*cricketbox*

I’m sick.  It started about a week ago, pre Coachella, and has steadily spiraled down.  Bronchitis, sinusitis, and an ear infection (no, I don’t know what –itis goes for ears).

Because of this, I’m not sleeping, not eating, and not really able to stand for more than a couple of minutes at a time.  The only thing I really can do is think.  Think, and stare at the charcoal portrait of Kurt Cobain that continually passes judgment over me, my actions, my life all while growing younger and younger by the passing of days as I get older.

I met Shepard Fairey just before his scorching DJ Diabetic/Insulin set at Coachella.  That guy is an absolute fucking inspiration.  Not only did he take the time to talk to me, but bothered to ask my name, introduced me to his wife (Amanda) and talked to me about other street artists here in Vegas, and even Oscar Goodman.  He was not only engaging, but but actually engaged.  It totally blew my mind; it continues to do so.  Due to technical difficulties, he actually did a bit more talking to the crowd than he initially expected to.  Again, inspirational.  It was like having me from a former life lecturing complacent, downtrodden, more or less given up, frustrated, stifled present-tense me.  Only better, because it wasn’t me at all.  Hearing out loud, from someone else, how The Clash, Dead Kennedys, et al. changed their life and set them on a different path, and how that path could actually end OK was really fantastic.  Heart-swellingly so.  It reminded me of so much that I’ve shelved in myself, so much that I’ve given up on, so much that I’ve denied, so many regrets. 

I gotta say, it feels like shit. 

Right now, I have no future.  I do not have any idea what I will be doing in 3,5,10 years.  I just don’t.  I have no idea how I am going to make a living once my winnings are gone.  I have sent out many many copies of my résumé, written all manner of asinine pre-employment essays, answered many questionnaires.  For nothing.  I haven’t done anything specifically INFOSEC related in a long time.  I also just found out that my idea for a semi-automated client-side attact platform has been done.  And what do you know, the guys that did it got picked up on the con-circuit and ended up being no small thing.  And that hurts like Hell.  I have a single idea right now, which is of dubious quality and which requires a Goldbergian sequence of events to fall in to place before it can even happen.  Another pipedream.  I wish I wasn’t like this.  I wish I could’ve capitalized on the ohsovery many opportunities that have slipped through my fingers.

For now I have to be satisfied with staring in to the so-tired looking eyes of a Buttonesque dead man.

Woke up early, in a mild snit about whether or not I needed to jet out to Henderson.  I’d emailed my instructor last night and as of this writing I’ve yet to see a response.  I did, however, find my own answer to my question on the back page of my Bio syllabus, which was awesome.

I finished my absurd “Critical Thinking” writing for the week, which I suppose is a good thing as well.  I have my first Bio test tomorrow, and I’m going in pretty confident about it, so we’ll see how that turns out.

After my early morning snit my day, internally at least has been on a downward spiral.  I’ve been shopping Vespa parts off and on, and I just don’t know what to do with my bike.  Right now it is a tossup between buying a new PK engine, or sending my original engine in to Scooterworks.  Either one is going to be a costly gambit, but I’ve known that for months.  I’m pretty much OK with that.  I also need to find turn signals front and rear, get the bike titled and licensed.  Oh and figure out a weekend to take a basic motorcycle course.

This is a project that I didn’t realize was going to be this epic when I took it on.  I really just want to ride my damn bike, since that was one of the things I’d used to convince myself that I was going to be alright down here.  Maybe there will be another bike in my future, I don’t know.  I’ll probably feel better once the thing runs and I can at least tool around the neighborhood.

Speaking of bikes, my uncle finally got his new Harley, for Valentine’s Day, nonetheless.  Good on him, he deserves it.

In other news, tomorrow I will be turning in my application to graduate.  I haven’t told anybody yet, but I’ve done some soul searching, and I really don’t feel like I have enough time to fuck around.  So, asterisk or not, I’m going to move ahead, I’ll deal with the tainted memories later.

Overall I’m in an asstastic mood, I’m downtrodden, ready for the semester to be over, and ready to move on.

So it seems the bulk of my nasty week is over, and as per usual, much of my worry was without reason or substance.  This is a good thing, and certainlly beats the alternative.  Leonard Cohen would say that “there’s a crack in everything.”  This, supposedly is “how the light gets in.” 

I found out yesterday, before wasting my time on a faux-interview, that I will not be graduating this year which is infuriating on so many levels.  When I think about it, waves of anger, like goosebumps, come rolling up my body.  My only option is to graduate with a big-ass asterisk by my name, which after waiting this long, and with so many other memories tarnished by regrets, just seems like a non starter to me.

I need this to be a clean memory, as I do not have too many of those, and it would be nice to have my first college degree to not have any sort of footnote attached to it.

In other news, I got a big ‘ol box of badassity from Josh, check THIS shit out:

Badass, no?  There’s a shirt too, but I couldn’t find it to snap the pic, and since I’ve had a bit of a bite in the ass of a week, I just couldn’t be bothered.  But, seriously, anyone who sends me stuff from cool places that I’ll likely not see with mine own eyes is good in my book.  And Josh, well, as a former hetero-lifemate and always best friend, he takes the fucking cake.  Period.

Also, I got our Coachella tix in the mail today, which is one less thing up in the air.

I’m missing the Twestival right now, and I’m a little disappointed that I decided not to go.  Oh well, there will be plenty more in the future.

Also, my birthday shindig is in the process of getting planned.  It’s looking like we’ll be holdin’ it down at Frankie’s Tiki Room, I just love that joint, and they’re being hellaciously cool about the whole thing too.

Aight, I’m off for some food and sleep.

So it is Thursday night, and again I’m at the Frog and about to get tanked and pimp myself around the blogging cognoscenti.  Good times.  Tomorrow I have to start full-court press on getting full time employment.

My dad was informed he would no longer be paid going forward.  How that is different than being fired escapes me.  But never fear I’d already had a plan B in the works.

Lets pray that I won’t need to move on to plan C or D.

Stay tuned.

I’ve been thinking quite often, lately, about fear.  I was on a whole bunch of television sets about a week ago, and it made me incredibly nervous.  I knew how the show ended up, but had no idea of how I’d be portrayed; with my history I don’t trust media types.  I realized that, during the taping, aside from the anti-anxiety drugs coursing through my veins, the thing which kept me focused was the Litany Against Fear.  Stop me if you’ve heard this one. . .

I must not fear.
Fear is the mind-killer.
Fear is the little-death that brings total obliteration.
I will face my fear.
I will permit it to pass over me and through me.
And when it has gone past I will turn the inner eye to see its path.
Where the fear has gone there will be nothing.
Only I will remain.

If you’re a geek like me, or a Lynch fan you probably know at least part of that.  I’m not a religious man, nor very spiritual. I am, however, extremely superstitious.  I, like most other humans, have a need for ritual and repetition.  Serialized routine is very soothing to me, since most of the time I feel very unsettled.  Strange that eight lines from a Sci-Fi novel would have that kind of impact on me, but they do.  Hey, there are plenty of people who have taken the words of a hack to be their RELIGION, and at least my book didn’t have anything to do with body-possessing aliens.

The other thing that I have at the ready in my mental tape-library is a bit from one of my idols, Bill Hicks.  In fact, if you saw me on the boob-tube, I was actually wearing my Bill Hicks t-shirt given to me by Josh.  Again it is a comfort thing, for me, to be able to look in a mirror and see Bill’s slightly snarky, eternally wise, visage staring back at me.  Over the last eight years I found myself asking, at times daily, what Bill would’ve thought, had to say, etc.  When my internal fear finally does boil over, and takes hold of me I often hear Hicks’ voice in my head repeating:

The world is like a ride at an amusement park, and when you choose to go on it, you think it’s real, because that’s how powerful our minds are. And the ride goes up and down and round and round and it has thrills and chills and it’s very brightly colored and it’s very loud. And it’s fun, for a while.

Some people have been on the ride for a long time, and they begin to question: ‘Is this real? Or is this just a ride?’ And other people have remembered, and they come back to us and they say ‘Hey! Don’t worry, don’t be afraid - ever - because… this is just a ride.’ And we kill those people.

‘Shut him up! We have a lot invested in this ride! Shut him up! Look at my furrows of worry; look at my big bank account, and my family. This has to be real.’

It’s just a ride. But we always kill those good guys who try and tell us that - ever notice that? - and we let the demons run amok. But it doesn’t matter, because… it’s just a ride, and we can change it any time we want. It’s only a choice. No effort. No worry. No job. No savings and money. Just a choice, right now, between fear and love. The eyes of fear want you to put bigger locks on your door, buy bigger guns, close yourself off. The eyes of love, instead, see all of us as one.

Here’s what we can do to change the world, right now, into a better ride. Take all that money we spend on weapons and defense each year and, instead, spend it feeding, clothing and educating the poor of the world, which it would do many times over - not one human being excluded - and we can explore space together, both inner and outer, forever. In peace.

To give you an idea about how I feel about this guy, I couldn’t copy/paste that paragraph without shedding a couple of tears.  Yeah, it’s like that.  When I panic, I hear his reminder and it calms me down.  When I’m out having a good time, I hear his reminder which heartens me to take in as much as I can, for as long as I’m able.  For the majority of my adult life I’ve tried, as best I could, to live by his example, and even though I’m not really able to do that right now, I still aspire to it.

On Friday 1/30/09 David Letterman finally did Bill one solid, here it is, timely as ever:

Today is inauguration day, which also happens to be the first day of my return semester to CSN, which should also be my last semester, though that remains to be seen.

I’m tired, yo.  I said it.  I cannot believe that we are finally out from under George W. Bush.  There have been times over the last eight years that I have had very, very serious doubts about whether or not this presidential election would even take place, let alone whether or not the results would be allowed to stand.

But it did happen, and the results stand in the face of history.  It doesn’t feel quite real yet.  All the work, all the stress, all the information bombardment that has made up the last two full years, all-day-every-day-even-on-Sunday has come to bear beautiful fruit.

This week will also mark me being broadcast far and wide to television sets across the world.  Which is crazy.  My mother actually heard me speaking from the television today, and all she could do was screech.  So, we’ll see how being marginally, briefly, famous goes.

I’m not cool enough to be famous.  I’m not even cool enough to be on TV.

I’m already way ahead in all but one of my classes this semester.  So far it seems like this semester is not going to be all that bad for me.  D, however, having her ass handed to her.

Sleep, Biology, Arabic, in that order.

As a side note, I learned something very interesting about Asthma in NV.  No I will not elaborate, so don’t ask, but I dare say it was HIGHLY enlightening.

So it’s been almost a week since I’ve powered up either my HP Laptop or my main Desktop PC.  Initially, I’d turned them off to allow me to clean without distraction.  Then I picked up the Aspire One and haven’t had a reason to fire either up since.  It is a strange feeling to say the least.  The quiet is downright eerie, as I’ve lived with the omnipresent drone of fans, power-supplies and hard-disks for half my lifetime in some form or another.

Amidst this new found quiet I’ve come to a realization: I’m not nearly as dependent on my power-hungry, noisy machines as I assumed I was.  The Blackberry Bold helps, and the Aspire One puts me over the top as far as my technology needs are concerned.

Freeing and strange.

Now it is almost like a personal competition within me to see how long I can last without the two monsters that I would normally call home.  To give you an idea, I just logged in to check my work email, not even realizing that I already get all that email on my Berry so there was no need to check it on the One.  I have a mountain of other email addresses that I should probably check, but they can wait.  Almost nothing but spam comes through on those accounts, as some of them are approaching a decade old, and almost everyone either contacts me via gmail or through my work email.

It is an absolutely bizarre feeling. . .I just can’t state that enough.

We’re off to a housewarming party for a couple of our friends tonight, so there will be, I’m sure plenty of intoxication and picture taking to go ‘round.

A day to recover, then on to my last semester without a degree, which as mentioned previously, is also very strange to me.

Will the strange feelings ever cease?  Right now I don’t know, and couldn’t care less.

I know people from all over the world have gotten bent out of shape about some older (now deleted, though NOT because of their content) posts on this site in which I have made reference to the concept of niggerdom, and have referred to myself as a sand-nigger and right-wing hate-speech firebrand Michelle Malkin as a rice-nigger.  And as of today, I regret having removed those posts, as I feel that they were extremely important.  Alas, at the time I had wanted to take the site in a different direction, and the posts were removed to reflect that change.  The issue with those posts was stylistic, and not in any way related to the content.  I’m sure the content pissed people off, as it should.  Those words are meant to be painful, meant to incite emotion, like a thought-guided smart-bomb.

As many of you know, part of my ethnic background is Polish.  I usually don’t talk about it very much as, generally, it isn’t all that interesting, and the history of the Polish people is pretty depressing.  I think it was Pope John Paul II who said “…the plight of the Polish people is suffering,” or something to that effect.  I certainly know from my own family that this would ring true to many in the Polish community.

Growing up, the ONLY acceptable racial joke was the “Polack” joke, and I heard them regularly.  Polish jokes, like the majority of fucked-up racist humor, pretty much revolve around how stupid and backward Poles are.  For most of my youth, I was extremely ashamed of that part of my heritage and would deny and attempt to hide that facet of my background.  It wasn’t until later that I started to put the various pieces of my ethnicity together, eventually drawing a picture of suffering at the hands of bigotry from almost every angle.  It was because of this, along with my family’s history during the Ha’Shoah that I became increasingly sensitive to bigotry in all its forms.

Over the years I’ve become less and less ashamed of being Polish, though I still rarely talk about it.  It always seems as though there just isn’t much to be PROUD of there (other than having, quite possibly the best Pope in the history of Catholicism to call our own).  So when I see things like this, it is quite a notable event, and yeah, it makes me proud to be Polish, and consequently proud of what good people are capable of achieving despite suffering under the boot-heel of bigotry/niggerdom.

The Bielski Partisans

As I’ve said before and will likely repeat many times during my remaining days on this planet:  If niggerdom hasn’t got to you yet, don’t worry it will.  It is waiting, watching, and nobody is immune to it, eventually it will find you.  In short, until none of us are niggers, we all are.  There is only one destination at which this road arrives, and we would all do well to remember it.

So I picked up a new bit of kit today: an Acer Aspire One netbook.  Just got everything set up, downloaded and installed and so far this thing kicks ass.  I missed out on the original Eee mania when it launched (and yeah I know they just announced a touchscreen model at CES) so this thing is a revelation to me.  Exceedingly light, entirely usable keyboard, although I’m still getting used to the layout and a built-in webcam.

I snagged the 120gig (the actual size of the drive is bigger than that though) hdd model, as opposed to the SSD model which people have been complaining about, in black, of course.  The hdd is the same tiny-ass PATA drive that lives in your ipod so it is rugged enough to handle being hauled back and forth to class on the back of a Vespa.

So, expect some more blogging from this tiny little box of sex.  It’ll certainly make it easier to blog as things happen and to blog from interesting locales, etc.

Oh, and I’m now taking Arabic in a classroom this semester.  Crazy.

The year officially started oh, ELEVEN days ago, but tomorrow is the first official week of the year here at the *box*.  Tomorrow I will officially repack all of the knitwear that I’ve collected over the course of the past fifteen or so years which was pulled out of various boxes about four years ago when D moved down here and acclimated.  She’s got her own sweaters now, and I rarely, if ever, have occasion to wear my own, not to mention they take up a good bit of storage that I desperately need.  So tomorrow is uncluttering/cleaning day at cricketbox HQ.

I’m trying as best I can to do some mental uncluttering as well.  I’m overly sentimental for my own good, and as previously mentioned, regularly harangued by my superior memory.  I am blessed/cursed with a near photographic memory, which when combined with my general poor self-esteem, makes for a nasty cocktail seemingly custom crafted to paralyze my thoughts or send them into a frenzied spiral which is almost always exclusively negative and focused on the past.

I’m trying.  I think regularly about people who have, likely, forgotten I even exist.  In their world, I cease to be, while in my world they not only exist, but, with alarming frequency show up to remind me of some past failure that, for whatever reason, my memory refuses to purge.  In my head, there is a cavalcade of shame and failure that I cannot seem to shake.

I’ve done therapy, meds, everything that I could think of.  Nothing has worked.

So after I get paid I’m going to go talk to someone who specializes in PTSD (LOOONG story there) and maybe someone who does EMDR (maybe even the same person).  EMDR helped me greatly in the past (Nate’s mom was such a comfort to me when I was pretty well at the end of my rope) and I’m hoping it will again.

I’d just like to be able to utilize my memory for something other than a fucking anchor tying myself to a past that really, at least right now, doesn’t seem worth the tie.

I watch constantly as the world moves forward and the people around me do the same while I just slip further and further behind, not be regression but by stasis.

I believe a little housecleaning is definitely in order.