One of my literary heros, Kurt Vonnegut, has shuffled off this mortal coil, as they say.

Cory says it better than I can.

Vonnegut’s short story collection, Welcome to the Monkey House, was one of those books that opened my world. My first significant sci-fi, my first read by someone who’d be considered a major, modern literary figure, my first encounter with short stories. Pieces like Harrison Bergeron, Monkey House, and Tom Edison’s Shaggy Dog made huge impressions on my young mind; possibly the still influence my thinking to this day (certainly I still refer to Bergeron often.)

One more hero gone off into the sunset. Hey, Kurt? Say hey to Hunter for me, k?

I ran across a bit of dialog in a book I was reading last night – a CJ Cherryh novel, one of Fantasy/Sci-fi’s perennial greats, and in my opinion, one of the greatest writers working today (even if her recent books have been someone off her usual mark). She’s a brilliant, insightful, lyrical writer, someone who seems to understand human beings on a more deep and fundamental level that most, and someone who can take that understanding and build characters with the full, conflicted, confused richness that comes with being human.

Strangely, some of her best observations on the human heart and mind come from the point of view of non-human intelligence; as if humanity’s real nature is best seen from outside.

This quote then is from such a character, Tristan, from Cherryh’s Fortress series.

“This too: love you must have, love that come to you from outside, un-bought and unasked for. Do you understand? You cannot hold it. You cannot compel it. But you must keep it when it comes.”

“How do I keep it, then?”

“Deserve it”.

This captures something that is central to the way I try to live and what I expect in others. Love isn’t a thing to be expected, assumed, compelled, or demanded. Love is something that is earned; one gains it by being deserving of it. One keeps it my striving to remain deserving.

I tried to express this the other day, and failed, and then found this quote; That, I said to myself, is exactly what I was striving for.

Christ, I wish I could marshall my thoughts enough to post something coherent. I just keep wanting to post songs that have the feel of the moment. I’ve started to post Richard Thompson songs, Be Bop Deluxe songs, Miles Davis songs, Graham Parker songs, and several more I can’t quite recall.

What I really want though is to post my own words, and they’re just not… coming… together…

It’s just been a bitch of a time since the new year; so many little or not so little things have gone wrong or needed attention or consumed my time and energy. I have a list of shit that needs doing that just gets loner and longer, and the things I want, like writing, like taking off from work here and there to appreciate the beautiful things, like just catching my breath, are off the fucking table completely right now. I’m having to steal minutes for myself, not hours.

Work is a fucking pressure cooker. we’re working on some new product or other (and as usual, no, I don’t know what it is, and if I knew, I couldn’t say, and if I told you, I’d just have to kill you), and it’s one of those projects where we need eighteen months to do it, so are asked to do it in three. My team, being the support-and-infrastructure people, have to deliver everything from new internal web sites and wikis to CAD tools and licenses to new machines, to new development methodolgies, and we have to do it yesterday. We’re all spinning and the work, the real design and engineering work, hasn’t even started yet.

I feel like I ain’t had a day off in three months, and I’m not seeing the end of this when I look forward. My team went into this short handed by three people and have effectively had our workload doubled.

I am, how you say, a bit stressed.

But what bothers me is that I can’t tap into the creative center to even express it. I’m just bitching here, and I don’t want to bitch. Bitching-blogs are a royal bore (almost as bad as how-great-is-my-sex-life blogs). In the past I’ve been able to get angry and I can’t even work that up for any prolonged rant. I wind up with low-grade irritated rather than that big seething angry that I can channel into sex and violence. THAT makes me feel better, this, I just wind up fed up with myself.

Feh.

Seems I’ve pretty much given up blogging.

I could claim it’s for lent, but I’ve given religion up for lent.

In fact though, it has more to do with time than with anything else. Work has become a fuckin’ whore, a new project starting up, a new team in lower-middle-upper-management and a re-org, bringing with it a sea-change in priorities that switches direction as often as a witched-up wind.

We’re short of hands and long on tasks, and the hoped-for new staffing is still a dream, not even a hope.

I’ve tried to work up the energy to be creative, or even communicative; it’s not coming, aside from a burst of inspiration in a blog comment or other. In truth only minor moments of joy are getting me through the day without my head exploding.

Little things, like the ipod jack that came stock in my truck, finally letting me choose my own music and getting me playing several bands I hadn’t listened to in a while.

Little things like the ring I’m due to get any day from my pal Carlos at Sinners Inc.

Little things, like watching firefly with my daughter; she’s old enough to get the sci fi now, and old enough to handle the more adult moments, without understanding jokes like I’ll be in my bunk. Plus, no one else appreciated the fact that I own the exact same bowie knife Jayne carries (including a replica of the sheath) quite as much as Olivia did.

Little things like looking out my east-facing window and seeing winter turning into spring, and knowing that way lies better things and better times.

Little things that make the day better. Shiny, as they say on firefly. Shiny little things.

Between work and real life issues, I’m completely failed as a blogger lately. I’d say I’m taking a break from blogging only that’s far more organized than i feel right now. I don’t even have time or bandwidth to think.

My world’s gone into hyperdrive – and I’m not seeing anything to slow that down for a while.

I think I’m only updating because I’m tired of seeing the same post sitting here day after day.

I posted the caricature version of me from that bar-mitzvah-on-the-bay; here’s the real version.

(click for full size)

That’s Alcatraz to my right (your left), and the city of San Francisco on my left (your right). The bridge you see is the SF bay bridge, and if i were looking over my left shoulder I’d be looking at the Golden Gate Bridge.

I got to get t’movin’ baby I ain’t lyin’
My heart is beatin’ rhythm and it’s right on time
So be my guest, you got nothin’ to lose
Won’t ya let me take you on a sea cruise
Oo-ee, oo-ee baby
Oo-ee, oo-ee baby
Oo-ee, oo-ee baby
Won’t ya let me take you on a sea cruise

I had another of those plaguing 3am wake-ups last night; 3am, which I’ve taken to calling the worrying hour for it’s always the hour at which people wake to brood, or dread. It’s the hour when we stare into the back heart of despair and can’t see a way out.

It’s not a singular thing that wakes me up at 3am; the BIG ISSUE I can sleep on; i know it, I understand it, I can cope. No, it’s Bukowski’s Shoelace, it’s the small, sharp implements of life, boring tiny holes into the skull. You can hear them at 3am; the world, and the mind, quiet down, and let in the grinding, scraping sounds of creeping madness.

I lie awake at 3am and stare at an invisible ceiling and make fatigue-addled lists of things I need to be doing; lists in my head that will be gone before morning, sleep or not. I let hopes run away with me, dread both named and un-named all the while dragging me down into the mire.

I dare not hope at 3am; it’s the meat the night’s demons feed on.

I lay in the dark for two hours, chasing elusive sleep, knowing that around me people blissfully slept, or rose for jobs that start at ungodly hours; finally one thought drew me from bed.

Coffee.

I sat in the dark waiting for a sunrise, drinking hot, black coffee and thinking; giving in to thoughts and hopes and dreams but not fears; they’re swept away with the cobwebs of sleep, at least for a moment. Chased by caffeine and sunrise, they retreat into dark, grim holes of night.

I look for a battle to fight. Enemies evaporate like smoke; I’ve nothing to smite, and the prize of my mind’s eye remains just beyond reach.

I hate nights like these.

I was talking to a friend the other day, and she mentioned how many years she’d been working without a break.

I started to do the math for myself.

I started working when I was 18 or 19. Seriously working, full-time working.

The next couple of years I went through a few jobs, fired twice (once my own fault, once not, and then a few temp or short term jobs). Started my own business doing hauling and odd jobs, working as hard as I’ve ever worked in my life for crap pay (but damn, I looked good, tan and fit, hands calloused, covered with bruises and scratches. My hair was long and sun-bleached, I looked like a surfer and I was my own boss).

While the work wasn’t constant, there was no break; when I was outta work I was also completely out of money, no one taking care of me, no one funding me, and constantly struggling to get work.

By the time I was twenty-two or twenty-three, I had full time work (at Seagate). I worked there for three years, and then was laid off, and went to a startup company as quick as I could find work. That also ended in a layof,f after a couple years where I built computer systems, tested them, managed inventory, worked shipping and receiving, wired computer rooms and phone systems, and drove the company truck. After that I went on to my other most physical job, working in a used computer parts warehouse; a filthy, dusty warehouse full of the most amazing junk you’ve ever seen. I ran the warehouse, driving a forklift (god DAMN I was good at that), packing weird, heavy equipment, climbing pallet racks like a monkey to get shit we could not reach with a forklift. I came home every day sweaty, filthy, covered in greasy black dirt. The job sucked, but not because the work was hard; I liked that. No, it sucked because my boss was not just a crook, but a madman in all the wrong ways. But again, it was work that made me strong, and work that connected me, via a random association of friends-of-friends, into some friendships I still have today. And I thanked the boss when he fired me, saying I needed to get myself the fuck out of here.

From there, I went directly on to temp jobs; Apple being one of the places I work for a short time (in what’s now the iPod team headquarters building, though in between then and now it’s been several other companies), and then went to Sun; not a break in between.

Six years at Sun; hard work, and connections made, friends I still have. Some of them even read this blog. And then Cisco, a job I had before I even left Sun. Nine long hard years, where I learned to be an engineer (a complete career re-boot), got a taste of managing people, and burned myself out in a lot of ways, working harder and harder for little or no recognition (but for a good chunk of money thanks to the dotcom era). Cisco was where I learned how big corporations eat people alive.

And then out of Cisco and to Apple; another career reboot, moving from software to hardware; six and a half years now, both some of the best times and the worst times in my adult life (for reasons that have little to do with work, yet which make getting through the day and getting to work even harder than usual).

I add all this up, and I get something like twenty-seven years. That’s how long I’ve been working. Twenty-seven years, and while there are gaps in there, the gaps are times when I was trying desperately to find work. Not times when I had time.

Almost 8000 work days. 16000 commutes. 64000 if we only count eight hours a day; though I average more like ten hours a day in truth.

The numbers freak me out a little bit. This wasn’t quite how I visualized my life; wage slave.

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I was talking to my friend Jeff – my long (very long) time friend, my tattoo brother, my former boss, my current bosses bosses boss (or something like that); and it was one of those bizarre conversations you can only get with a long time friend. It started with Jeff peeking over the divider between urinals while we were taking a leak; he’s theatrically checkin’ out the business; I of course, with the week I’m having, didn’t even notice that the man next to me was looking at my cock.

“You’re extra spaced today“, he said, and I had to agree. And Jeff is the kind of guy who’s seen me as spaced as I get, so he should know.

We started chatting – we don’t see each other as much as we used to at work. We talked about how hard we’re working, how burnt we both are; we talked about the tattoo I’m getting and my choice of who to do it. He asked how old my kids are now, and was aghast at the numbers I gave him. We stood looking at each other, shaved heads no longer tight and shiny, 5 o’clock shadow hair-lines receding now on their own under the shaving that has always been a style choice. Both of us with bright silver-gray threads in our facial hair that were not there a year or two ago.

“We’re fucking old, Jeff” I said to him, and he shook his head.

“This wasn’t how it was supposed to me,” he answered. And I agreed.

“We were supposed to be dead by now,” he said.

“That’s what I’d planned on on.”

He’s right. We didn’t figure, when we were twenty, on someday being tired, over-worked middle-aged guys. We rode our motorcycles and did drugs and didn’t always do safe things, we didn’t worry. We looked for risks to take. We were not afraid. We tattooed ourselves and pierced ourselves and didn’t think about what it’d be like to be old men.

Jeff’s right. We really were not meant to live this long; Jeff and I were our own sort of warriors, and we should have gone into battle of one sort or another, shone bright, flashed, and then gone down. Fight and drink and die.

Somehow we didn’t. And neither of us are sure how that happened. But it’s nice to have a brother there who understands.

I was going to post some fluffy light-hearted thing today about it being the anniversary of three years blogging. Today though I don’t feel like a party.

I feel more like a silent, angry brood. I feel more like banging my head against a wall than like waving the big foam finger.

Why? Fuck if I know. Maybe I just slept wrong. Maybe I’m just grumpy ’cause it’s a holiday yet I’m working. Maybe I’m exhausted with other people’s problems.

Whatever.

This is the kind of day where i tend to take my blog down ’cause I’m generally so out of sorts it just makes me angry. So if this all goes away, you know why.

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EDIT:

I for some reason woke up in a total fuckin’ funk this morning. Dunno what’s up. I somehow managed to turn my day around a bit by just gettin’ outta work a little early for a change. So I’m not feeling anywhere near as sullen and I did this morning.

I would have deleted this entry if there were not already comments on it. But I’m nowhere near as crabby.

Some days you just wake up fuckin’ mad at the world.

You know what I’m sayin’. King Kong on the big ‘ol building, swatting away annoying insect airplanes. Pissed and with all the power in the world to do nothing back to life’s tiny, maddening annoyances.

Bukowski said it better.

I want it to be pissing down rain or better yet, white-out ice storm, thunder and lightening, sturm und drang to match my mood inside. Instead i look out my window and it’s a dull, gray sky and a dull, gray city.

Though sometimes, some small spark comes out of it all and lights up a day like this, something that makes one feel better. I try to smile, and take pleasure in life’s smaller joys, rather that it’s over-whelming small annoyances. Otherwise, i just go looking for ways to hurt myself.