Elsewhere in Dreams

Seems I was born
in the morning yesterday.
Seems I was torn
from the middle of a page.

As if you were like
something I once knew.
A glitch in my mind,
and familiar deja vu.

You are amnesia.
You are the things I
just can’t remember now.

Four to a buck
and a crisis to be had.
The needle is stuck
on the same old wanted ad.

A tendril of smoke:
I recognise this page.
As blank as a stroke,
and as full as middle age.

You are amnesia.
You are the things I
just can’t remember now.

These motions are so familiar.
I swear that I’ve done them all before.
These oceans are so familiar.
I swear that I swan right off this shore.
These emotions are so familiar,
but still, how they shake me to the core.

You are amnesia.
You are the things I
just won’t remember now.

I grow up reading that love is all sorts of different things. I crack open this book and find out it’s about sacrifice, I open that one to discover it’s about doing the Right Thing. An American movie tells me it’s the rush. A French movie chides me on its futility. A song wishes more than anything for yesterday. Yet another hates today. Before I turn the radio off there’s a man singing about being afraid of the future.

I grow up and (let’s be honest) I haven’t the foggiest clue. It seems one day there are eleven sorts of love, and the next that there is only one, and the next that there isn’t any at all. Of course, I write this now as if while experiencing such and such a fact it at all resembled fact. It becomes this in retrospect.

I grow up to find retrospect comes a lot quicker, now. I look back on yesterday like it is a five-year-old yesterday, and wonder if perhaps it really is that old; perhaps there’s more deja vu to the world at twenty-five than at seventeen.

I grow up and wonder what the big deal about growing up is. I want to be a child again. When I am a child, people say I’m full of potential, they remark on how I’ve matched the coloured men to the same-coloured cars, they are amazed by these small natural motions. And because I am not experiencing love or that thing I call love or that thing my lovers call love, the world is a plain stretching out in time and space over distances too vast to measure. And because I am not experiencing love, I am scraping my knees with impunity. I am very careful of my knees now.

I grow up, becoming lonelier by the minute. I am not alone in this sandbox, though I am alone. I am alone in this bed tonight, though I am not alone. I am steeped in a myth of the world as written in books. I am constantly destroying mysteries by thinking them through. I am loved, though I am not a lover (these sandwiches are love, this push out into the wild, this woman telling me to explore the world). I am not loved, though I am a lover (these veal cutlets aren’t love, this push into my apartment, this woman telling me not to lean over the edge).

I grow up because that’s what people do. And I have the life invented for me before my life had begun. I am wonder these days if this mould made me or if I made this mould; is it even possible to know? I am drinking coffee, I am drinking alcohol, I am smoking cigarettes, I am doing all those things I fine distasteful when I am young.

I grow up and realise one morning that I am going to die.

This morning’s post is about coffee. First, Google Calendar reminds me via email that I am having coffee on the first of November with a certain young lady. The calendar is of course wrong, and I’m glad it is. It’s odd what you can do in seven months or so, but it’s hard to talk of it without sounding either pompous or an ass.

I have the privilege this morning of seeing TCG the second time in 10 hours. This in itself is as good a reason as any to wake up. I am glad at the time, though of course as I explain to a friend in no uncertain terms, I know what this is, and I know how to deal with.

Third paragraph: I am sipping coffee. By now, reader, you should be confused. Was that present or past? You see I have mixed my tense. Perhaps I’m doing so for a reason. What is it?

Really. If you want to convince of the virtues of your software or your hardware, let me try it out, give it a spin while you softly outline its virtues somewhere in (distant) background.

Even if you’re brash and self-assured and quite convinced that what you use or what you’ve written is the best thing to happen to computing since the command line interface I’ll listen.

But if you’re an ignorant twat, do the world a favour and shut up. Got that? If you can’t even give me several real selling points for whatever you’re advocating, not only are you making yourself look stupid, but you’re spreading manure over that very thing you’re evangelising.

Mac fanatics are truly guilty of this. Especially neophyte Mac addicts. You know, the ones that decided to drink Job’s Kool-Aid and woke up feeling like they were truly enlightened? You probably know at least one.

The guy, for instance, who told me I should switch over my entire workplace to Mac because - his words, not mine - Macs can now run Windows programs! Oh really? I will try to treat this with grace, but there’s no possible way that it can unless some sort of virtualisation is going on in the background. (Which, as a side note, was exactly the case.)

I understand this is a fundamental misunderstanding of the fact that Apple software and hardware are two different things, but still. Let me spell this out for him. He wants us, a company of 30 or so people, using more than 30 computers to switch to Mac so that I can switch inbetween Windows and OSX in order to - again, his words, not mine - do better email, surfing, and desktop publishing? That’s somewhere in the range of $75,000.00 just to get new hardware and licenses for all those copies of Windows.

And for what benefit? None that I can see. Sure, I like OSX as much as the next guy. I’m that guy in the advert that is all hip, and I get the fact that Mac is cool and Windows is not. But you have to understand that I’m not at work to be hip. I’m at work to do work. If a Macintosh can help me do work better, I’ll consider it. But not until then.

I managed to explain all of this clearly and without raising my voice. Amazing.

Seems I was born in the morning yesterday.
Seems I was torn from the middle of a page.
As if you are like something I once knew.
A glitch in my mind, and familiar deja vu.

You are amnesia.
You are the things I
Just can’t remember
now.

…are the simple things. For instance, a song starting off with a phat beat and pulse-raising bassline, building tension on one glorious note until the simple release of a chord change. Beautiful. You can forgive a band almost any grotesque excess just to bask in the glorious simplicity of that drum and that bass.

Now, the above paragraph is descriptive enough, yes? Yet I’ve taken the liberty of Pitchforking it like so:

…are the simple things - not simplistic, mind you, merely unprepossessing - like a song infused with an enviable austerity, a sort of Jungian synchronicity melting the absence of dynamic interplay into the dreamstate-like repetition of bassline and beat. The sort of song one might sense upon waking from a particularly arctic dream, waking from the building tension of approaching daybreak to the gloriously understated climax of eyes cracking open, blinking in the glare of what can only be described as the archetypal chord change. One may forgive a band almost any grotesque superfluity in pursuit of that Dionysian ideal, that paradigm shift that completely redefines a record - nay, redefines an entire morning, an entire day, an entire week, an entire generation.

You probably won’t have noticed because you don’t read my email, but spammers have started taking shots at my contact box above. Which is just idiotic, really. I’m running a blog with Spam Karma, Akismet, a spam-blocking shoutbox, and trackback validation: you think I’m vulnerable to spam? Talk about a waste of time!

But then again, I get something like 100 spams a day in my Gmail account (after I posted it all over the web to see what would happen), so I guess my point is if they have a worldwide net of zombie boxes, they’re going to spam anything and everything in sight.

In other news, Gmail is still letting through a great deal of the Nigerian scam type emails that come my way. Seriously. I get three or four every day landing in my inbox. Gmail team: shape it up.

Coming up later today: How I jumped from a ledge into ice-cold water in a cave the size of Maine, bounced off a tree into another tree after peeing into the woods at night, drank Jameson’s and laughed about the fact I was laughing with my Kretek cigarette buddy, risked my life clambering around on a sheer rock face three hundred feet above a lake, and nearly vomited when Fedex arrived with a particularly tightly-wrapped package.

In the meantime let me say this. It seem to me an IQ test is one of the stupidest ways to measure intelligence, something obviously unquantifiable. This is not because I’ve received a particular harsh score; it just occurred to me yesterday that any number of questions will fail to quantify intelligence because every person is different and every person will express their intelligence or lack of intelligence in a different way. Or more to the point, an IQ test essentially seeks not to define how intelligent you as the individual are, but what intelligence itself is. After all, you need criteria to develop the test, and why should I believe those who develop these tests are unbiased? What if they decide that being smart is mainly about being good at math, or identifying patterns? I’d be sunk like a Spanish Galleon. I’m bricks when it comes to math.

Personally, I’m of the opinion that IQ tests can only really establish that an individual is better or worse at certain tasks than the average. And beyond that it’s quite meaningless.

What is simple in the moonlight, by the morning never is. What’s so simple in the moonlight, now is so complicated.

You are bringing me coffee. It’s morning, or something like it: light should be lifting curtains, peeking underneath, but instead a mantle has fallen over the world and everything is waiting to breathe. Another Saturday. Remember when Saturdays felt so special? Now they’re every other day, simply a different workplace. You putter around the house, straightening, planning the re-decoration, smoking on the balcony over the garage. I putter around the house, making sure water doesn’t go where is shouldn’t and does go where it should, phoning the contractors, washing dishes, smoking on the balcony above the garage.

Buy before all that, coffee, and a first cigarette to start the day. Do you notice how little we talk to each other these days? Often we don’t need to. Often we don’t want to. We walk upstairs in near silence, you mentioning your father’s birthday. I don’t remind you how little I like the pretentious, stuff old codger. But of course I don’t have to: we’ve had that argument so many times before. We’ll spend time at the flimsy old shack he refuses to sell, talk about your mother passing away, light candles and blow foul bacteria over a cake, and finally we’ll leave. We’ll probably fight on the way home, about something, anything. It’s tension, you see. You have to let it out somehow, and we can never wait to get home.

I can’t believe we still have the same furniture out here we did when we first got married. Some unfortunate soul was posessed of the idea that it was something other than extremely ugly - no accounting for taste - and we eventually moved it up to the balcony, probably in the hope that a bit of ash might flick off, set a fire, and the furniture would be the first thing to go.

I am enjoying the coffee, even enjoying the silence, sitting above the garage on this grey day. September is colder than I remember it being when I was young. We get cold quickly now. You reach over, place your hand on mine, as if to remind me that you love me. Or that we’re about to fight about getting rid of this awful table and chairs.

Maybe there isn’t such a difference between fighting and loving. Not really. After all, women fall in love with the things they pity, don’t they? I am quite sure you thought you could fix me, when we began, that you could somehow elevate me. And for a while, you did, strangely. I was a better man for a year, for two, for a half of another, and by then you were too deeply entangled to admit defeat. And as so many people discover, the thing you love is not so very different from the thing you hate, and the thing you sought to uplift not so very different from the thing you feel weighing you down. And so we fight because we love. Though in our case sometimes I think we love because we fight.

You are grinning confidently. This means something is brewing in your head: I must needs enjoy my coffee as quickly as possible and make a break for the garage. But of course you have laid your hand on top of mine. Escape is now not so simple.

The plan is percolating in my head when you speak. And instead of a half-assed escape, I choose to stand and fight. In fifteen minutes we excuse eachother to the kitchen for another round of coffee. In twenty we are at it again.

How I love Saturdays.