOREVER.

I started this new job and it’s going well. I’m keeping busy with learning new stuff, and enjoying learning new stuff. My cup runneth over.

I still want to write.

I think.

Who knows? Maybe being more satisfied with my day job has left me without as much of a needy need to put things out here. And maybe I can start writing more freely if I don’t put so much desperate desire into an outcome for it.

Just have fun. That would be weird.

I’ve been writing technical stuff for The Nerdery blog.

I wrote this and this and this.

If you glance at the this-es, you’ll see a major betrayal of the roots of this blog, of which I should most certainly write more about, but not tonight, because I have other things to do.

I’m unfollowing you for any number of reasons. Complicated reasons that surely have more to do with me than you. I’m notifying you of the unfollowing/unfriending in case your “interest” in me was reciprocal or contingent in any way upon a mutual connection, so that you can likewise unfriend or unfollow me. (I’m probably even more irritating than you are.)

If you require examples of why I’m breaking this social bond, well, let’s see…

Check all that apply:

• You tweet too much. Or too little. Or about the wrong things.
• You shared too many vacation pictures.
• I grew tired of seeing your horoscope in my timeline.
• You didn’t “like,” star, or retweet my wit and wisdom enough.
• It rankled me that you “liked” Glenn Beck and Sarah Palin. In general, your likes are like a roster of stupid.
• There’s nothing wrong with your social network usage, but your posts make me feel anxious or insecure in some unspecifiable way.
• Your profile picture unsettles me.
• You’re too edgy.
• My god, don’t you get tired of always being so clever?
• You posted too many song lyrics or inspirational quotes, or ones that failed to entertain me.
• In general, you demonstrate a lack of understanding of the importance of amusing and entertaining me.
• You didn’t appreciate my song lyrics or inspirational quotes.
• Maybe I’m not unfriending you, but I’m choosing not to see your updates, so please don’t expect me to be current on anything you’re talking about.
• You kept exhorting me to like and share something if I had any decency or human feelings, and I grew tired of the constant ethical dilemmas.
• Your children are dreadfully unattractive.
• Not enough cat pictures.

public domain image via fithfath.com, from the book Tidens naturlære (Nature of time) by Poul la Cour, 1903

The pendulum swings again. I applied for a new job last month, a technical job, and just like that, my brain started its descent to the other side, thinking about software development and how I do like mucking about with computers and code, and that perhaps this should be my focus. I love programming and making things that go.

My imagination is taken with these words:

The computer programmer is a creator of universes for which he alone is the lawgiver. No playwright, no stage director, no emperor, however powerful, has ever exercised such absolute authority to arrange a stage or a field of battle and to command such unswervingly dutiful actors or troops.

–Joseph Weizenbaum

The actors often don’t seem so unswervingly dutiful, but they are. The logic and the functioning of the machine are beautiful. The quote may sound grandiose, but there is such freedom and power in the commanding of these troops, along with the frustrations.

And there’s the thought, oh, how nice it will be to have money. That is, by working at something that pays, rather than at… this. This writing thing. For so long I’ve imagined quitting or working part-time to really pursue this thing, and it was frightening, because I know how it is in this business.

More importantly, there is always the suspicion that this isn’t the call for me.

I’m disappointed that I don’t feel possessed by the need to write. I like writing. I love when people like what I write and I get some validation from their approval. But I’m not pulled into it by the fascination I want to feel. I know that it is work like any other, and I trusted (and still trust) that if I keep working at it, I might find that fascination more consistently.

And thus, times like the past few months, where I’ve pushed myself to write more. I enjoy it at times, and occasionally feel inspired, but still I think I’ve been “doing it wrong.” It isn’t so much that I have to write as that I desperately want to do something different than what I was doing in my old job. The writing has been driven by fear and desire as much as by love.

After submitting my resume, I felt hopeful, and adrift. Waiting for signs from elsewhere. Would they call me? In my imagination, it seemed like the perfect job for me. I quickly dropped my recent writing regimen as I considered this change in direction.

I heard back from the company, and as part of the interviewing process completed a “code challenge.” I spent a weekend writing an application to demonstrate my skills, and I loved it. I worked on it for hours at a time. One day I worked on it for nearly fourteen hours, I think, on and off from four in the morning until ten at night.

There was fascination, and the drive to make this thing, and the joy in learning and working with the pieces and making them all line up. I wanted to be a programmer, again.

This is how the pendulum swings. Writing software is also work, not always enjoyable, and at some point I expect to look at my “alternative” of writing prose more seriously, yet again. This is the nature of pendulums.

But it doesn’t have to be either/or. I’ll keep writing here, and I hope from a better place. I may not be so prolific in my posting schedule for a time, but I’ll keep writing. Maybe I can relax and stop being so desperately needy. Just write.

Posts aren’t that hard to do. So short, so transient. Anne Lamott says to write what you can see through a one inch picture frame, and that’s about right for a blog. It doesn’t have to be difficult.

Know that it is good to work. Work with love and think of liking it when you do it. It is easy and interesting. It is a privilege. There is nothing hard about it but your anxious vanity and fear of failure.

–Brenda Ueland

I’ll be turning 42 soon. I expect this to be a big year. Forty-two is an important number, as anyone who’s read The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy knows.

This will be the year when I find answers, small and large. Perhaps the ultimate answer, to “the great Question of Life, the Universe and everything.”

Except… I forget the answer is simple. It’s the question we don’t know.

We might ask “What do people want?” or “What do people need?” But maybe these are frivolous questions in the face of an unimaginably vast universe which cares nothing about our tiny lives.

(DON’T PANIC!!!)

Aging continues to be a smooth process of recalibrating my ideas about it. Forty-two doesn’t seem old, now. As long as I’m in my early forties, I have time to figure this thing out. In a few years, I imagine I’ll feel good as long as I’m on the short side of 50. Then I expect 60 will seem far away, and that’s clearly when you actually start getting old.

Old is always a receding number, yet somewhere along the way my eyesight will finally start to fail, and the aches will persist longer, and then…

Wait.

This wasn’t supposed to be a post about getting old. I don’t look forward to a weaker, less able body, but I’m okay with the process so far. I look forward to many more good years. I wonder how I’ll accept or deny the death sentence at the end, if given the time to serve a long term. It still seems so far away, and it’s easy to forget the string could be cut at any time.

And I yearn as desperately as ever for answers, even though I know there aren’t any. No simple ones, anyway. Just wisdom that may only come with age. And in death, the answers? Or at least in death the questions might finally go away.

I settled into a habit this summer of sitting out in the backyard with a beer and a book, under the shade of a maple tree, and it was good. A wonderful, simple pleasure. Basking in the heat. Maybe even living in the moment, once or twice, for a moment.

And then fall comes along, and though I regret the passing of warm weather and shorts and bare feet, and I’m not rapturously embracing the freezing weather to come, I like this season as well. The leaves change color and fall, revealing the stark branchiness of the trees, their bones prepared for death and rebirth. Brisk and windy days. I’ve even lost some of my resistance to raking, a thing I once loathed, but now I don’t mind so much. I’ve grown used to it with the slow growth of our trees.

I enjoy the rituals of fall, like raking and putting hoses and chairs away. Maybe not so much the chores as having done them, and being prepared for winter. And, after all the walking in the heat and too-crowded streets, this is a great time for walking the dogs.

Winter arrives, and with it, thankfully, no more lawn mowing. There is snow shoveling, but I mostly enjoy that. Most welcome is a reason to stay in the house without thought of outdoor pleasures and yard work foregone. Even extreme cold doesn’t bother me much, as long as our creaky electrical grid holds up, and natural gas flows to our home to warm us. The thing I like the least about winter is driving in the snow and ice, but I’m fortunate in that I can largely avoid it.

Winter is too long, making spring a revelation. Life beginning again. Grass greening up and trees sprouting leaves and flowers popping out of the ground. All that stuff. Warmer temperatures, where a 40 degree day promises that summer is coming.

And now we’re back to summer, and you truly appreciate the salvation and rebirth after the cold, snowy winter. But as much as you may wish for a permanent summer, you’d miss the changing seasons.

Continuing from part one, and starting with those bears on their way to Guyana…

Traveling with the bears wasn’t easy. They pretty much lived on cold fish. (I missed the flamingos and their greasy fast food.)

Our political differences generated considerable friction, but much worse was their taste in music. They preferred it as raw as the fish.

Why were they migrating to Guyana?

I never learned the answer. The truth is, I didn’t stay with them for long since they turned away from the river after only a couple of days.

It was then I noticed the waterway was filled with dollar bills folded into origami ships. I gathered up as many as I could before getting clubbed across the back of the head.

When I awoke, I was naked, and all the money was gone.

A warmer, greener time.

A while back, I found on a discount rack a nicely bound edition of The Ultimate Hitchhiker’s Guide, which is a collection of all five Hitchhiker novels and a short story. I’d previously only read the first four installments, and I’ve still only read those four. The book has been sitting on a shelf, neglected and beautiful.

More recently, someone mysteriously known as § directed my attention to a delightful passage from the series, causing me to pull the book down and seriously consider reading it.

And then I came across The Salmon of Doubt, a collection of Adams’ writings that includes previously published essays and chapters from the book he was working on when he died. It started as a Dirk Gently novel, but he was thinking it might turn into a sixth Hitchhiker’s book.

You can find a lot of the articles on his still maintained website or at h2g2, but I like having them collected in Salmon, for the title if no other reason. I’m loving the discovery of essays like the one quoted below, and wonder how I’ve been so negligent in my reading.

I was once in San Francisco, and I parked in the only available space, which happened to be on the other side of the street. The law descended on me.

Was I aware of how dangerous the manoeuvre I’d just made was? I looked at the law a bit blankly. What had I done wrong?

I had, said the law, parked against the flow of traffic.

Puzzled, I looked up and down the street. What traffic, I asked? The traffic that would be there, said the law, if there was any traffic.

This was a bit metaphysical, even for me, so I explained, a bit lamely, that in England we just park wherever we can find a parking space available, and weren’t that fussy about which side of the street it was on. He looked at me aghast, as if I was lucky to have got out of a country of such wild and crazy car parkers alive, and promptly gave me a ticket. Clearly he would rather have deported me before my subversive ideas brought chaos and anarchy to streets which normally had to cope with nothing more alarming than a few simple assault rifles. Which, as we know, in the States are perfectly legal, and without which they would be overrun by herds of deer, overbearing government officers and lawless British tea importers.

–Douglas Adams, “International Driving Laws”

I had a dream flash of inspiration yesterday morning as I woke. Not fully fleshed out — it was just a glimpse — but it seemed so right and I knew I had to expand on it.

How about a car wash that is also a submarine wash?

The floor would have panels that slide over to allow a submarine to rise, and then it could go through the same washing machinery as the cars! A car wash owner could really leverage their existing investment to expand their customer base!

I presented the idea to Kathy so she could revel at my brilliance while helping me hash out the concept. She asked, “Why would a submarine need to be washed?” This was unhelpful. And it shows why you should initially keep your inspirations to yourself. It destroys creative and dramatic tension when you share things too soon.

Still, I’m putting it out here for anyone who wants to take it and swim with it. I’m not one to start this kind of business, but please feel free to use my idea.

No charge.

There’s the old joke:

“It’s not paranoia if they really are out to get you.”

And maybe “they” are. But maybe “they” are really working on your behalf, for your own good.

Firstly, the more pessimistic view: let’s consider why they’re out to get you. It’s most likely for experimental reasons. Purely as speculation, I’ll consider examples from my own life, but this is all stuff I made up just now to illustrate things for the crazy people. (It’s not like I’d ever seriously entertain these thoughts. I’m not crazy. I’m fine. I’m perfectly normal.)

My current job is in I/T and is fairly abstract, working in “application integration,” sending messages between applications and companies. For something that’s all about connections, you can feel disconnected in the middle. You’re dealing mostly with other I/T teams, and embedded deep in the machine.

When something breaks, you might get an email with a red exclamation mark, proclaiming that “trucks are waiting!” at some plant, but you never see the trucks. You never really see the business. You’re just sitting in front of a computer in a cube in a plain office building. It’s obviously all a sham. There are people in white lab coats somewhere, maybe behind that opaque glass on the wall, and they’re manipulating things and observing your reactions.

There can be no other explanation.

I imagine the experiment is complex and takes a lot of effort to set up and maintain, but then it’s rather simple to set up the conditions for a quiet day or a panicky one. See how you react to stress and unreasonable demands. It’s hard to say how many people are “in on it.” How many people around you are participating as experimenter or experimentee. You have to look at everyone with suspicion.

It’s easy to see the ruse in other contexts also. I worked as a bowling mechanic for many years, and it’s the same thing, really. Same opaque glass, similar experimental parameters with a machine that can break down, mostly under control of the behavioral scientists. Same questions about the extent of the experiment. The league bowlers are certainly part of it. Regulars coming in at regular times. There’s less certainty for open bowlers and kid’s bowling parties. These can be chaotic, and I imagine that kind of experiment is less rigorous.

Look at your own life, and how victimized you may feel. If things aren’t going your way, you might be the subject of a grand experiment. Please don’t freak out. You should be honored that science is interested in you. Bad things have to happen, or the experiment wouldn’t be very useful. You’re playing an important role.

More optimistically, if things are going well for you, it may be less an experiment, and more of a conspiracy to make you happy, or at least to take care of you. Or perhaps it’s still an experiment, but lucky for you, you’re in the “control group.” Or, for better or for worse, you’re in a “Truman Show” situation.

We’ll consider some of these alternative and not at all paranoid views another time.

This is a guest post by Mr. Turtle. He loves music, and he does that thing people do where they’ll quote song lyrics. Some other people find this annoying, I realize. For myself, I may or may not enjoy seeing this kind of “thing,” depending on quality and quantity considerations.

Mr. Turtle has impeccable good taste and a keen sense for appropriately shareable snippets. I’ll turn it over now to him…

Hello. I’m Mr. Turtle, but you can call me Ed.

I wish Mr. Carpenter wouldn’t have insisted on that preamble, and I wish he’d let me link to my own blog. I think he’s afraid — rightly so — that you’d all flee this dump for my groovy black sand blog in Hawai’i, where I still reside even though he attempted to steal my soul by taking the picture shown above. (I think the only thing keeping me free is that he shares it with a free culture license.)

Anyway, yes, this post has some song lyrics. But it’s really about poetry, you know? Groovy poetic poetry. Despite my great age and wisdom, I’ve had a hard time “getting” poetry. But when set to music, I can see it. I can feel it.

Yet there is no music here in this post. Is that one of the problems with sharing lyrics?

But, but, just look at this. Breathe it in. Play it in your head:

“Little Wing”

Well, she’s walking through the clouds,
With a circus mind that’s running wild,
Butterflies and Zebras,
And Moonbeams and fairy tales.
That’s all she ever thinks about.
Riding with the wind.

When I’m sad, she comes to me,
With a thousand smiles she gives to me free.
It’s alright, she says it’s alright,
Take anything you want from me,
Anything.
Fly on little wing.

–Jimi Hendrix

Is that poetry?

I sheepishly have to admit I don’t hear Mr. Hendrix’s voice in my head for those words. I first learned the song through Mr. Sting’s cover version. But even if you don’t know one of its many renditions, does it still sing to you?

Good poetry gets under your skin, and I sometimes hear Brother Martin’s voice, suddenly calling to me:

“Cookie, cookie, cookie, cookie cutter, cuttin’ cut, cut, cookie cutter.”

And then I must share a bit of his poetry:

He rolls down like an ancient river,
Deep and dark and makes me quiver.
With the truth in my belly and the thing in my head
That made me once knew what my father once said.
He said, “Keep it simple.”
I’m a human being.
Keep it simple.
Truckers and mourners and soldier men,
Women and pretenders, come on in.

–Martin Sexton

Relatively few of you will have heard the accompanying music and roughly spoken cadence, and ’tis a shame.

Let’s do one more, from a song you’re much more likely to know, plucked out of a magical year in music, 1986:

Don’t want to end up a cartoon
In a cartoon graveyard
Bonedigger Bonedigger
Dogs in the moonlight
Far away my well-lit door
Mr. Beerbelly Beerbelly
Get these mutts away from me
You know I don’t find this stuff amusing anymore

That is one of your finest poets, Mr. Simon, but of course we can call him Al.

He is surrounded by the sound
The sound
Cattle in the marketplace
Scatterlings and orphanages
He looks around, around
He sees angels in the architecture
Spinning in infinity
He says Amen and Hallelujah!

And I say it also, from a more spiritual than religious place:

Amen.

Hallelujah.

(YouTube: Martin Sexton, “Hallelujah”)

And there is your chance to hear Martin’s voice. To experience something mystical…

It feels strange to be writing so much about writing. I’m not qualified to offer writing advice. I can echo Brenda Ueland and Anne Lamott and Natalie Goldberg, trusting they have the necessary amount of wisdom and “authority,” but who am I? What have I done to give my words any weight?

But of course we all have something to say and teach, right? Our struggles are educational, and we can help each other find the way.

An aunt — or a sister? — shared Natalie’s Writing Down the Bones with me. Ms. Lettmann assigned Anne’s Bird by Bird in a college writing class. I thought I saw somewhere where Lamott recommended Brenda’s book, but I couldn’t remember how I came to find her. Then with the recent discovery that Anne is on Twitter, I saw her tweet, “Great old book on writing & creativity is Brenda Ueland, If You Want to Write: A Book about Art, Independence and Spirit. It changed my life.” (Ah ha! It must have been Anne, somewhere.)

I love that Anne was inspired by Brenda. Their styles are quite different. Brenda is unreservedly exuberant. Anne holds back, offering despair and wicked humor along with hope. Brenda will tell you of her troubles and the quagmires of writing, but then she believes in you so fervently that you feel enveloped by unconditional love and acceptance. Anne is more grim and disturbed, but is so hilariously funny about it that you laugh and feel better.

I see now this is becoming a post about these women, the teachers that I love so much. I haven’t spoken of Natalie yet today. Writing Down the Bones came before the other books. She started me on a lifelong journal writing habit. Natalie is a spirit guide, helping me find another plane outside of what we see in the everyday world. Over the years and re-readings, I recognize more and more of her wisdom from personal experience, and she in turn offers wisdom from others:

Chogyam Trungpa, Rinpoche, a Tibetan Buddhist master, said, “We must continue to open in the face of tremendous opposition. No one is encouraging us to open and still we must peel away the layers of the heart.” It is the same with this way of practice writing: “We must continue to open and trust in our own voice and process. Ultimately, if the process is good, the end will be good. You will get good writing.

And then we come back to me. Who am I? I’m probably overly concerned with illusory authority. I’ll trust too quickly the word of the “published” writer. That is, the traditionally published writer, approved by the establishment. I’m unfairly suspicious of myself and all the other grubby self-publishers. Damn the internet and its egalitarian ways!

In the new world order, I respect more the words of a writer with a tribe. With numbers. Twenty thousand subscribers. Ten thousand Twitter followers. Some thousands of “likes” on Facebook. These are just numbers, and in some cases a complete fraud, but they confer the proper amount of desperately needed authority.

I can’t take seriously a guy like me, with only a handful of readers, even if they are fiercely loyal and dedicated and breathtakingly good-looking and outrageously smart and funny. It’s not that I think these writers — or myself — have nothing worthwhile to say, but– no, that is exactly what I think, in my worst moments. We want to go with the winners. If people are already listening, the speaker automatically seems worth listening to. If the restaurant is empty, the food must not be good, and there are so many other eateries on this strip to choose from…

And so it goes.

But lately as I stick with my program of writing and get my thoughts down, they seem to me not overly putrid, so I put them out here. Maybe it is helpful or interesting to share these things, and maybe that’s how you grow, and how you can help others find their path as well, to see another way of working.

And I continue to catch glimpses of the truth, that the important part is “just” the writing. Natalie, Anne, and Brenda have already tried to show me this, so many times and in so many ways, but some things you have to learn for yourself, and you can only learn this lesson by doing it.

When I wrote about that stairway at my work, a reader was surprised I didn’t mention another pitfall of the big climb. This is when you ascend six floors, and your heart rate goes way up and you’re breathing like some kind of pervert, as you do, and now upon exiting the stairwell, you decide you have to pee.

So you stop in the men’s room and belly up to the urinal. Maybe someone is already nearby, or maybe they pull up after you. Then you realize the situation you’re in with the heavy breathing, and it suddenly seems very quiet in there other than the sound of your labored gasps of breath.

Bathrooms and urinals present many problems, of course. Dave Barry spoke to my soul when he wrote about “The Public-Rest Room Problem” in his Complete Guide to Guys.

This is a problem that guys face when they go into a public rest room. When women go into a rest room, they have the privacy of stall, but guys have to do it while standing pretty much out in the open, sometimes with many other guys standing around.

This can be tricky, because peeing is very much associated, in guys’ minds, with masculinity…

My point is that peeing has significance for guys that goes way beyond the mere elimination of bodily fluids. It is an important territorial statement. This is why, every time a guy enters a public rest room, he must confront a critical guy problem; namely: Which urinal should he use? His goal is to avoid, at all costs, peeing right next to another guy, because they would be infringing on each other’s territories.

So in the ideal guy rest room, the urinals would be located a minimum of fifty feet apart. Unfortunately, in the real world, they’re right next to each other, which means the guy often must make split-second strategic urinal decisions. To illustrate this process, let’s imagine a public rest room in an airport. [...]

And he goes on in thorough analytical detail.

I’ve been greatly scandalized when people break these simple rules. But it happens, and it’s an occupational hazard. I’ve come to accept it.

I was even more scandalized when someone I followed for a time on Twitter seemed to have the opposite problem. He was offended when people chose urinals farther away. This still troubles me.

The first time I saw him comment about it, I was disturbed, but I let it pass. Note that in my own Twitter usage, I typically don’t discuss bathroom goings-on. I save this kind of talk for blog posts where it belongs. No, wait. I’m afraid I can’t make any promises. Twitter is exactly the right place to discuss breakfast food choices and bowel movements. Anyway, I later saw another tweet from this guy, again complaining about someone not choosing a neighboring urinal.

I had no way of reconciling this with my world model, and to this day it’s an unresolved issue in my mental processing. It’s one of the reasons I eventually had to unfollow the guy.

Do you know?

What do we all want so bad? Is it all pre-programmed? Are we captives of evolution? Our DNA the source code of some real or imagined creator?

What do you want?

I tell myself I’m materially satisfied, but I want more. I want security. I want safety. I want enlightenment and wisdom and peace of mind. Truth and beauty and love. And more and more and more.

I want connections and I want solitude. I want “someone to talk to, and someone to sweep the floors.”

Do people really want to kill other people? We do a lot of that. So many people living and dying, and we want it to make sense when maybe it doesn’t, or it makes all the sense that it needs to if we could only see and understand. Maybe some people have understood. Plato or the stoics or Epicurus or Lao Tzu or Jesus or Buddha or Marcus Aurelius or Ralph Waldo Emerson or that guy Steve at the bar last night. Maybe it’s that voice in my head that I can’t hear or won’t listen to. (It could be the cicadas.)

I don’t know if I fully understand “Plato’s Cave,” but I felt a chill when I first encountered the allegory — that depiction of reality — and wanted to see more than the shadowy figures. But there are always the chains of our everyday lives and our immediate fears and desires. We are trapped. We see only the shadows on the cave walls.

Maybe it’s as simple as interrupting the program and rewriting the instructions to our suiting, much like when my dad showed me how to modify Oregon Trail running on the old Commodore PET computer at Lincoln Elementary School. Perhaps if I could, I would be just as juvenile as that kid in the school library, adding curse words to it and laughing with his friends. And maybe it’s all as unreal as that game, the changes just as temporary, and the laughing the only thing we really want.

But I can if I want to.

I hear from people I know “in real life” that some of the “writing to write” posts can be kind of painful to read, to hear about the struggle in so much detail. And I can understand that, and I’m sorry, but it’s therapeutic for me to work through it.

Would you be happy to hear I’ve withheld much more than I’ve posted?

I still feel good about these posts as practice, not only in writing but in sharing the words. In most cases the final post goes out weeks after the first draft, so that I’ve had time to get acquainted with the awkwardness, and stand apart from it enough that I don’t feel like I’m airing my rawest need.

It’s just words.

Words that mean something to me, and with which I’m trying to share something, but they’re just words. They won’t cut me. (Which means I’m still hiding out, keeping it down, playing it safe.)

And I’m about more than pain and suffering. I want to be funny, too. I want you to smile, to feel better.

I’ll keep writing and trying to figure it out.

Only one thousand words for you today.

The river doesn’t take many days off. It works harder some days and takes it easy others, and sometimes quits altogether. But it’s mostly steady.

I thought I’d go down to the river, but as I neared its gentle bank I started floating, drifting with the wind.

Mr. Bojangles danced below and I wooted, but he said I was being lazy, only imagining him while Neil sang him. He waved his hand and I tumbled end over end to the other side of the river and got caught in a tree.

I sat in the tree for a bit, listening to the birds, and had a chat with a squirrel. The squirrel’s name was Atkins and he asked me if I had been finding any good nuts lately. I said no. He suggested a nearby oak grove and beckoned me to come along. He waited impatiently as I slowly climbed down. Then to the grove, and he was right: So many good nuts. But I just laid on the grass, watching Atkins and another squirrel named Fletcher as they gathered acorns and occasionally shook one to check for suitability of purpose.

Presently I grew restless and made a small raft of fallen branches and discarded Pepsi bottles, returned to the river, and pushed off.

Soon I arrived at a riverside community of flamingos, who invited me over for lunch. They had sent for McDonald’s and said there would be plenty for me. Did I mind having McDonald’s, they asked, and I said no, that would be fine.

An otter asked if he could take my raft and I nodded. Please, be my guest.

I enjoyed the McDonald’s, but the flamingos and I agreed we felt some regret after. I stayed with them for many days, living on a variety of fast foods, until I joined a group of migrating bears on their way to Guyana.

I stayed with the bears for as long as they followed the river.

continued in part two…

I’d like to be less outraged by things. It’s not that I don’t want to care, but I’d like some measure of enlightenment.

To be more accepting.

Not approving, not saying it’s okay that there’s so much suffering and injustice, but accepting that it’s there. It’s part of life. Start with that.

Then do you move on, and ask what can you do about it? How can you make a difference?

Not having suffered a lot of injustice — other than that time you were refused two cookies — and accepting things will only change slowly over a long time, maybe you don’t really want to make a difference. It’s futile.

You just want to live.

For what?

Then you might look at your fingernails and remember you need to trim them. And now it bothers you. It’s all you can think about, this unresolved tension: nails that need trimming, yet are not trimmed.

Thinking about it selfishly may help. I’ve read that people are happier when they help others. I’d like to be happier. I support Habitat for Humanity with money, but maybe I need to get out there more and pound nails in walls. I love my home, and am so grateful to have a good home. It’s such a basic need, and helping people to have the same feels worthwhile to me.

Maybe pick one or two causes to focus on?

Definitely I should be less outraged by the quiet, tepid couple in front of me in line at Chipotle, when they persistently fail to move aggressively into the gaps ahead of them. That’s not worth hating over.

But look at that guy. What a square, with his short hair, standard issue Levi’s, and New Balance shoes…

He looks just like me.

Wow. Do I look that uptight? (Except that I do have this facial hair now. I can imagine I’m a little more rounded on the corners, maybe with an air of danger, a jagged side to my square.)

Less obvious is how you accept with equanimity things like this:

Our plutocracy now lives like the British in colonial India: in the place and ruling it, but not of it. If one can afford private security, public safety is of no concern; if one owns a Gulfstream jet, crumbling bridges cause less apprehension–and viable public transportation doesn’t even show up on the radar screen. With private doctors on call and a chartered plane to get to the Mayo Clinic, why worry about Medicare?

[...]

To some degree the rich have always secluded themselves from the gaze of the common herd; their habit for centuries has been to send their offspring to private schools. But now this habit is exacerbated by the plutocracy’s palpable animosity towards public education and public educators, as Michael Bloomberg has demonstrated. To the extent public education “reform” is popular among billionaires and their tax-exempt foundations, one suspects it is as a lever to divert the more than $500 billion dollars in annual federal, state, and local education funding into private hands–meaning themselves and their friends. What Halliburton did for U.S. Army logistics, school privatizers will do for public education. A century ago, at least we got some attractive public libraries out of Andrew Carnegie. Noblesse oblige like Carnegie’s is presently lacking among our seceding plutocracy.

–Mike Lofgren, “Revolt of the Rich“

Setting aside the question of what we can do — because we can only do so much, and there is so much outside of our control — how can we be less outraged and more accepting? We might read Marcus Aurelius, at the risk of becoming overly fatalistic, and we might read Richard Bach:

The mark of your ignorance is the depth of your belief in injustice and tragedy. What the caterpillar calls the end of the world, the master calls a butterfly.

Keeping in mind that the “book” ends with this note:

Everything in this book may be wrong.

Here’s Tugger, peering through the veil over this day. What does he see? What strange world lies ahead of us?

The results of the process are beneath him, of course. He’s a cat. He would eat my paper ballot if he could.

He doesn’t care that “Voter ID” is actually a voter suppression effort. I showed him the definition of a demagogue:

1 : a leader who makes use of popular prejudices and false claims and promises in order to gain power

And explained that we’re seeing demagoguery at work. He said, “Whatever.”

I asked him about the “anti-gay marriage” amendment. Didn’t he think it was a rather mean-spirited attempt to discriminate, and a shallow ploy to get out the vote for “conservative” candidates?

He said, “You keep me trapped in this house and refuse to worship me properly. The only things preventing me from killing you are that you feed me, and you have me on these anti-depressants which have dulled my predatory rage.”

See how it is? You just can’t reason with cats.

I’ve had this metaphor in mind about rivers that I thought I might keep to myself. At least for a while. Maybe a long time.

Why?

Perhaps I thought it grandiose, or silly, or that it would have some special power if I didn’t share it.

Well, phffft.

I love rivers.

Water flowing endlessly, gentle and unbroken, and then rushing over cascades and plunging down falls. The river is patient and powerful, cutting deep gorges through stone. Looking at the walls of rock over a river, you can feel time.

Earlier this year I imagined I had that epiphany I’m always looking for. I was sitting on a rock at the top of secluded cascades on the Manitou River, watching the water run by. I thought about its persistence. I thought…

My words must be like a river. I must write every day, pouring out new words to renew the stream. Many words will go by unseen and unremarked, but they are a necessary part of the river. All I can do is keep it flowing. In time, this river of words may find its true course and start carving out a channel, but only in time.

The spirit, I think, is a stream, a fountain, and must be continually poured out, for only if it is poured out will more and clearer streams come.

–Brenda Ueland

It may be that only a few people find and enjoy this river. I have to be okay with that. Maybe I should prefer it. Gooseberry Falls is crowded with tourists. I infinitely prefer the private time I spent at Manitou.

Still, I crave attention as much as anyone who sends their words downstream. I know I should write my own thing and “make my own kind of music,” and that’s what I try to do, to some personal satisfaction, but little acclaim. I consider what sort of posts might prompt more sharing, that people will link to, even while knowing it’s largely out of my control. I’d go a little crazy pursuing that. My efforts would reflect the desperation and hysteria. Day to day, you can’t get that viral big bang every time. Maybe not ever.

People will have to come for the steady flow of the river. There may be an occasional waterfall or flood that draws more attention, but those only come from the overall activity of the river. We’re drawn to the disruptions, the water pounding on the rocks, but we also like to hike along the calm stretches. We spend time at the waterfall and take our pictures, but then we keep going. The river is always changing.

I have to let go of the published posts. They’re on their way, flowing out to sea. If few people see them, what of it? The river will keep flowing, cutting its channel, with green things growing on the banks, and in time more people may find it. For those that have already lingered on the shore: Thank you.

I’ll learn to rejoice in the continuing flow. Discovering new turns in the river. Instead of worrying that I won’t have much to say, that I can’t keep it up year after year, I’ll remember those river gorges on the North Shore of Lake Superior. It is only with time and patience that I can hope to produce something lasting and memorable. I’d like my river to offer cascade after cascade, with regular hundred foot drops, but that’s not how rivers work. There will be long, calm stretches, as there should be.

I had in mind an old-fashioned general store, at first seeing a layer of dust over everything, but no, the proprietor keeps things tidy and clean. It feels wholesome and solid in here. There’s a golden light in the air, and through the windows, the greens of summer. Leafy trees and children playing and a dog running and all that.

The shelves are full of hearty sundry, lots of wood and metal and no finger-cutting plastic packages. I want a postcard of this moment.

I might be in the world of “The Great Brain” books, although as a child reading of Tom and J.D.’s adventures, I imagined things to be dustier out in Adenville, Utah. But now that I’m here again — if that’s where this is, and I think it must be — I see it’s not that way.

It’s great to be back. I so loved being here as a child. I remember the comfort of reading one of the books on a dark winter evening in my childhood home, sitting on a rocking chair in the living room so warm and secure and far away in another place and time.

I want to go forward, as well, and read later chapters of our story. I want to live a hundred years from now. A thousand. What will the books say of the past, of the time we live in now? (Or will it all be multimedia? A term which will surely become as antiquated as “five and dime.”)

I don’t yearn for an earlier, “better” time. I yearn for all times, for all the story that is human history, what’s done and what’s to come. As much as I love technology and numbers, I think it’s the story of people that fascinates me most, even while my introversion has me so often avoiding them.

How do people get along? How do they live, laugh, and love?

I don’t have a post ready for today, so I’m sharing this picture from a trip to Boston a few years ago, and will ramble for a bit…

I’ll also share this quote I randomly came across this morning:

To begin writing from our pain eventually engenders compassion for our small and groping lives. Out of this broken state there comes a tenderness for the cement below our feet, the dried grass cracking in a terrible wind. We can touch the things around us we once thought ugly and see their special detail, the peeling paint and gray of shadows as they are–simply what they are: not bad, just part of the life around us–and love this life because it is ours and in the moment there is nothing better.

–Natalie Goldberg, Writing Down the Bones

I love that.

With my overindulgence in Twitter lately, I’ve been consuming too much snark and cleverness. It wears me down, all the attention-seeking by myself and others. There are true connections, and a lot of entertainment and wisdom, but such a cacophony. I get lost in the din. And the quiet. It’s a crowded and lonely place.

And that’s all. I’ll try spending more time on blog post writing than Twitter chirping today.

I had a problem yesterday. I didn’t allow myself to write a “shitty first draft.” (This is one of Sister Lamott’s core teachings.)

I was taken with an idea, imagining it published at McSweeney’s as an “Open Letter to People or Entities Unlikely to Respond,” and suddenly I had created pressure to write a certain way, and that it would be really great, and I froze. I dilly-dallied more than usual and Resistance took the opportunity to smack me in the face.

Please note that I aim for “really great” on all my blog posts, for your sake, but I’m more forgiving an editor than those guys at McSweeney’s. (I allow myself to be simply good, or just tolerable, or plain awful.) I got away from the program that’s been working for me and had a less than self-actualized writing day.

I had a glimpse of what Stephen King meant about a story being a found thing. A fossil you unearth from the ground, and carefully brush away the dirt and chip at the stone. I wasn’t digging up a fossil the way I have on some of my “better” posts. It felt more like scooping up handfuls of sand and haphazardly imagining a bone before it all ran through my fingers.

Another problem: I spent way too much time on Twitter, and received less approval and validation than expected. I got some love there, although all those stars and retweets are more like coins dropping in a tin cup. A lot of standing around and begging and appearing needy, just for some spare change. But the alms are appreciated, and it’s fun — or at least numbing — and it’s better than a sugar IV drip. It works for an introvert like me. I can close the window when I’ve had enough, and come back 3-5 minutes later for more.

Despite my struggles, I feel good. I’m doing the writing thing. I’ll keep doing it. (I’m doing it right now!) I’m getting constructive comments. One of my most dedicated readers, who I hadn’t heard from in a while, responded yesterday to my recent posts. For “Hiding,” she wrote, “I feel like you need to talk to a professional.” For the next day’s effort, “Demon Gin,” she wrote, “…a REALLY good professional…”

I replied (more or less), “Oh, COME ON. You pass on all the well-adjusted happy stuff to hit me on these posts?” I continued, boasting and justifying, “I’m getting some nice feedback from readers to the tune of: would I please get out of their heads. See, I’m appealing to the mentally ill segment of the population, which is why you enjoy this stuff.”

Let me quickly say that if you’re reading my posts and/or have made comments that indicate some level of identification with my deranged thoughts, I don’t necessarily think you’re mentally ill. I was just trying to make a point with this friend, who is a disturbed individual. For those of you that might like reading my ramblings but are perfectly well-adjusted: I hope you’re not offended. I’m sure there’s plenty of material here for sane people, and I don’t mean to imply that you’re not whole and well. I’m sure that you’re fine.

Finally, re: the title of this post. Does it seem misleading? It was my killer title for McSweeney’s, but why give it to them for free when I can sell it here? It felt vaguely appropriate anyway, and you’ll likely get the spirit of the letter in a post coming out in a week or three, except of course it will be an entirely different animal than what I thought I was digging up.

They say having one or two drinks a day is good for you, don’t they? A couple of glasses of wine, or beer? It’s healthy, it tastes good, and it feels good. Loosens you up a bit, perhaps to be more creative as you let go of your inhibitions. Be bold. Be free.

But it’s a trap! Run, rabbit, run!

It might help, but more likely it will become a crutch, or hide the truth from you, like smoking pot or dropping acid and thinking you’re having all these deep thoughts, but they only make sense to other stoners. It will dim your light.

You’ll polish off a bottle of wine over dinner one night and then wake up all fuzzy in the brain, and still there is the blank page, and the few prospects you have for a post that day seem, “meh,” and now you’re writing about your drinking, and that certainly wouldn’t make your Grandma Carpenter proud.

But we do like reading about people’s weaknesses. I’ll admit I enjoy it when people share their pain. Not that I’m delighted with their suffering, but I want to learn about their humanity. I want more than the safe stuff, more than is comfortable to share. I want the stuff that makes our families wince.

Up to a point, anyway, and maybe past that point if it’s really gripping and well-done. But in general I don’t want all wretchedness, all the time. I want to read about fender benders and plunges into the ditch, but it can wear you out if the writer is always in the gutter.

Anne Lamott wrote:

I like for them to have hope — if a friend or a narrator reveals himself or herself to be hopeless early on, I lose interest. It depresses me. It makes me overeat. I don’t mind if a person has no hope if he or she is sufficiently funny about the whole thing, but then, this being able to be funny definitely speaks of a kind of hope, of buoyancy. Novels should have hope [...] In general though, there’s no point in writing hopeless novels. We all know we’re going to die; what’s important is the kind of men and women we are in the face of this.

Yes! I can only tolerate a certain amount of reality. I want to pretend that everything will be okay.

I don’t know if — or how — I should give full voice to the crazy in me. We’re all crazy, and I love it when someone can let it out in entertaining and poignant ways, like Anne, or Jenny Lawson. But it seems there are many ways to express it that would only lead people to think, or say, “Wow, this guy is fucking crazy.”

Was I writing about alcohol, or the crazy? Does alcohol cause the crazy, or does the crazy just like alcohol? I’m reminded of the time I smoked a bunch of dope and drank excessively at a high school party and then got hauled off in a cop car to detox. (Except that, technically, I don’t “remember” much of it.) And then, …

Oh, dear, would you look at that? We’re out of space and time for today.

I’m just hanging out on the surface.

Maybe I’m that shallow, and have no depth to plumb. I’m afraid to dig, fearful of what I might unearth, ashamed to show you what is there.

The songwriter can clothe her words with music. These words here are raw and unadorned. Naked. If my words are ugly, that’s all there is. The words.

Perhaps there’s nothing there. I don’t know anything. I’m running with the great herd of American consumers. Wanting there to be meaning, but maybe there isn’t. Only playing my role, working and consuming and reproducing, not understanding the dissatisfaction, wanting more, unable to buy it, and left with…

Thinking I have to say something. I mumble it here. I’m another voice among millions. Although I know I’m unique and special. I was told so.

I don’t know if any of this matters. Do I “matter?” I matter to me, and my family, and this is good. But we’d all like to matter more, wouldn’t we?

I don’t know anything. Anything at all.

I’m only writing this out of duty. The 300 words, every day. An unplanned and unstable bridge across the void. I like to get the words done early, so I can pretend I’m building something and will one day find the other side.

This comes from a sad, empty place. A hopeful and despondent place. I’m not even sure if I’m writing this to you. It feels bleak and miserable and safe and hackneyed, and pitiable. (But I’m not looking for pity or consolation.)

I’m angry. Not at you. At myself.

For hiding. For not letting go. For not taking off, for not flying, for not doing it.

“This is it. Fight like hell.” –Hugh MacLeod