TB Sheets
November 18, 2008
The virus has loosened its grip enough for me to return to blogging, for the moment at least. It must have sensed it was losing ground in my sinuses, because it is staging a fighting retreat to my chest. This is fine with me, as the nasal symptoms are what keep me up at night. Last night was the first night since this damn thing started that I’ve gotten most of a night’s sleep. Plus, I’ve always secretly enjoyed coughing. It’s just such a ghastly symptom. Hearing a nasty cough is like hearing a spadeful of earth hit the lid of a coffin, only there’s a chance the cough is contagious. I remember seeing Tombstone as an adolescent and for the next couple years whenever I got a bad chest cold I would always imagine it was “consumption” and that, as I was not long for the world, I was free to drink heavily and settle my disputes with gunplay.
Whoa
November 16, 2008
Due to my recent inclination to lay on the couch moaning all day, I have finally had time to fit in a couple of hours of Krzysztof Kieślowski’s Decalogue. For those unfamiliar with this (moderately obscure) film, perhaps some brief background info. Over ten weeks in the late 1980′s, Polish television aired this series of ten one-hour films, each one of which takes as its theme one of the ten commandments. Quite possibly a foreign language film about Christian spirituality sounds pretty unappealing to some of you, and I understand that. At first, I was afraid the films would turn out to be preachy or predictable, but I was in for the most pleasant surprise of my career as a watcher of movies.
Instead of tracing out some exercise in dogma, Kieślowski and his co-writer Krzysztof Piesiewicz take each film to some place raw and intimate, finding creative and sensitive ways to probe the underlying conflicts that shape and shatter lives. Again and again, I find myself brought face-to-face with the essence of human morality and struggle in the kind of confrontation that only the very best art can provoke. I read somewhere that Stanley Kubrick considered Decalogue the only cinematic masterpiece created during his lifetime, and in the afterglow of watching an episode, I agree with him; it feels that important.
Of course, I’ve just finished watching films eight and nine, I suppose the tenth could ruin the whole thing 
P.S. Thank goodness for Netflix, without which I might not have discovered or ever gotten my hands on this film, which doesn’t seem like a strong candidate for either TV or the shelf of the local Blockbuster.
Uhoh
November 15, 2008
My left eye is developing a twitch, which I am not at all happy about. Hard to remember just when it started, hope it goes away soon.
Malaise
November 15, 2008
I am suffering from a deep malaise right now. Or maybe it’s just lassitude. Lethargy? Anyhow, despite my present enervation, I am still capable of staving off ennui by playing around with synonymy.
See, these are the kinds of words we lose each time we resort to colloquialisms such as “I feel like shit”, though I admit it was easy, and is accurate.
Now, what are some synonyms for self-pity…
A Positive Note
November 15, 2008
I feel like I was a little too negative and hostile in yesterday’s post, and I apologize. I’d be ashamed to become just another lonely crank venting his spleen on the Internet, so I’ll try and keep things a little more upbeat from now on.
This will be difficult for the next few days, as I took sick yesterday and am thoroughly miserable in the grip of my annual winter cold.
I did manage to finish a good book today, however, and I have ‘Bekah’s birthday gift, a beautiful two-volume set collecting all of Sir Arthur Conan Doyle’s Sherlock Holmes stories, to start on next, so I should be able to make the best out of spending the weekend curled up in bed. Clemmy has also pledged to aid my convalescence by snuggling up to me under the covers, and this is a pledge upon which she has already started to make good.
The Future’s Uncertain…
November 13, 2008
As some of you know, my job at the car lot has recently become a good deal more complicated due to tension of an interpersonal nature. Since I am the lowest man on the totem pole, I am destined to come out on the losing end of any personality conflict, and so I have begun job-hunting.
Now, job-hunting is my least favorite activity in life, which should mean something coming from someone who spends so much of their time cleaning up stains of indeterminate provenance. Making the situation worse is the fact that several of the jobs I am applying for in the next couple weeks would require a return to my abandoned vocation of public education.
My father greets the news with ill-concealed glee. “I really want you to become a teacher.” he said when we discussed my employment situation recently. “Oh, yeah?” I replied, then bit my tongue before it could finish my retort, because “Well, I really want you to be gang-raped by a pack of syphilitic chimpanzees!” isn’t the kind of thing one says to one’s elders. Now, don’t get me wrong, a teaching career isn’t quite as bad as contracting ape-syphilis, but I have a quick temper, and when someone wishes that I would spend years of my life in a high-pressure, low-reward job witnessing a wastage of human potential and public funds on a gargantuan scale as I endeavor to impart knowledge to America’s increasingly impatient, ignorant, and ethically impoverished youth (one of whom may well gun me down while attempting to slaughter his classmates) despite the best efforts of their parents who - though they possess little or no training in the field - are empowered to call for my censure before a society that has lost almost all respect for my profession due to the widely-reported actions of a few corrupt individuals, I take that as an expression of ill-will.
I was originally going somewhere with this, but crafting that last 136-word monster has all but exhausted the flow of my rhetoric for today, so I’ll have to take this up again some other time.
P.S. Sorry Rebekah; I know that I promised you I wouldn’t say things like “gang-raped by syphilitc chimpanzees” after you told your father about my blog. Maybe he won’t read this one…
The Four Pillars…
November 13, 2008
Clementine is a very well-fed dog. There is no good reason for her to supplement her diet with random bits of filth, and yet she insists on doing a little bit of surreptitious crud-grazing whenever we take her for a walk. Although I do my best to remain vigilant, I inevitably fail because Clemmy possesses that superb combination of sneakiness and focus that will get you nearly anything you want in this world.
And so it came to pass that on one of our recent rambles, Clementine, furtively munching on all manner of horrible, nasty things, ran headlong into one of the scavenger’s greatest occupational hazards: disease. She managed to contract a wicked little case of giardia, which is one of the less pleasant afflictions in the veterinary universe.
The sudden and gruesome onset of the disease rather upset me, and as often happens when I am upset, I babbled like an idiot to anyone in proximity. One thing that I said to Ezekiel (who happened to be the “anyone” at the time), has stayed with me since. “I hope that little dog is alright,” I said “because she is one of the four things in my life I can’t do without right now.”
I realize that I am a neurotic creature, compulsively ordering everything in my life into little hierarchies, and I can’t help feeling like most people don’t enumerate the essential components of their lives that specifically. In order to contribute to a more complete taxonomy, then, of my strange, sad little evolutionary offshoot, I feel like I should identify what I consider to be the four principal supports of my happiness and sanity:
- My wife Rebekah
- My companion, rival, ward, lost twin, and occasional foil Clementine
- My band of brothers, the weekly gaming group
- My interface with all things vulgar-but-necessary: my job in the sulfur mines
Ground Rules
November 11, 2008
It is my intention to update this blog every day, but I’m a realist. I know there are going to be some days where I don’t feel up to either creativity or confession. On those days (of which today happens to be an excellent specimen), I plan to post either quotes, or trivia, or cool links, or some other little tidbit to avoid letting any visitors or subscribers down. Today’s grab bag:
“The first time ever I kissed your mouth / I felt the earth turn in my hand / Like the trembling heart of a captive bird” – Ewan MacColl, “The First Time Ever I saw Your Face”
A trivium in honor of Veteran’s Day: America’s highest military award is the Medal of Honor. There have been just 19 double-recipients of the award, and of these only 14 won their two Medals on separate occasions (the other 5 won both the Army and Navy Medal of Honor for the same incident of heroism).
Incidentally, my blog’s spell-checking program does not recognize the word “blog”. Oops.
Why
November 10, 2008
I have said before that blogging exemplifies our society’s increasing tendency toward narcissism and navel-gazing, so why am I starting a blog? The last time I started one, the answer was simple: narcissism! I wanted everyone to know how awesome I was. I’d like to think that my motives are a little more complicated this time around, a little more mature, if you will.
I guess that the blog bug bit me when I started reading the blogs of other people I knew – namely Sarah, Dylan and Jon. I guess I’m a pretty distant person in a lot of ways, and when I read Sarah and Dylan’s blogs, I felt like I got so much closer to them – that I understood a bit more about their daily lives, what they were worried about, what they looked forward too, etc. Also, since I was catching up on two or three years worth of blogging all at once, I really got to appreciate how over time a blog, just like a journal, becomes a record of one’s experience.
Jon’s blog was influential in a couple of ways. First of all, I laughed really hard when I read his blog. Second, during one of his early posts, he articulates many of my feelings about the desperate and sad nature of many blogs. In doing so, however, he showcased some of his range as a writer (Believe me, y’all – Jon has chops, and we haven’t yet seen what he is truly capable of achieving). It made me nostalgic for the time in my life when I had to use my writing skills, and I thought a blog might also serve as an outlet for all my pent-up language.
So this place will serve as a journal, yes, and a way to share a bit more of my inner life with my friends and family – a way to eat up the distance between us, perhaps – but it will also serve as a place for me to write, write , write and keep my skills from atrophying. I am already hoping to produce some fiction or poetry or a worthy essay in this space several times a year; if nothing else it will spice up the typical blog mixture of epistles and rants.
Birthday
November 9, 2008
So yesterday was my birthday, which I suppose is as good a fodder for blogging as anything. I tend to be very morose on my birthdays, contemplating my future in terms of my impending mortality and my past in terms of failed ambitions. This can make throwing me a birthday party a somewhat unrewarding endeavor, as my heroic wife Rebekah has discovered over the past two years. Yesterday seemed to go fairly well, however, and I found myself grateful, yes, but also interested in why I was not quite so melancholy as I had been previously.
I think it might have something to do with the dramatic changes that have occurred in my life over the past year. Y’see, for each of the past two years I have been up to my eyeballs in our nation’s failing public schools, working ridiculously hard to become a teacher of the “language arts”. I have been exhausted and unhappy, but trudging steadily toward a fixed goal for my life: rewarding career, financial security, children of my own.
Earlier this year, much of my projected future came crashing down as I entered, then almost immediately left, the world of professional teaching. In the aftermath, I was left with thousands of dollars of debt incurred for a degree I might not even use, a perception of personal failure, and perhaps most troubling of all, a lack of direction.
I think I shall gloss over the next few months in the interest of getting to the point, which is this: by the time my birthday rolled around this year, my wife and I had reevaluated our place in life and in the world, and made a new plan. While it may not be as conventional as our previous plan, I feel that it suits the two of us much better – and notably, was drawn up with a lot less input from our parents than was our last set of marching orders. I finally feel as though I’m getting comfortable in my own skin.
