Bliss

Five beers and an unhurried conversation with my wife - I am totally fulfilled. I am a lucky man.

I think I hear my son waking up... back to reality.

Septic Stress

We went to sleep last night listening to an odd warbling sound outside our window. It was like frogs, which are common here, but constant, a frog that never takes a breath. Not common.

With my ability to talk myself into anything, I assured myself that it was a chorus of frogs, and lulled myself to sleep. Waking to the same chirping song, I realized it was our septic alarm. Now, I'm concerned. We just had the septic guy out for a look, and it cost $125. I don't even know what to check, and you can't just let shit like this go. I don't know whom to consult. I went to check the cap on the sand filter (whose alarm was going off), and I can't even open the thing to begin to contemplate its mysteries, because some sadistic bastard has skulked away with the allen wrench set that usually sits in my toolbox.

So, you add up:

• broken technology I can't fathom
• unknown but certain costs on a budget that surpassed the red zone long ago
• lost items that shouldn't oughtta be lost

... and you have ample ingredients for a rage-tinged panic attack on Tommy's part.

Antidote? Talk about it, and quickly, before it takes root and floods the rest of the morning with unreasonable desperation and fear of the unknown. Luckily, my wife caught me kicking my way through the house, and I was able to unload on her in the space of forty seconds and two sentences all of the above concerns, and I immediately felt better.

The septic tank is still fucked to whatever degree it's fucked, but I am scheduled to spend the next 6 hours attached at the hip with my wife and daughter, and this narrowly-averted shitty mood is just what we don't need.

Get a job

I am working my way back towards gainful employment. Once a little snag with my driving privilege clears up, I'll be fully on the make for a paying gig.

Hopefully, I will be able to form a healthier relationship with my next employer than my last, but that's up to me. Last time 'round, I so closely associated the job with survival that I got to a place where every single bump in the road went straight to my central nervous system, and stress was manufactured by the metric ton. I simply could not let things go. I shudder to recall that state of being. Yeck. Having not had a regular job for what, 18 months now, I realize that there's no threat from one single job, manager or workplace worth twisting your nuts up in a bunch for. If I can practice this realization, I just might be free to enjoy myself at the next gig. And when Tommy's having fun, it's really something...

Which leads me to my next point

There's something else - since I am back to looking for a new job, I am faced with the internal conundrum of choosing jobs that look like shit, but might pay a little better, or jobs that interest me. Hell, most days I'd be happy for a shot at either one individually. It ties into self-confidence in the same way the above paragraphs tie into a sense of survival. My self-worth, for some reason, hovers just above the toilet when scanning employment ads, making any good-paying job seem beyond what I deserve. This is also not a healthy state of mind, and I need to move past it. Let's have some affirmations, shall we?

You're a good person, and you deserve good things. Great things, even. Insist upon them.
Money follows happiness - find a job you might like, and riches will follow.

Continuing education?

Just for the Hell of it, here are available online classes at San Joaquin Delta College next semester:

• ART 001B Art History: Europe from the Fifteenth to the Twentieth Century
• BIM 043 Records Management in Public Agencies
• BUS 008 Introduction to The American Legal System
• BUS 020 Introduction to Business
• BUS 026 Economics of Business
• BUS 037 Human Behavior in Organizations
• BUS 060 Small Business Management
• BUS 067 Introduction to Personal Finance
• BUS 094B Essential Topics for Small Business
• CSA 035 Multimedia Presentations
• ENG 044D Creative Writing: Play and Screen Writing
• ENG 044B Creative Writing: Style
• MUSIC 004 Exploring Music

I hope to choose one or two from the mix. Who knows what life will look like by mid-August?

Got my new hard drive

I got my new laptop hard drive. Now, it's just a matter of the heady task of installing the new drive, and hoping that a) all goes well, and b) it restores this old clunker to its former glory.

"Speaking of Art," Impending Debut

I recently mentioned a video project that is reaching culmination. The video project itself is a done deal, but the first time I cut it to a VCD and DVD for review, it didn't seem to burn right, and the resultant videos were jagged and choppy, respectively.

I am re-exporting the work to another format and re-burning the DVD as I blog this. Hopefully I'll have chased out the last bug on this project, and begin to obsess on the next. Not to mention, I'll be able to hand it over for run for cable distribution, and show it off a bit!

Hiker dies on wilderness-survival adventure

Survival hike or death march?

New Jersey man Dave Buschow died of thirst in a Utah desert while on a survival hike run by Boulder Outdoor Survival School, or "BOSS." With emergency water supplies available, and a natural water source just yards from where he succumbed to thirst, it's a very sad tale all 'round.

The dead man's family blames the company, the company blames the man's preparation techniques. Total bummer.

New French prez on the way

Recent debates between French Presidential candidates remind me that the torch is about to be passed over there. My money is on Sarkozy, the son of a Hungarian immigrant. I predict his victory, and he's my pick to, for his moderate-to-right leanings, and great head of hair.

He also stands out from his opponent by being reputed as a U.S.-friendly choice, certainly the more-friendly choice to the U.S. I don't know if that's a good or bad thing, but an uptick in U.S.-French relations wouldn't hurt my feelings.

More life litter

I have eased back on beer and binge eating for a few days, and the bathroom scale has rewarded me in kind. Moderate efforts, moderate results.

This morning I find myself continuing the blahs that overshadowed yesterday. I am deep into my second cup of coffee, trying to jump-start the flow of energy. So far, nothing. Maybe some music will help...

Lifestyle detritus

If you dug out the pants-pocket of my life, this post would be among the lint:

• I topped 210 pounds today. Not cool.
• Yesterday was fast-paced and rewarding - I dumped the boy off with his Grandmomma, allowing me a moment to think and several hours to work. I got keyed up on coffee and got some shit worth doing, done.
• Today, the polar opposite. Not all bad, but all thoughts and actions entrenched in ever-solidifying cement. Had the boy all day, and I've had constipation of the mind. Didn't get much done, outside of some reg-a-lar housework. Fed up and burnt out with everybody in the house, those non-communicative, zombie-eyed, shout-my-life's-blood-at-them-and- get-nothing-but-snake-eyes-in-return band of cardboard cutouts.

Shit, gotta run.

Nosing around in the dark

I am beginning to suspect that my problem is not psychological, or even emotional, but spiritual. Sounds odd to say, as I am not a broom-smoking, flower-licking hippie type. I am probably one of the least-spiritual people I know - some might say that's the problem, but I'm not sure.

I do know that my spiritual adviser, Paula Phipps, has had some very reasonable advice, lending perspective to otherwise befuddling and maddening circumstances. Plus, I've been trying to read a book on manifestation, and it's making more and more sense as well.

Finally, as lousy as my own instincts have been for years, I have made a few helpful realizations on my own lately, which have also helped to smooth my ride.

Life is certainly not easy, but it's been a little easier. And that ain't nothin'...

I need a new kink

Man, I am so bored with life. What a pathetic statement that is - bored people are boring people - but it's true, so why hide from it?

I feel numb and disinterested. Nothing drives my mania lately, leaving me to wander and drift. I need something to invade my mind, fully engulf it with unreasonable desire, push me to spend ridiculous amounts of time involved in its demanding pursuit every day. A pitiless lover, sadistic, needy and cruel, wanting nothing from her subjugate so much as simply: more.

The only thing I do everyday now is drink beer and chase my ass in this circular, existential stupidity. Ridiculous, indeed!

I am not depressed, like I was not so long ago. For that, I'm extremely grateful. Not so long ago, I was almost completely disabled, paralyzed by formless despair. Now, I simply recognize that something is missing. It was brought into sharper focus yesterday when I spent an absolutely sublime afternoon spending time with musicians and other interesting people. Watching Levi Huffman and his friends drill away on their instruments, weaving long, winding tunes, it nailed to the inside of my skull proof of where ongoing pursuit of a goal, relentlessly scratching an itch inside your head, can take you. It's been a long time since a passion took up residence in my dome, but I remember what it was like. I miss it. I yearn for the condition where a dominating force provides energy and desire that seem both internal and external at the same time. A special form of madness, putting the pedal down somewhere in my psyche.

Bored. Disinterested. Numb. No pain, no brain. I want to cut through the callous, peel away the shell. Feel. Want. Burn. Get some gas in the tank, spike it with some nitrous oxide.

So... what? I have my health, most of my marbles, all my fingers and toes. I am very fortunate in the array of choice I have before me, even just the ones my tunnel vision allows me to see: website design (yeah, I don't think so), digital video, guitar... The list goes on and is generous. Hell, I'd settle for the abject pursuit of greed, if I could fall into it and get some traction. At least making some money would ease the pinch in our financial state.

I think I'll put an invisible "Vacancy" sign on my forehead, try to take in a new resident up in the ol' noggin.

Ah, the waters are receding

Whatever torture I have so richly deserved for the past weeks (and months, and years, but who's counting?) has thankfully begun to subside these last few days. My laptop is still wheezing but working, the Dell CDs came next-day via special delivery, and my DSL guy finally came out and put my signal back on its feet and off of its knees. It's almost like I can breathe again.

The upside is that I had begun to find things to do in the analog world: my wife re-upped my subscription to a real, ink-and-paper newspaper service, I cleaned up the place, and some other stuff that was worthwhile and non-digital. Maybe now though, I can meld the two, or at least read my little daily list of bookmarked pages with my morning coffee, as God intended.

Whatever sentence I've been serving in digital limbo/Hell, I am glad to be at least on probation. Let's hope I stay on the Digital Deity's good side. Amen.

Rick is the best friend I never met

Rick at Dell, now my most faithful reader (certainly among the most helpful) has left another comment, this time explaining that Dell has resumed the normal and ethical practice of providing the reinstallation CDs for paying customers. Thank God for that.

Thank Him/Her also that Rick let me know, as I have been unable to access the Dell website to research for myself my previous assertion that they just don't send them anymore. I'm glad Rick set it straight.

"Be cool, dude..."

My laptop continues to subsist on quasi-life support. It works, but every boot-up could be its last. Preceding each boot is an error message warning that hard drive failure is imminent, and I should back up my crap and get a new hard drive. Better advice was seldom given.

The thing reminds me of the friend we all had (or were) in high school, who no matter how loaded he was, no matter how slobbering, falling-down wasted he found himself, could always pull it together for the 35 seconds it took for the cop or school administrator to walk by, before degenerating back to the stumbling, poorly arranged mass of cells he had worked so hard to become.

Here's hoping my laptop can hold it together a while longer...

Dell - savior or Satan?

Dell doesn't send Windows software CDs with new systems

After my desperate, blogged complaint of my Dell laptop succumbing to the forces of entropy, I received an unexpected note from a Dell representative, advising me that I can contact Dell to get copies of the WinXP OS that I so badly need. Come to find out that the reason they'll happily send them to me is that they never sent them to me in the first place!

Oh yeah - apparently, it's policy. What the blazing Hell...? When you buy a new machine from a big, reputable name, you also buy the OS. How the bleeding Christ can you justify not sending the CDs with the new system?

Now, somewhere out there is a Dell guy surfing blog entries - it must be how he found the last one, and so-generously left me a helpful comment. And I appreciate that. When he finds this one, I would like to explain the previous, rabid paragraph thusly:

When I got near the lowest point a computer consumer ever hopes to get to, on the brink of total system failure, I reach for my magic bullet. During digital freefall, I reached for the ripcord on my silicon parachute, and I found absolutely nothing. I thrashed around the house like a blinded ape for two hours, racking both my brain and my evermore-cluttered home office, looking for software that just had to be there. Looking for software that I had never needed before, and so had never searched for before.

Reaching into the abyss and pulling back nothing, I was quite upset, and instantly deluded my guilty conscience that I must have misplaced the CD's that I lacked. Why, it must be the only answer, since it would be hideously unorthodox to not include them with a new machine. Only software pirates need fear this type of inconvenience/gripping terror - I paid for my shit! What is this, "Bargain Bob's Big Box Computer Warehouse??" No, no, certainly this must be my error in losing the disks, and what a fool I am to have put myself in such a position!

And so it was a relief but still jarring that I found I hadn't directly caused myself all that torture, but that it was provided to me by a wrong-headed corporate policy. Yeesh!

Your name isn't really Phillip, is it?

Following that revelation, I got to spend over 90 minutes on the phone with "Phillip," a very nice gentleman from east Asia who either due to language skills or lousy intercontinental phone connection took no less than five tries to collect EACH discreet piece of contact data. I had to spend several minutes stating, repeating and even describing ("no, there are five digits in my zip code...") my street name, telephone number, zip code, city name, e-mail address, etc. Frustrating for both of us, I'm sure, but shit, at least he was getting paid to do it.

Then he called me back to tell me he won't be sending me the CDs for the older Dimension system, because it's not under warranty. Madness! I rebuked his attempt to snatch away my just-won CD, and told him that they were never sent in the first place. After a brief discussion with his supervisor, he advised me he'd send them. I'll feel a lot more secure when they are actually in-hand.

So I must say thanks to Rick at Dell in Texas, for going the extra mile and clueing me into the fact that my OS CD's can be found somewhere, anywhere. That's just the kind of thing that keeps a customer loyal. And big, hairy bollocks to Dell for disincluding said CD's as a matter of course. That's just the sort of thing that scares customers away.

At long last, my video interview project is finally taking shape. I put together a decent intro animation and some subtle but attractive graphic and video overlays that add both utility and gentle pizazz to the end result. I still want to add music to the intro and some respectable credits. For taking as long as it has to get this far, having the end in sight is a pleasure.

Laptop down

My laptop is seriously troubled, possibly boned. It spent about 5 hours running a hard drive scan, dispatching bad sector after bad sector. It seems to be working now, but my faith in the thing is shot.

Even worse, I don't seem to have the Dell/WinXP disks I thought I had, with which to mop up this impending mess. This surprising lack of media strikes at my very core, and I had to take a deep breath, step back, and crack a beer before I put something through the nearest wall. The rest of the day has been salvaged, but only as a result of fastidious control of nearly uncontrollable rage.

So, that's how it's going... I am so disheartened.

Testy dispatcher

I took a 3-hour test today for a gig with the county Sheriff's department. It was a tough test, timed and unforgiving. My reading comprehension and note-taking are strong, and they helped counteract some drawbacks from some skill sets that were maybe a little less robust than I had hoped.

The test was pass/fail, and I am confident that I passed. I should know for sure within two weeks. I gave it my best, and I feel pretty good about it. The time-sensitive nature was a bit of a surprise, but after the first five minutes, I realized what pace the thing demanded, and rose to the occasion.

There were about 12 other applicants testing. I am surprised how many people show up to this type of thing looking... well, pretty casual. No flip-flops today, and it wasn't like it was an interview, but some people didn't show up dressed to play.

Big props to Grandma for helping with childcare and transportation, or I woulda never made it.

Easter laughs

My Dad and his fiancé Denise came over last Sunday, and we had a good time. Some of the laughs:

Brian, carrying a plastic hog to show to Grandpa, the former peace officer: "Pig?"
Tom, to Brian: "No son, he's retired."

Grandpa, to Mackenzie, defining sleep apnea: "That's where a fat person goes to sleep, and the fat from their neck slops down over their throat, and they can't breathe."

Both those exchanges still crack me up.