Time: The Keeper of My Prison

I think that one of my favorite quotes in Mass Effect 3 comes from Garrus after the mission to Grissom Academy.  He points out that most good parents will raise kids telling them that the universe is a good place, with some rough spots here and there, but good overall.  They will grow up believing that things work out for the best, and things will be okay.  But then you have them face an ugly reality that burns this illusion to the ground.  What do they do?  It honestly doesn’t surprise me that most of my generation who is grown up is taking some kind of anti-depressant or mood-stabilizer.  We are raised to believe that the whole world is in front of us, but the truth isn’t nearly as pretty.

Time is a companion.  You may wish it to move slower or wish it to stop altogether, but it is always with you as you go through life.  It will remind you of the good times, but it will also remind you of the bad ones.  It will show you the pain, but show you good things, when they happen.  It is non-judgmental, doesn’t take sides and does its duty.  It is the keeper of the world.

For me, time is the keeper of my prison.  The constant reminder of how little is happening in my life.  The companion who tells me what so many others have, and I don’t.  A girl I used to run with posts on Facebook that she is in a relationship.  It is with a guy that she was running with before me.  I have no ill-will toward that.  Not at all.  Given how little happiness there is to be found in this world, I am always glad that people can find something to make the long nights easier.  But that’s how it is with everyone.  Everyone is in love, everyone is getting what they want.  Everyone is happy.  But not me.

More time passes by, the more posts I see about friends getting into relationships.  It must come so easily to most.  I keep hearing about how love is so hard, but from where I am sitting, it doesn’t seem to be hard for most of the people I know.  They are in and out of relationships like it is nothing.  Sure, they hurt for a bit, but only after it ends.  For me, love was a fuck-ton of work that, in hindsight, wasn’t worth my time.  And yet, that is how it is.

A friend of mine told me that a former friend of mine is going to be running for a seat of government here in Anchorage.  Some city council or something.  I wasn’t listening that intently.  I tend to tune out sometimes.  I was thinking about the former friend.  His wife and I used to be incredibly close.  But, when her husband stopped liking me, she stopped liking me.  Monkey-see, monkey-do.  For me, I see time doing so many things for people.

They all seem to have direction.  I’m lucky if I can figure out what I am going to have for breakfast.  I know what my immediate obligations are, but five years down the road, ten years down the road, I don’t have a fucking clue.  What am I lacking?  It might be passion.

As I have become more and more walled-off from the world, I find my ability to feel anything is waning.  To avoid getting hurt, I just don’t care.  Sure, the next neat story that I see gets my attention.  I care about the superficial.  But what do I have to care about beyond that?  With my head injury, the family connections are gone.  They never did come back.  I kept hoping that they would, with time.  But they never did.  So, there are no family connections, even though the family tries their damndest.  I don’t begrudge them that.  It’s in their nature to be that way.  With no romance and no interest in romance, along with the residual resentment of being used and betrayed by love, I no longer feel anything for that.  With friends all going off in their own directions, leaving me behind (and given that I, a titan of a man, am quite forgettable), I no longer am feeling much for that.  With nothing to care about, I have been going out of my way to not care.  Easier, really.  But maybe that is what it is.

Passion just doesn’t exist in my life.  For anything.  Ever.  And time is still the ever-present companion through all of it.  It follows me down life’s pathways, never letting me go.  The people who work at the coffee-shop at my job joke that they never see me smile.  They are on a mission to get me to do so.  I do feel for their position.  I am being as cold as humanly possible, without meaning to hurt anybody.  I just don’t want to hurt anymore.

Time is the keeper of my prison.  A girl that I was in kind of an odd position with told me that if I wanted something bad enough, I would find a way to get it.  Yeah, because money isn’t tight and I don’t have obligations, right?  If I could, I would pack up my shit right now and get out of this state.  I would go somewhere far away and find a place to call my own.  Pity that Seattle is so expensive to live in.  Rain and wind constantly, it is my kind of place.  Plus, no more winter.

Winters are brutal to me.  With no one to curl up with and to take the ugliness of the nights away, I am always at my loneliest in winter.  I want to go to a place where winter doesn’t follow.  Seattle would do nicely.  But again, expensive to live there.  And the job market sucks there.  I’m a journalism major.  I follow these things.  Had a friend suggest that her and I buy a run-down motel in Squaw Valley, California, and fix it up.  It wouldn’t be hard.  It is along a tourist route, and gets heavy business accordingly.  Fix it up and it would be a regular cash-cow.  Alas, she hasn’t brought that plan up again.  A small hope, never to be.

Time is the keeper of my prison.  The keeper of this stagnation.  The constant reminder of how everyone is going places and I’m not.  I hate living, but death sounds even more boring.  Boredom, more than anything else, keeps me here.  But this stagnation is killing me.  The same job, the same people, the same place, the same world, and nowhere to go.

Time is a real piece of shit.

Until next time (pun intended), a quote,

“I like to expect the worst.  There’s a small chance I’ll be pleasantly surprised.”  -Garrus Vakarian, Mass Effect 2

Peace out,

Maverick

In Memory of Zoe

The last post that I did like this, I wrote that I had a feeling that I would be doing many more of these before my time on this world was up.  There are days when I hate being right.  Zoe was a good friend to me.  She wasn’t the kind of friend who comes over and brings you a cold drink when you need it.  She wasn’t the kind of friend who you could nerd out with your newest games with.  She was just a friend who put her head on your lap and looked up at you, just glad to see that you were there.  Zoe, Shield Maiden of the Homestead, was my dog.

Zoe with her puppies. The little white one is Riley.

Confused about the name?  Well, Zoe is a pure-bred lab.  Pure-bred dogs have to have titles.  Since neither of the parentals were good at thinking one up, they put the task to me.  Same with her puppy, Riley.  I had just watched the Lord of the Rings movies, so I thought of a name that was regal and whatnot.  She was a gift to the family after I had surgery.  Cervical fusion.  C1-C3.  The most unpleasant operation of my life, following an accident that has defined my outlook on life, forevermore.  She was such an excitable puppy.  She had a bit of a problem of peeing on the floor whenever people came home.  She just got so happy.  We trained that problem out of her by adulthood.  She wanted to be everybody’s friend.  Much to the chagrin of my cat and confidant – Lizzy.  Lizzy brutalized that puppy, to the point that even as an adult, who could bite her in half, she was afraid of her.  A trait that carried over to her puppy, Riley, when he tried to be her friend.

If there was a more friendly dog, I can’t think of one.  She was everybody’s friend the moment that she met them.  Hitler and Stalin could come in and she would try and be their best friends too.  I loved that quality.  Since the parents live out in the country, long walks around the woods were a favorite activity of hers.  Sometimes, she had a bit of trouble coming back when called.  The adventures were just too fun.

Now, while I say that she was given to me, the truth is that she wasn’t my dog.  Very quickly, it was the father-unit, Dave, who she bonded with.  Make no mistake, she was HIS animal.  Went absolutely everywhere with him.  Working in the garage, she was there.  Working outside, she was there.  In the plow truck clearing the road in the middle of winter, she was there.  She went absolutely everywhere with him.  He would complain, but the truth is, I think he liked having a little helper go everywhere with him.  One of my fondest memories from the old house is how I knew who everybody was by how they walk.  Since the basement was my favorite place to hang out, I could hear everybody walking around upstairs.  Sally (the mother-unit) had a slow and monotonous walk.  Not in a hurry to get anywhere.  The Sister had an angry walk.  For real, even her walk sounded pissed off.  I refuse to believe that she has arches on her feet.  But with the old man, everywhere he went, there was the clickety-click of doggie feet behind him.  For a while, it was Zoe, but then there was Riley.

See? Such a momma’s boy.

Riley is her puppy.  He has been such a momma’s boy.  He doesn’t appear all sad, but then, dogs process death different than people.  I envy that about them sometimes.  Everywhere that Zoe went, he wasn’t far behind.  If she got attention, he had to have some.  There was a constant competition to see who got the old man’s lap while he would watch the news or TV at night.  But the neatest thing to me was when, even though he was so much bigger than her, when Zoe got pissed at him, she could run him down and throw him over, showing that he may be bigger, but she was top dog.  Given how large he got, that was so neat to see.

I got a call a couple months ago that it was confirmed that Zoe had cancer.  In her lymph nodes.  Not a good way to go.  She was having a hard time breathing.  When I got home from college for the summer, I got to hear how labored it was myself.  That was hard.  Her death was nowhere near easy.  She still seemed happy, but she’s a dog.  Dogs always seem happy, if people are being nice to them.  And we were.  By the end, her sense of smell was gone, her eyesight was getting really bad and her breathing was like the bellows.  We knew that it was time to put her to sleep.

I couldn’t be there when it was done.  I had to be at work.  We all have to earn money, right?  Been thinking about it all day.  I get home, hearing that it was done.  Part of me is glad that I wasn’t there to see it.  Too cruel a thing, for me.

When I was a kid, I used to think that animals all had a kind of sacred place that they go when they die.  Some kind of place that only they can find.  Since the parents used to say that none of the cats that they owned died at home, I figured that when they got old, they went off to find that sacred place.  The final resting place of their kind.  I don’t believe in God or anything, but part of me still wishes that I believed that.  And that maybe, someday, I will go to that place, and find my friend again.  If there is an afterlife, I have a feeling that there is a ton of nature to explore.

That’s all I have to say, really.  I lose one more friend.  A friend who I’ll never get back.  Lately, I feel so alone here.  Alone, forevermore.

Normally, I close these things out with a quote from the person who passed, but this was a friend, and I don’t have a quote by them.  So, I will use a quote about the species.  Goodbye, my friend.  I hope that you are in a better place, even if I don’t believe that.

Until next time, a quote,

“Happiness is a warm puppy.”  -Charles M. Schultz

Peace out,

Maverick

Life on Autopilot

Haven’t done one of these posts in a while.  Posts about my own existential view on the world.  There is something about not being wanted, sexually.  Something about being a titan who isn’t all that much in the looks department leaves me getting almost no interest in fooling around.  Who knew?  But there is an upside to it all.  It offers one a chance to see things with a good deal more clarity than most people will ever have.  It’s not their fault that they don’t have clarity.  It’s just biology.

It’s quite simple, really – the human mind is programmed to want sex.  Because we want sex, when we have the chance to have it, we don’t want to lose that.  I know how strong that pull is.  However, House was right when he said that there are two things that people get stupid for – money and sex.  So, when one doesn’t have any interest or options in that department, it opens up an entirely new dichotomy of thought because one doesn’t have to worry about what it all means.

I have figured out why women tend to go for jerks over nice guys.  Don’t worry, ladies, this isn’t going to be me attacking you.  In fact, the reasons that you go for jerks isn’t mean-spirited at all.  I’ve always been of the belief that women are practical.  They like things to work in an efficient way.  They like things to be very direct and straight-forward.  I’ve always admired that.  They generally tend to take the most direct path to get what they want.  The most direct is not always something that required brute force, metaphorically speaking.  The direct path is the path that gets them the most gain for the least amount of effort.  Don’t think I’m calling you lazy.  I’m calling you smart.  Women generally tend to act with their logical processes.  Men, on the other hand, tend to just run in and care about the problems later.

Here’s the difference between nice guys and jerks – jerks get things done.  There is this really enlightening book called “Assholeology.”  It is a comedy book, but if you read it, the real-world applications are actually kind of profound.  Jerks is another word for assholes.  This book has some pretty smart reasons why assholes get ahead.  Jerks have very clear goals.  Jerks have a plan to get those goals.  Jerks don’t care what the consequences are.  Jerks will pursue that goal, regardless.  That is something that I naturally can see why women gravitate toward.  Guys who have a clear direction and are determined is going to be a group that they will get along with, by nature.  It’s the way of the world.

For those ladies who think that I am still attacking you, don’t.  Your reasons aren’t bad ones.  If anything, they’re logical.  They make sense to me.  That doesn’t make it any easier, because I am a nice guy, but I am starting to understand.  With understanding comes peace of mind.  I now understand my role in the world.

Nice guys are the guides to those that they care about.  They are those who give of themselves, knowing that they will never get what they give back.  They are the ones who try with all their might to make others happy, with the understanding that they cannot have that in kind.  The world is just too mean-spirited of a place for that.  This role is thankless, in every sense of the word.  Nice guys are the ones on the bottom who are perpetually kept their by the people who run the world – jerks.

Jerks are powerful.  Jerks don’t let the little issues like whether something is right or wrong stop them from doing whatever the fuck they want.  It is an admirable trait, in many respects.  Part of me wishes that I could be like that.  Life would get a LOT easier.  But it’s not who I am.

So, I continue one.  I keep going down that road, waiting to see what tomorrow has.  Like Urdnot Bakara, I am sustained by hope.  Hope that tomorrow will be better.  And if tomorrow is not better, there is always the next day.  It will be like this until we are ash that has spread across the winds and been forgotten by the world.  Never to be in the minds of the people we worked so hard to save, forevermore.

Being in love taught me something.  When Camille was still alive, her and I were a strange couple.  We both hated the world so much.  Our mutual hatred of it was a common talking point between the two of us.  We fed each other’s depression.  Maybe that is why her death has damaged me as much as it has.  We both were feeding the very worst qualities of the other, and now we are both irrevocably tainted by this.  Well, just me, now.  She has passed on from this world.  If there is something after all of this, I mean to find her again.  I mean to say sorry.  Sorry that things got so bad between us, toward the end.  Sure, she lied to me, betrayed my trust.  But why be angry, in the end?  Not worth it.

I live life on autopilot.  No particular direction.  No particular destination.  I see my life as a highway across a natural landscape.  Though the landscape changes from time to time as I walk down it, this road continues onward.  I have no idea where this road will take me, but I keep going.  Sometimes the landscape is beautiful, and I sit and enjoy it for as long as I can.  Other times, it is lifeless and I feel very alone.  But the road continues, and we continue on it, as that point inevitably comes where we no longer continue.  Where our ability to go on living ceases.  I do not lament that.  My morality is not something that frightens me.  It is the score that all of us get to settle up with after a while.

So, when I go, I tell people – do not mourn for me.  Life is too short for that.  Instead, when that day does come that my end approaches, take a moment and remember what I did.  Then, let me slide from your memory as the thoughts of living take over.  I am one of those people who is somehow very easy for people to forget, even though I am a titan.  I take that for what I will.

Until next time, a quote,

“Wheel of life.  Popular Salarian concept.  Similar to human Hinduism in focus on reincarnation.  Appealing to see life as endless.  Fix mistakes in next life.  Learn, adapt, improve.  Refuse to believe life ends here.  Too wasteful.  Have more to offer.  Mistakes to fix.  Cannot end here.”  -Mordin Solus, Mass Effect 2

Peace out,

Maverick

What is Love?

Before you ask, no, I am not going to do the ‘Baby Don’t Hurt Me’ pun.  It’s been done to death.  Even if it is an obscure reference.  I have asked what really controversial topics are, like what is God? (fake) What is Faith? (Ignorance) and I am even working on a post called What is Death? (the end) But probably the most talked-about thing that has ever been in the history of the human race is this – what is love?  From the shitty pop artists of today to the great poets of the past, it seems like love is the just the awesome thing in the history of ever.  All of humanity imbues love with sacrosanct status.  The idea is that all of life is designed for the express purpose of this chemical interaction in the brain.

Speaking of the brain, let’s start there.  The reality is that love isn’t one thing.  We like to think that it is, but it’s not.  There are multiple aspects to it that need to be addressed.  The first is lust.  When you see somebody who you are sexually attracted to, your relationship may start there.  Unless you are a genuinely nice guy.  In which case, you will be friend-zoned and passed over for jerks.  Life’s a bitch.  But the basis of all romantic love is lust.  There is not a single piece of romantic love that hasn’t started there.  And I can see so many of you already commenting that I’m wrong.  You will talk about how that doesn’t matter.  Well, let me call bullshit and pass you off.  If it didn’t start there, then the human race would have died out long ago.  We are programmed to be sexually attracted to certain things.  I hear a lot of women say that intelligence is sexy.  Yeah, I have yet to hear any of those women say that Steven Hawking is hot.

So, it starts out with lust.  But then there is another part of human behavior that is programmed into us – bonding.  Romantic bonds are formed due to another primal behavior for us to find mates and carry on our genetic code.  I am one of those people who says that the primal instincts to have as many mates as possible affects men and women equally.  Women will say that guys only want one thing, but the truth is that they are just as sexually open-minded as men.  They just won’t admit it.  Their loss.  We were programmed to have as many mates as possible.  The idea is that we find the best mates to continue our genetic code.  It is one of the many reasons that I think that monogamy is outdated.  We fight against our primal nature because of 2,000 years of “moral” guidance for western society.  Namely religion.  Hence the quotes around “moral.”

A romantic bond cannot remain as strong as it started forever.  That’s the cold truth.  Again, I can already hear so many of you who are getting ready to refute this.  But the cold truth about this is that since we are designed to seek multiple mates, we will start to want something new.  We are constantly fighting against our nature to have the romantic structure that we do have.  To overcome our natural tendency to want something else, people have to do a simple action – no longer see the person they are with as a romantic partner.  Instead, they become a best friend.  That is how marriages last.  It all comes down to brain chemistry.

For all the grandiosity that we try and bestow on love, the reality is that love is nothing more than brain chemistry.  But why does society want to believe that love is so wonderful?  Well, as I see it, the reason is simple – life sucks.  It really does.  Life is a giant grinding pain in the ass that we all have to suffer through.  Love is an emotion that makes one feel so amazing.  It raises people up.  It makes days brighter.  It makes the entire world seem like a better place, even if only for a little while.  Love is the emotion that gives so much to so many.  When you have to go to a shitty job and deal with shitty people, what is better than coming home to a person who cares?  That is the reason that logic goes out the window when people fall in love.  People will do whatever it takes to keep love in their lives.  So many horribly bad choices are made for love.  The reason is because people want to believe that it means something.

I was once a very profound romantic.  That part of me is dead and buried.  I have no part of me that believes that love is worth all the effort that people go through to have it.  I talk to people who are head-over-brain in love, and so many bad decisions are made.  I see train-wrecks that are coming, but do they listen?  No.  Of course not.  Tell somebody that they are on the wrong course and they will naturally rebel against it.

So, what is love?  Is it brain chemistry?  Is it a profound philosophical concept?  Is it the fabric that keeps our world together?  Is it all you need?  Is it everything?  The answer is that it is none of those things.  Love is the thing that keeps people from slipping into despair.  Love is the way that people avoid hurting.  Love is the thing that gives people’s life purpose, because they have nothing else.  Love is a means to an end.  Love is the way that people can deny that life hurts them.  Love is how they will see that things are better.

Love is ignorance.  The same way that religion and faith are.  It feels good, but that’s it.  It feels good.  Beyond that, why do we care so much?  Don’t think that I am insulting you by saying that it is ignorance.  Lies are what keeps the world running.  The lies that we tell others, and the ones we tell ourselves.  I won’t shame that on anyone.  It’s how we survive.  And that’s all I have to say.

Until next time, a quote,

“I imagine John Watson thinks love’s a mystery to me, but the chemistry is incredibly simple and very destructive…I’ve always assumed that love is a dangerous disadvantage. Thank you for the final proof.”  -Sherlock Holmes, Sherlock

Peace out,

Maverick

The Mother’s Day Dissonance

Dissonance, that is the word that I would use to describe my thoughts on this holiday.  Don’t think that I am going to be criticizing it on its merits or just saying that it’s dumb.  Far from it.  And I also want to point out that I am not in any way criticizing your mothers or what they have done in your life.  There are a ton of amazing mothers in the world who have done great things for their kids.  But at the same time, it must be recognized that there are also a ton of deadbeat moms who mess their kids up and are a detriment to their kids’ lives.  But here is the thing that gives me dissonance about this holiday – why is somebody just being a mother celebrated?

For those among you who want to do the knee-jerk reaction that they gave birth to the kid, don’t.  So do dogs, cats, snakes, sharks and army ants.  If anything, the queen of an ant colony should get a lot more respect if simply bearing children is why this is a celebrated holiday.  They bear thousands of them.  Most queens bear hundreds of off-spring per day.  So yeah, that is not a good criteria for why there should be a special day for them.

Perhaps it is being a parent.  That reason does make some sense to me.  Honoring the parents in your life who make your life what it is is a wonderful thing to do.  But why one parent in-particular?  Since I won’t be making a post about it, I should point out that this post is also a commentary on Father’s Day.  Another day that has the same problems as this one.  Though it can’t be defended as easily as Mother’s Day can.

However, the problem in celebrating this day because of the good mothers doesn’t hold up because as I have pointed out, not all of them are good.  Some of them are pieces of shit.  My late fiance was abandoned at a group home with her little sister because her mother couldn’t take care of them.  Part of me still wants to find their mother and kick the shit out of her for abandoning her kid, because she couldn’t get clean off of drugs and look after them.  But let’s not drill into the past.  I am hashing this out because I am trying to look for a good metric to have this holiday be what it is on merits alone.

When I brought this up to a friend of mine, she pointed out that religious implications.  In most religions, the mother has a special place that is supposed to be honored.  Most religions see them as sacred because they can create new life.  I guess the writers of their text didn’t know that it takes two, and that the father is equally-important to provide both the genetic material but also in creation.  While the mother may carry the offspring, it cannot be denied that the father is just as important in the creation of it.  Not to mention that I am not a religious person.

Since religion means nothing to me, as I am a man of science, how am I supposed to accept that one parental-unit should be honored exclusively for that reason?  Similarly, how can I accept that the other parental-unit should also be given a special day as well?  There is no direct correlation between a holiday and a group of people existing.

So, what do I think should happen?  Well, to be honest, I think that we should scrap both Mother’s and Father’s day.  Instead, since there are some mothers and some fathers who are worthless sacks of garbage who do nothing but bring pain and misery, I have a different idea – Parent’s Day.  A day that honors the contributions of your parents and all that they have given you.  A day that recognizes that you are who you are because of what they gave you.

For those who want to call foul because the same problems that I said before are prevalent here, I think that this holiday undercuts them, to an extent.  If one of your parents suck, then you can recognize the other.  If both of them do, then you only have one day to have that point ground home in your mind.

Like I said, I’m not criticizing your parents or saying that this holiday is worthless.  Recognizing what your parents have done for you is something that we all should do.  But a parent isn’t worth recognizing because they exist.  This is tied into my thoughts on respect.  Respect is earned.  It isn’t given just because of who somebody is, or their relation to you.  Whenever somebody tells me to respect my elders, I want to almost laugh.  Why?  Because they’re older?  That does NOT entitle them to respect.  Similarly, a parent just being a parent doesn’t mean that we should treat them with some sort of unearned respect.

Don’t take this personal.  I mean no offense to anyone.  Just think about it.  That’s all I ask.

Until next time, a quote,

“Get to know your parents.  You never know when they’ll be gone for good.”  -Baz Luhrmann, Everybody’s Free To Wear Sunscreen 

Peace out,

Maverick

The Small Moments

Being an unrequited romantic, whose romantic side has more or less died on the vine, I have a lot of thoughts about those little moments that we get in life.  See, the truth is that life is merely a collection of moments.  There are good moments, bad moments and moments that show us for who we really are.  All of these moments are connected by one thing – the small moments.  For clarity’s sake, let me define what the small moments are.  The small moments are those brief, almost unnoticeable points in time that you are given to comprehend a situation.  It is a point where you are seeing what is coming and can prepare yourself.  And it is my personal belief that the small moments are the moments that make life worth anything.

Take a small moment I had on Saturday night.  I was taking a friend to the airport.  This is a girl that I have gotten very close to recently.  She is leaving, and I don’t know when, if ever, she will return.  I thought that this was going to be an unbelievably miserable experience.  In some respects, it was.  But there was a small moment that occurred between us, right before a major moment that I still am thinking about.  All the time.

I have synesthesia.  It can occur in any number of ways, but for me, it occurs when I taste something.  Whenever I taste anything, there is a reaction where I see a color.  All tastes have colors.  The best tastes have the color blue.  The worst tastes have the colors brown, orange, pink and yellow.  Now, this doesn’t affect me with things like my own spit, because that has taste.  My body just got used to it.  Lord knows, I’ve had this body long enough.

One neat bi-product of this condition is that all the people that I’ve kissed have taste to, and each one has their own unique color.  So, this girl and I had talked about this before.  It was a passing conversation that we both enjoyed.  One of many.  But tonight, with the future of us being able to see each other very much in question, she got proactive.  She wanted to know her color.  Our friendship was tight enough where she could trust me with this.

The small moment came as I said that I was up for it and that the next move was hers.  She came closer and that is when it hit.  Right as we were barely apart, that small moment occurred.  It was…amazing.  Nothing short of breath-taking.  The look in her eyes were just amazing.  And that kiss was incredible.  I haven’t had a kiss that good in a LONG time.

But right after that, there was another small moment.  When it ended, and I was feeling like this was the best thing that could have happened, she kissed me again.  She already had the information that she wanted.  I told her her color.  Velvet red.  What a beautiful color.  But she kissed us again.  Another wonderful moment in time.  Right as I knew that it was going to happen, that perfect balance of beauty and touch made my nerves run wild.  I felt great.

It felt good for a couple of reasons.  The first is that my skills with my lips were still razor-sharp, even though I haven’t gotten to employ them in a LONG time.  That was pretty swell.  The other thing is that I have felt very much unwanted lately.  When you are a titan and not much in the looks-department, it makes it so that very few people notice you.  I have felt so unwanted lately that when a woman was asked by her kid if I was handsome, and she said yes, I felt like a new person.  That was a nice compliment, even if not directed at me.

The little moments are all I really have.  With my health never in the best place, I may not have all that much time left.  I have enough, but time is never my ally, and I am aware of that.  So, getting a soft kiss from a beautiful woman makes all the difference in the world.  Sure, now that she is gone, it has come back to me how sad it all is.  It might be a LONG time until I see her again.  Who knows – with law school and whatnot, she may never come back up here.

I choose to believe that it is all worth something.  Even if all life does is give me shit, I have to believe that all of the shit that life gives me is worth something.  It doesn’t have to be a compelling something.  Hell, it doesn’t even have to be a truly worthwhile something.  It just has to be worth something that I can see and understand.  It’s getting harder and harder to believe it.  My heart aches from both the medical and the emotional.

When Camille was around, I will say that one draw between us that probably worked against us in the long run is that we tended to fuel one-another’s depression.  She was as depressed as I was.  Our mutual hatred of life and the world made it so that mocking it was a common pasttime.  Once she was gone, I lost that.  I can’t try too hard to find it again, because I have already seen how that can push people away.

I am so tired, lately.  My job fucking sucks and hardly anybody seems to want to hang out lately.  It is getting so hard, finding reasons to keep going.  But I do keep going.  I can’t tell you why.  Maybe it is best that I don’t know.  But then there are the small moments.  Those moments where you feel like you aren’t going to just crumble into your own life and the pathetic bullshit that it is on all sides of it.  I choose to believe that those moments are worth something.  Even if it isn’t profound, it is worth something.  It has to be.  If not…then maybe there will come a point where my mind’s lack of a desire to wake up will finally convince my body that it’s the right thing to do.

Until next time, a quote,

“If I laughed at every bonehead stunt you pulled, I’d laugh myself to death!” -Baron Franz d’Epinay, Gankutsuou: The Count of Monte Cristo

Peace out,

Maverick

The Boston Bombing and My Thoughts

Today there was a bombing in the city of Boston.  At the time of this post, two people are confirmed dead, and dozens are injured.  From reports, there were two explosives.  This is an act of terrorism, and it saddens me that there are people in this world that would do things like this.  But I do have a few thoughts.

We Americans take for granted how safe we actually are.  In countries like Afghanistan or Iraq, they don’t have that luxury.  I will never for a second condone this tragic event, but the fact that Americans are so complacent is interesting to me.  After 9/11, the people were terrified.  American soil had been attacked.  Over 1,000 people died.  This sort of thing made our nation so scared that it immediately had people willing to throw away their freedoms to feel safer.  You can bet that the media had a field-day with this fear.  The reports that were coming out were about as gloom-and-doom as it gets.

Then you have the other side of this equation – the people who want to believe that danger is every single place.  They had absolutely no problem throwing away freedoms after 9/11.  I cannot tell you how many people in my immediate area were saying stupid hyperbole like, “people shouldn’t be worried if they’ve got nothing to hide!”  That sort of sentiment just drove me up the wall.  But hey, that’s America for ya.  And when the government decided to make some unbelievably stupid decisions following a tragic event, we all went along with it, because fear and sensationalism were rampant.  I am hoping that this tragedy is not another repeat of that, should it be found out that a terrorist organization was responsible.  If we are EVER going to get out of our species infancy, we have to start being able to talk about things.  Otherwise, this kind of tribalism is going to drive us into the ground.  That is, to be honest, how I think the human race will end.

Though all things being said and done, here’s what we need to remember – we need to be able to talk about this.  I am one of the people who thinks that when we are going overboard about these issues, we are basically just selling out our freedoms for not even close to what they are worth.  What’s more, these discussions need to be rational!  I cannot tell you how many people are already online saying that this is the Muslims.  Then there are the conspiracy whack-jobs who are saying that this was all one big government scheme.  I swear, those people must think that our government is the most well-oiled machine in the world to make every single national tragedy happen without a single open omission or confession from one of the people involved.  But the reality here is that we aren’t rational about this.  Battle lines are already being drawn and we are already starting to fight it out.

Another thing that I want to add, if this was a terrorist attack, is that I have a very galvanizing opinion about terrorist attacks (if that is indeed what this was).  See, here is my thought – I have a TON more respect for the tradition mob hitman than I do for a person who kills innocent people for what they believe is a cause.  There are a couple reasons why.

The first is that the mob hitman doesn’t do this because of some delusion of it being a for a good cause.  The hitman is doing it for money.  They are doing it to survive.  They do a job that they know they are good at (if they have been alive doing it for a long time, they know that) and that they know will earn them the money they need.  This person has an understandable reason for their work.  Whether you agree with it or not, that should make sense to you.

The second reason is that the mob hitman doesn’t kill innocent people to do their job.  Don’t go off on me before you think about it.  They have a target.  A professional enforcer for the mob will know to take out their target in the most efficient way possible.  Does gunning that person down in a large crowd sound efficient to you?  Absolutely not.  They do their work in a way that can maximize efficiency while minimizing risk.  That’s the smart way to do these things, and criminals are a lot smarter than people give them credit for.

Look, this is a tragedy.  We should take time to mourn the victims and try and help those who can be helped.  One of the refreshing reports I got after this was that people were running in to where the blasts were to help those who were hurt.  That’s the kind of attitude that we should have.  We should come together and work together, instead of taking to the internet to fight it out.

Consensus is possible.  Our species doesn’t have to follow its usual pattern of immediately finding ways to get mad at each other.  But maybe I am just being too hopeful.  Keep the people involved in this tragedy in your thoughts.  Pray for them, if you must.  But most of all, please, keep an open mind and try and think about this rationally.  Please?  I am tired of hearing reports about how another school shooting has devolved into an argument about gun rights, when it should be us looking at what the causes of people’s violence are (and please don’t insult my intelligence by saying violent movies and video games.  That’s ignorance at its worst).  I am sick of tragedy being a battle over which rights that we lose.  We need to be smarter than this.

Otherwise, the point that others have made countless times before me is true – the terrorists have won.

Until next time, a quote,

“But it’s pretty obvious that a lot of people, in the absence of any kind of definitive answers, are clamoring for someone to blame.  And, really, in my opinion, that shouldn’t be our first imperative.  We shouldn’t immediately say ‘who can we blame for this?’  We should be all about finding the truth.”  -TJ Kirk, THE BOSTON BOMBING – What happens now?

Peace out,

Maverick

RIP, Roger Ebert

When I was a kid, I remember channel-surfing one day and coming across a show that immediately got my attention.  In this show, there were two guys who were talking about movies.  Some of them were movies that I had seen.  I perked up.  I listened to them go back and forth for half an hour about these movies.  When the show was over, I was a little bummed.  I wanted to see more.  This was before the days of the internet, when I could just go online and look at people talking about stuff.  And I didn’t always agree with these two guys.  Sometimes, I thought they were dead wrong.  But I always was engaged, and if they were around today, with the internet blogosphere, I can guarantee you that I would have been debating with them about stuff on Twitter of wherever.  And believe it or not, I would be respectful about it, because I respected the intelligence of these two guys, and the passion they brought to the world of critiquing cinema.  The two guys were Gene Siskel and Roger Ebert.

Let’s all admit it, almost all of us, if not all of us, have grown up watching Siskel and Ebert.  We wanted to know what these two guys had to say about movies that we might have seen.  We wanted to know what their opinion was.  Even if we disagreed.  When Siskel said that he didn’t like Mark Hamill’s work as the Joker in Batman: Mask of the Phantasm, I wanted to strangle him.  How could you not like that?!  Did you not hear the perfect contrast between humor and menace?!  Did the brilliance of Hamill’s portrayal, which perfectly captured what the Joker represented (madness and humor) elude you?!  Ugh!

But regardless of those differences, I and every single one of you came back.  In 1999, when Siskel passed away after a long battle with cancer, and so many of us were thinking that the show was going to stop.  But no, Ebert and his love of cinema carried on.  Sure, the show wasn’t as great as it had been before, but Ebert and his perspective on cinema still carried so much weight.

I remember when Ebert published the article where he said that video games are not and could never be art.  I couldn’t disagree with him more, by the way, but the thing that interested me the most about that was how almost everybody came out.  Battle lines formed on both sides.  And the two sides took to a battle of words online.  Countless YouTube videos, blogs and Twitters posts.  Some of them were the usual ranting BS that we have come to expect from the internet.  But what surprised me most was how many people didn’t do that.  So many people came at this from a professional point of view, talking about this rationally.  Why?  I mean, arguments on the internet usually devolve into bouts of who can say “fuck” the most times.  What made this different?  What made this different was that it was Roger Ebert who said this.  Roger Ebert, a man who was the uncontested zen-master of cinema.  And if you wanted to argue his point of view, you came at it in a way that was professional.  You came at it in a way that was intelligent.  There was no requisite of that.  It’s not like me or anybody else who argued against it would ever be read by him.  But we did it anyway, because it was what most people believed was the right thing to do.

Roger Ebert had a passion for film that was and probably will never be rivaled.  Well, except maybe by Gene Siskel.  He viewed this as important, because cinema says something about modern society.  That level of passion is something that I think every single one of us looks for.  We all want to have something in our lives that matters to us as much as this.  And even though I didn’t consciously think about it back then, my passion for finding a good story was partly inspired by that.  I absolutely LOVE a good story.  A good story is worth so much.  And like Ebert, I think that the stories that we tell say something about the time in which we live.  It’s the reason why I am so involved in the future of gaming.  Video games are pioneering new stories, because they are seeing the potential they have in telling them.  Look at Mass Effect.  That series had a story that had all the grandeur of a galactic-size story.  We felt the weight of the entire galaxy by the end of the series.  It had a massive world that it let us explore.  It let you learn about every little thing you wanted to know.  Whether gamers will admit it or not, that is what kept us coming back.  And it’s the reason that the ending to Mass Effect 3 was so angering.  The story didn’t matter anymore, and we were being talked down-to by the people who made it.  Great stories have the potential to be fully explored by the pixel medium.

A great man has left the world.  He inspired so many.  He was watched by us all.  He was a voice we went to, even if we didn’t agree.  We wanted to know his opinion, because that opinion was important.  Ebert never once backed down from his positions.  When he said that gaming would never be art, he stood tall to the critics.  He stood tall to Kellee Santiago and her presentation at TED Talks where she argued against him.  I will disagree with him forever, but his passionate defense of his beliefs, and how well he articulated them is just amazing, and I will always respect him for it.

I don’t believe in Heaven or any of that sort of stuff.  But, on the off-chance I’m wrong, and there is an afterlife, I hope that Siskel is saving you a seat, and you can continue to enjoy the show.

Rest in peace, Ebert.  You’ve earned it.

Until next time, a quote,

“Well, we saw the same picture, but my thumb is way down!  I wanted to escape from this movie!  I didn’t care if the asteroid hit the Earth or not, I was afraid the movie was gonna hit me!”  -Roger Ebert, Siskel and Ebert

Peace out,

Maverick

Saying Goodbye is Always the Hardest

As the semester is drawing to a close, I have been left with a fair number of things to think about.  Things that are leaving me, for the most part, very unsettled.  It has been a long road, and I am not very eager to see it’s end.  For once, the destination is more averse to me than the journey.  But, as with most things, it cannot be changed, so I do what I can.  I look at the future as it is coming to meet me, wondering what life has in store for me next.

It has been a hard year.  I will do as I did last year and make a post where I talk about it all once it actually does come to an end.  But before that, let me say that I have had a lot happen to me, and it has left some marks.  I did a lot of growing-up this semester.  Unfortunately, it wasn’t for good reasons.  Some people grow up because they are getting new responsibilities, like marriage or having children.  The latter isn’t anything I am into, but I can see why people would feel a need to become a better person for it.  And once upon a time, marriage was something that I wanted.  I grew out of that as well this year.  My inner romantic has died a slow and agonizingly painful death.  But it is dead now, never to return.

However, something that I am going to be looking at in the near future is the sight of a friend depart the state, never to return.  She has a bright future ahead of her, and will be continuing her education down in the States.  Once that is done, she will be returning to California, to begin her career as a lawyer.  Naturally, I wish her the very best, as I do with anybody.  Wishing ill on a person who hasn’t wronged you seems cold to me.  Of course, it will still be so hard to watch her go.  My time with her has been one of the few things about this semester that matters to me.  The few bright spots among the absolutely miserable rest of the year.  One that I won’t lament one bit, once it’s gone.

So many of my friends have either graduated or gone off from this place.  Sure, I keep up with them via Facebook and the like, but it isn’t the same.  You can’t get the small and subtle little bits of conversation that make you both laugh.  You don’t have the small moments where you can enjoy a person’s company.  The little smiles that show that even though they don’t want to admit it, you made them feel good.  Part of what I love to do with friends is to make them smile then they are sad.  It’s a gift I have.  I can make almost anybody smile.  I have a feeling that I got that from Sally (the mother-unit).  But yeah, being with a person on the internet just isn’t the same.

There are so many people who I wish were still around.  One of my oldest and best friends used to live just down the road from here.  I would sashay over to her place as often as I could.  It was wonderful.  They left and I didn’t even get a chance to say goodbye.  They were just gone.  I will probably never see them in the flesh again.  I have tried keeping up with said friend online, but that is a well that is also going dry.  Why?  Well, that’s a mystery for both of us.

One of the family dogs was in surgery, recently.  It was found that she has a mass in her throat, making it harder for her to breathe.  Preliminary findings point to it being cancer.  If this is the case, that means that a dog who was given to me, so very long ago, looks to be on her way out of this world.  This hurts me for a couple reasons.  The first is that I love this dog.  True, she and her puppy are the old man’s dogs.  She may have been given to me after a surgery of my own, but she is his dog.  She follows him everywhere, sits on his lap and is basically his buddy in everything he does around the house and the neighborhood.  Still, like the rest of the family, I love that girl to death.  She has been an awesome dog.  About as sweet as can be, but not the over-exuberant joy that her puppy has for the entire world.  Seeing her go will be incredibly difficult.

But then there is another thing it makes me think of – my kitty.  See, we have family dogs.  But the cat, who I grew up with but still live with the parents because that’s where she has lived her whole life and is most comfortable, is most definitely MY animal.  Every time I am around, that cat is to me what the dogs are to my old man.  Her and I are thick as thieves.  That’s not to say that she doesn’t have some affinity for other people.  She likes the parents, mostly because they give her attention.  But every time I am out there, as I will be this summer, she comes running and hardly ever leaves me alone.  My old man complains about the dogs.  I don’t complain about the cat.  I like having somebody who wants me around like that.  It’s nice.  With a person, it would probably be creepy and disturbing.  With the cat, it is kind of sweet.  Still, she is one of my best friends, mostly because it isn’t easy for me to make close friends and the friends I have now are going off and doing their own things.  Going a new direction that involves me less and less.  Which is fine.  For real, I’m not hating on that.  I’m just saying that this is what it is, and the fact that I am okay with it doesn’t make it any easier.

Sorry, went on a tangent there.  But the point is that my kitty is older than the family dog, Zoe.  It makes me think about how she can’t have too much longer left, which really hurts me because she is one of my best friends.  Losing her will be awful.  I have no doubt that it will be agonizingly painful for some time.

When I was younger, my parents remarked that none of the cats people had ever died at home.  In their history, this was true.  The cats that their respective families had had, since we lived out in the middle of nowhere, always had a habit of going out one night, in their older years, and disappearing.  Personally, I always kind of liked that story.  I imagined that they would go to some sort of sacred place.  A sacred resting ground.  Like certain cultures, who would have pilgrimages to the sacred place of their people to rest.  Of course, now that I’m older, I know better, but still, it’s a nice thought.

Saying goodbye is the hardest thing in the world.  At the end of the semester, when this friend of mine goes home, I know that I will shed a tear or two.  Not in front of her, mind you.  As I said, I don’t want to make a person feel bad when they truthfully have done nothing wrong.  But that doesn’t mean it isn’t going to hurt.  It will.  But there’s nothing that can be done about it now.  Now, we are just stuck where we are, and that’s how it goes.

I am feeling very old, these days.  I wish the vitality would come back to me.

Until next time, a quote,

“I feel old…this game is rigged, man.  We like them little bitches on the chess board.”  -Bodie, The Wire

Peace out,

Maverick

How to be a Career Mother

Well, you are at that age, ladies.  Your biological clock is ticking, so you think to yourself – I am going to have that perfect child!  That child who will make all the other mothers in your neighborhood jealous.  The child who is perfect in every single way!  Good for you.  And now, I will tell you exactly how you can make this amazing dream come to fruition.

1. You are the smartest person in the entire world and don’t you forget it!
You have read every single book about how to be the best mother ever!  You have taken classes, watched educational films and talked to the leading experts.  Armed with this knowledge, you know exactly what to expect from your future child and you are ready to show it how to behave in this world!  Now, there will be people who will question this unrivaled intellect, like the kid’s teachers, your doctor and your neighbors who have the awesome kids who you are trying to surpass.  But they are idiots!  Who cares how much they are with your child and how good their education is?  Clearly they don’t have your amazing level of perception and knowledge about being a parent.

2. Your child is a genius, no matter what anyone says
Since you are going to be the perfect parent, you have been  already preparing for the absolute genius that your child will be.  You played Mozart for it when it was growing inside of you.  Your child is going to be the most absolutely amazing kid ever. I mean, sure, it does stupid things like try and eat its blocks, but that’s totally normal.  Didn’t you hear when your baby spoke German!  Most people who heard that said that it was what babies say, but you know better.  It was German.  Your baby is the smartest baby in the world!  Einstein would have a run for his money.

3. Don’t let your child do what they want
It is only natural that you impose all of your desires and dreams on to your kid.  Sure, they may not like doing it, but hey, they’re just a kid!  They’re too stupid to know what they’re doing anyway.  I mean, so what if they are supposed to learn and grow in a totally organic way that lets them find their passions?  That’s stupid!  Children should be required to be the host for all the failed dreams that their parents had.  I mean, what’s the point of having kids if you can’t live through your youth through them?  And don’t listen when they are sad and want to do something else.  Like I said, they’re kids.  Just stupid kids who should defer to you for everything.  Kids know nothing, except what you tell them.

4. Never, ever let your child have free time!
Free time leads to all sorts of awful things!  They might not be preparing for their schoolwork!  After all, if they don’t get a jump-start on the best preschools, then they won’t get into a good elementary school.  And then, they won’t get into a good middle school!  Then, they won’t get into a good high school!  And then, colleges won’t want them!  And finally, they’ll end up in a gutter or jail!  Yeah, best if you just keep them on a short leash and control all the free time that they have.  It’s only safe.

5. Control every single aspect of their lives
Remember how we said that your kid would be lost without you?  Well, this means that you have to make absolutely sure that there isn’t a single thing in your child’s life that isn’t FIRMLY under your control.  When they play, when they see their “friends” (we all know that a child’s best friend is their mother), what they watch, what they eat.  When they are were a baby, you had to control everything they did.  So why shouldn’t the rest of their childhood be the same?  It is only safe.  In fact, if you watched your kid constantly, that would probably be the best.  Never let them out of your sight.  You must always be there for if anything goes wrong.  Oh, and while we’re on the subject…

6. If something goes wrong in their life, it is everybody else’s fault
There might be days when you get a call from your child’s school.  They will say things like your child isn’t doing very well, gets into fights or just isn’t good at the work.  Well, rest easy, perfect mother.  For you can be rest-assured that it isn’t your amazing child’s fault.  There are the incompetent teachers, for one thing.  They spend all day looking after kids.  So naturally they are not able to see how amazing your child is and cater to their needs.  Then there are the other idiot children who didn’t have amazing mothers like you.  They are on the level of wild animals!  And then there is the absolutely awful television!  Make sure that you never, ever suspect that your child might have done wrong, or that you have somehow failed.  It is the rest of the world’s fault.

7. Constantly tell them that they are wonderful and can do no wrong
Since you are the perfect mother, you have naturally raised the perfect child!  This kid will be the perfect athlete, a genius on the level of Einstein and is friends with every single person.  And you must remind them of this constantly.  If they aren’t first at something, make sure that they know that they are also a winner.  Because if they realized that they lost, well, you saw the causal chain above, didn’t you?  Yes, this is the best thing to do.

So, did you get all that?  Well, hopefully you did.  Now you can go out and make the world’s most amazing child!  And remember, since your child will have a completely sheltered life, which won’t prepare them for the real world, you will have them with you for a long time.  Like the rest of your entire life.

Think about it.

Until next time, a quote,

“That’s what you have to remember as you go through life in this country – it’s all bullshit, and it’s bad for ya.”  -George Carlin

Peace out,

Maverick