Category: ultrapersonal

Attack of the Enzymes

This was gonna be the Halloween when I actually had fun. I had the basic idea for a costume, I had invitations to parties thrown by two different sassy ladies, and I was eager to go out after a few consecutive weekends of out-of-town trips.

My enthusiasm for the whole thing started to dwindle late Wednesday night as I clutched the rim of the toilet bowl, when it became clear I’d been having more than just a little heartburn for the previous few days. On Friday, the doc confirmed my amateur diagnosis: ulcer!

Woohoo! A weekend full of stomach pain, bland soups, applesauce, and water instead of candy and hijinks! The coolest part of all was having to watch out for enough blood or anything that require a trip to the emergency room.

Fun!

Well, things are OK and my bland soups have been staying down, but my stomach still hurts and I still have to go have a tube with a camera shoved down my gullet tomorrow. That ought to be more fun the weekend I’d been planning, right?

9/11/03

So it’s the anniversary of that day again. Like last year, I’ve been avoiding the news because it makes me mad: I don’t want to see the endless human-interest stories, I don’t want to bask in the grief, I definitely don’t want to see the entire thing used as a cheap political rhetorical device. I get pissed off as all hell because it makes me feel like I no, like all of us are being used. And there’s no reason to expect otherwise, consideirng the impact of that nightmare, but I don’t want to get mad because it’s just more getting mad at the same shitheads that always make me mad. I don’t want to get mad again when I’m still trying to figure out why I still get so sad once in a while.

You see, I also avoid the news and the documentaries and the specials because I know they’ll play me like a fiddle. Not so much all the commentary and the memorials and whatnot, but the documentation of the experience still bothers me a lot. I still get sick to my stomach and I still end up on the verge of tears when I see that footage, when I read about the details of the day, when I’m made to imagine and remember and empathize.

It’s the wound. It’s this big, gaping, barely healed wound that I developed that one morning when the shit hit the fan and we had no idea what was happening and what we could do about it. I mourn for the dead, I feel for their families and friends, and I worry about the world we live in, but those are all intellectual abstractions to one degree or another. I don’t know anyone who died, nor do I think we are more or less at risk than I did when I woke up that morning. This world is a big, violent, dangerous place and that wasn’t the worst thing that has ever happened, or will ever happen. Talking about the event and putting it in context doesn’t explain what keeps happening in my gut.

I wasn’t in the area of the World Trade Center, but I ran for my life that day. We all ran for our lives that day, trying to get the fuck back to our homes or to our loved ones or to anyplace that felt safe. In a literal a sense a few million of us did run for our lives, streaming through the streets and over bridges and through tunnels to get far away, to any place less likely to be another target in all that pandemonium. But where could we find safety if the attacks seemed to be happening all over? There was news, but it was too much that came too fast and offered too little. All it confirmed was that there was carnage and confusion and danger and that we were all sharing it, so there was no one to calm us down, just other people with those same desperate looks on their faces. I’d never experienced something that bad, that big. It rocked me to the core in a way that I would never have expected, and I can’t really explain or understand why the effects linger.

The Great Blackout of Aught-Three

The Great Blackout of Aught-Three, as experienced by me:

  • Frankly, I enjoyed it. I have many blessings to count, I realize I live within a feasible walking distance from home, I was wearing comfortable shoes, the iPod was fully charged and loaded (and it also makes an excellent source of light in a darkened emergency stairwell), my apartment’s not that stuffy so I had a much easier time of it than a lot of other people. Still, it was a nice enough day and it was pretty interesting to see what was going on during the hike uptown and over the bridge. I have to admit that at times I had to stop myself from breaking into song along with the iPod, because I was so nonplussed about the whole experience, and I was finding so pleasant to just walk and watch people and stuff.
  • I LOVE NYOf course, it all would have been so much worse if the rest of the city hadn’t been so laid back about it all. Compared to that other time, no one was was freaking out that I could see. We calmly climbed down the 20 stories to the street, where people were hanging out talking to others, deciding what to do. Walking up Lexington Avenue toward the Queensboro Bridge, people were waiting calmly on lines at pay phones, delis, and ice cream trucks, and the only ones being assholes were the fat-cats sealed up in their SUVs who were pissed off that they didn’t have the right of way anymore. And for once, no one was greeting their hostility with more hostility. People were just rolling their eyes at the temper tantrums. Every truck driver with extra room was telling people to hop on, and at the bridge there was a human chain lifting others onto the upper roadway for the trudge home.
  • If I had to be stuck in a major city during a massive power blackout, I’m sure as hell glad it was this one. New York’s active street-level culture is normally a plus from a social standpoint, but it’s also useful in a crisis. It’s a pedestrian city, so if you’re forced to hike across it, there is no shortage of places to get water, food, or alcohol. There are lots of payphones, in case the cellular networks are down or overloaded. People are used to regular contact with strangers, so it’s not a big deal to interact with your neighbors or other people on the street. It becomes much more of a shared event.
  • I’m very grateful that delis and greengrocers stayed open long enough to let people stock up on provisions for the night. All we had at home was a half-gallon of milk and some wheat bread, so I was lucky to grab some fruit to snack on during the night.
  • Even with my rose-tinted view of life in New York, I was amazed at the lack of street crime and looting, especially after living through the blackout of ’77, and then later living in the middle of the neighborhood (Bushwick) where most of the looting and the fires took place. I guess it was part of the relief that this was just a blackout. Also, I have to give our charisma-free mayor some credit for telling everyone the power would be back by midnight last night. By letting everyone think it would get back to normal soon, those announcements probably prevented a lot of mayhem during the night.
  • I’d always believed the party line about this problem being solved after ’77, but I guess a certain vulnerability is the nature of any interconnected system. Even if safeguards had been put in place since ’77, I suspect that power usage has increased enough to leave us back in the same position. Bush is already yapping on about how the system needs to be modernized, but I bet he’s thinking along the lines of lucrative contracts to his pals in the petrochemical and other traditional power industries. I’m thinking more about the sensibility of alternative power sources, especially fuel-cell networks that would allow cars to dump excess fuell-cell power back into the grid, rather than letting it burn off while the car is idle.

Flotsam and Jetsam from the Weekend

I’m still trying to digest the entire Atlantic City experience. We brought Hugh down there for his bachelor party yesterday, and the whole place was so much more than I ever expected. More trash? More kitsch? More kitsch? More guidos? More people aging gracelessly? Yes, but also more, in a ways I can’t quite put my finger on. It should be experienced, but I thik the less time spent there the better. Maybe. I’m too sleep-deprived and still too overwhelmed to decide.

More elaborate stories and pictures to come. For now, a grab bag of links and random things we found amusing:

  • Since it came up in conversation: the Bullet Time Ping-Pong Game.
  • If you buy a round trip bus ticket to Atlantic City, it costs 27 bucks and comes with a voucher for a 14-dollar refund. There’s no catch, in case you think it’s just a scam: get off the bus at a casino, trade the voucher for a slip form that casino, and a quick detour to the casino floor is all you have to do to trade that in for 14 bucks cash money. A friendly travel tip from your pal Sparky.
  • Smokers should note that you can still smoke indoors in Jersey, and especially in Atlantic City.
  • At one point, we were trying to imagine what it would sound like if Ladysmith Black Mambazo did a version of “Three Is a Magic Number“.
  • I haven’t given much of a thought to the recent popularity of guidoism (there’s no novelty to it I grew up in the thick of it), but it’s hard not to ponder the whole phenomenon in a big Jersey destination spot.
  • Sometimes it’s much safer when straight guys are straight guys.

Dog Days

Huh boy, what a day this turned out to be. Nice enough day off, catching up on some overdue sleep. I was hoping for a leisurely time running errands, maybe a haircut and a nap after taking Andy down to the vet to have a tick removed and a lump on his ear looked at.

Well…

The doctor wasn’t in the first time, so Andy and I just had a little stroll and planned to go back later. After grabbing a couple of slices from the Pizza Twins around the block, I brought the little fella back. I brought his muzzle, since he gets a little uppity around other animals. There was strange kitty that was making him anxious, so I picked him up and coddled him like a baby to keep him calm.

Then this big, black dog came out from one of the rooms in the back, and Andy went fucking apeshit. I tried holding him still, but he got all squirmy and clawed at me and jumped down. I had a firm grip on his leash so he didn’t get a chance to bolt across the waiting room, but he was still all mental, clawing away at his muzzle and trying to pull his head out of his collar. I managed to quiet him down, but then noticed blood all over my hands.

I immediately got panicky, but as I wash trying to wipe the blood off Andy’s paw I realized that he was the one who was bleeding, not me there was a bit of a gusher on his left front paw. Leaving bloody paw prints across the floor, I brought him to the desk to get some paper towels and tried my best to keep him calm until the vet was available.

The tick was no trouble and the lump on his ear was harmless and easily removed, but it turned out that his paw was a bit more troublesome. While I held him down and cooed sweet, calming things into Andy’s ear, the vet shaved down the paw to get a closer look. Our sweet, little puppy wuppy was so eager to get his muzzle off so he could try and “play with” a strange dog twice his size that he just about ripped one of his own claws out of his paw. Since it was the claw, there was no way to stitch the wound closed, so the vet had to just wrap up Andy’s paw in layers of bandages that will have to stay put for a few days until things get better. Oh, and then there’s the antibiotics and the ear drops and the follow-up appointment he’ll need if the wound starts bleeding again once the bandages come of in a few days.

Of course, he’s only able to hobble around now, so I had to carry him most of the way home because he kept lying down and sighing every time we paused at an intersection. Now he’s home and sleepy making sad faces. (See below.)

Bandaged Andy

Frankly, I think he did the whole thing on purpose to make us feel bad for him since he knows we’re trying to find him a better home.

#928

This is my 928th blog entry (more or less there have been a number of guest writers, and I’ve deleted a few irrelevant technical announcements from former sites), having now combined into this one place all the posts ever made from all the blogs I’ve maintained for the last three-and-a-half years.

Phew!

I had to do a quite a bit of manual editing of all the stuff I wrote before I used Greymatter, which turned out to be more of a stroll down Memory Lane than a hassle. It was amazing to see how much has changed in my life over all that time. I started proper blogging a while after the dissolution of my last serious relationship and starting over again in my own place in East Williamsburg a time when I was still depressed, angry, tense, and eager to focus on something other than the difficulty of the previous few months. I wanted to sharpen my writing skills and put something in place that would make it easier for me to add new content to the website I’d been maintaining for a while. I wanted to tinker with some new tools that had just come out.

Since then, my weblogs have collected the records of my adventures, successes, my goofs, my failures, my insights, my cluelessness, and my changing attitudes. Crushes and boyfriends and friends have come and gone, some quite publicly and some with only the most obscure references. I’ve moved a few times, started and quit jobs a few times, gotten depressed and crawled back out of it, and grappled with the same damn insecurities over and over and over again. There have been a number of earth-shattering changes, too.

For all that’s happened and all that I’ve changed, I don’t really think that I’ve grappled with any more or less than anyone else. Whose life doesn’t go topsy-turvy once or twice between the ages of 28 and 32? Or during any other four-yean span, for that matter? It’s just weird to go and sift through all of that, and think about how publicly it all transpired (and also ponder the various gaps in the story, events and people I chose never to expose for one reason or another).

I’ve been thinking about how much energy has gone into all this writing over the years, and it made me stop kicking myself quite so hard for feeling like I never accomplish that much. Granted, it might have been nicer if I’d been paying attention to the effort that was underway so that I could have focused it and written an actual book or something, but I guess all the material is still here in case anyone makes me an offer.

All that stuff was also a good reminder about how my energy and my ability to articulate things ebbs and flows. Lately I’ve felt like I’ve barely been able to string two coherent words together. I’ve been almost completely incapable writing decent, thoughtful posts or e-mails, which has led to an enormous pile-up of overdue letters to people who’ve probably been offended by my silence. (It’s not for any lack of care, I swear, and I’m trying to catch up, just so you know.) I’ll get back in the saddle agian at some point I always seem to eventually. Life is a journey, right?

And thanks to everyone who had read this site, written for this site, or left any of the 2200 or so comments that have been collected (there would be more, but the demise of BlogVoices taught me my lesson about third-party comment services). Y’all are a huge reason this has all been worthwhile, and will hopefully continue to be a big part of life for years to come.

The Basement Blog

So what did your site look like when you first started out?

Unsettled

Things to say, apologies to make to many friends who have been neglected, many difficult things to admit about me treating myself like a precious little glass ornament that can’t withstand any pressure. I can take it I just haven’t wanted to, and I’ve used a vast array of excuses to justify my own laziness, my own unwillingness to juggle even a normal amount of work, social interaction, life in general. The details don’t necessarily matter: as it was pointed out to me (and as I’m forced to admit), I’ve developed an alarming tendency to use writing on the site as a substitute for interaction. That makes me feel shitty, and I hope I can correct my mistakes. I’ve done a poor job of showing a number of extraordinary people how big a piece of me thay really are.

If you’ve noticed, then I’m sorry. Bear with me it seems I still have more self-repair work to do than I’d noticed.

What Was It Like Before?

Trash Addict was reminiscing about his earliest online experiences, when the idea of communicating with strangers outside your usual sphere seemed so new and fascinating. Of course, it’s still quite fascinating, but I bet you take it for granted as much as I do, right? It all seems so matter-of-fact that there are so many ways to draw in words and pictures from the worl outside you, and forge relationships of one kind or another through a medium that offers both the gratification and the threat of immediacy, breadth, and a more malleable identity.

A friend and I were talking just the other day about what office jobs were like before the internet. We could hardly recall how we got through the day without switching to e-mail or news for a few minutes to break up the monotony and reach out past the workplace. I’ve had some kind of access since about 1994 (when I would use a telnet session from my desktop at the B.U. Office of Publications Production to read and write stuff with cryptic, elegant command-line tools like pine and lynx), so my memories are fuzzy, but I recall spans of time where I would just stare blanky ahead when there were no tasks at the moment, since there was nothing better to do with my concentration. Even then, I would wonder back to what it was like to work without a computer in front of me, which could at least provide some kind of distraction for a curious, developing nerdling. (When all else failed, I would fiddle around with the software and try to discover obscure little features to pass the time. Thankfully I was able to do even that, or I’d never have become the employable whiz-kid I’m considered to be today.)

On the flip side, though, I think about how grateful I am to have grown up and gone to school without much computer access, if just because I picked up the skills to make things with my hands, a process that gives me greater joy than any kind of electronic activity. Especially in the world of design, hand-skills and craftsmanship are like luxurious relics. If I hadn’t straddled the ages of physical and electronic production the way I did (My first job was laying out a 180-page book by pasting down type galleys onto mechanical boards and drawing FPO boxes with a ruler and a pen, but now I earn a living writing code that automatically typesets and assembles electronic data into complex books), I’m sure I would be a very different kind of designer today. I also think I’d be far less adept at understanding the relationship between tactile and virtual experiences.

Of course, my fondness for the tactile experience and the process of making things with my hands is part of the reason I loathe doing web design so much (not to mention why I design this site to look like it was made out of paper). I may keep up with it out of curiosity and an appreciation for good communication, but I don’t get the same kind of sensory gratification out of the end product with electronic stuff. My fingertips and my nose and even the more discerning powers of my eyes feel left out of the experience. Booooring. Pretty, maybe, but boring.

There’s something very magical to me about the way I draw on other parts of my mind when I make stuff, and something very magical about the way people hold and view and explore something physical. Even with the parts I prepare electronically, I do so with the end result of the tactile experience in mind. It’s a way of adding other layers to the whole process. In a way, there’s something very luxurious to that extra bit of care, even when the materials are modest. (Or, as my friend Jennifer caught me saying the other day, “It’s all about bein’ cheap and lookin’ fancy.”)

Hmmm, I seem to have wandered off my original point. Oh well more topics are just more bang for your buck.

The Price of Popularity

What in god’s name is going on here? Am I really using about 8 to 9 gigs of bandwidth a month at this point? that’s insane. Why do you people bother? Am I really that fascinating? Doubt it. Sheesh!

No, don’t get me wrong. I’m flattered and honored and amazed that I get that much traffic. I never check my stats, so it’s always a surprise to find out that people actually think that’s it’s worthwhile to stop in here from time to time. I guess I’m a little perplexed again, because this is the kind of existential blog angst that seems to happen to all of us periodically about why I do this. It costs me hundreds of dollars a year, it makes me feel obligated to perform whether or not I want to do so, it often sucks time away from other work I’d like to do, it makes me deal with web-site design, which is something I don’t really enjoy much at all.

So what’s in it for me? Why has this site turned out to be the most substantial thing I’ve worked on for these past six years or so? For that matter, why has this turned out to be the only personal endeavor I’ve ever stuck with for so long? I suppose there’s a lot of answers, and not all of them arty and altruistic. (Remember, this is called UltraSparky, a carefully thought out conceit to counter any criticism about whether or not it should be about anything but me, me, me!)

I suppose it’s the people behind those eight or nine gigs a month: the friends I’ve made and keep making (and the social obligations/pleasures that go along with them), the opportunities I’ve had to participate in (and maybe even influence and inspire) the development of a form of democratic media that I really believe in, the people who come here and add their own thoughts to the mix and make this really participatory, the people who care about me who come here to make sure I’m still ticking when I’m too caught up in one damn thing or another to keep in touch regularly. (By the way, I’m awfully happy and doing very well these days, thanks.) I suppose you’re the reason I do it. You make me engage with the world on some level every day, rather than just putter away on my own.

Thanks, ya bastards. But pardon the slimmed-down redesign. Engagements are expensive.