Category: general

My wife’s sister had twins in February, and they live in Davis, so we’ve been making visits to help them deal with the onslaught of human shit invading their house on an hourly basis. She’s going to have to start dressing them in different colors or something, because I can’t tell them apart, which probably makes me a horrible person.  Both parents are English professors, and they are surrounded by a dozen PhDs at any given time, so I am the only person who can explain to these two what the designated hitter rule is and why it’s a travesty, which I have.  You gotta start young.

(There’s not actually a lot to worry about, since the closest AL team to Davis is the Oakland A’s, and by the time these two are little league-aged, the As will probably have moved to Portland or Las Vegas or Puerto Rico or wherever someone writes them the biggest check, and good for them for getting out of that horrible stadium.)

So I am going to London and then to Germany next month.  I have done zero planning for both trips, aside from buying the relevant book for each.  What should I see?  What should I do?  What should I eat?  All I know is I will probably be doing a hell of a lot of walking, and I plan to take as many pictures as possible.  The flights will be a bitch – for both of the overnights, I am in the middle of one of those six-person rows in a 777, which probably means I will have two morbidly obese people having total flesh-to-flesh contact with me as they ooze out of their tiny coach seats.  I am very excited to take my DSLR camera over there.  I’ve never been to London at all; I’ve never been to Nuremberg, but have been to Berlin.  But Berlin was in 2006, and I’m sure the entire thing has changed since then.  Anyway, suggestions welcome.

I am also going back to New York in June for a brief work thing, which will be interesting.  The work part is good, but I just find myself with some odd nostalgia for the place, which will of course dissipate the first time I get pissed on in a subway car or have to deal with a cab driver or take a nice whiff of the garbage and dead fish aroma.  But yeah, it is weird for me to think about some random year, like 2002, and think about the time I spent in that Astoria apartment, or hiking to the subway, or sitting at my old desk, hacking away at FrameMaker docs while finding ways of covertly getting my coworkers to open up sodomy images unsuspectingly.  (Pro tip: create a Windows CD-R with an autorun that opens up goatse and then write “Half-Life beta” on it.)

In my mind, New York has this small, tangible quality to it, as I only remember the bits and pieces surrounding a narrow view of the past.  Like I think of Times Square and Penn Station, and how you could walk from one to the other in a few minutes, and in my mind, it’s almost the same as the walk from my front door to my parking spot.  But in reality, two and a half million people are between those two points, a densely packed chunk of an island with dozens of levels and layers of subways and trains and streets and sidewalks and offices and lofts and apartments, with wall-to-wall tiny stores and bodegas and locksmiths and cell phone stores and landmarks and all of that seems to fall from my mind.  I remember the last time I went to Manhattan, I stepped outside at night on Fifth Avenue, and at an hour when everyone should have been asleep or parked in front of their TVs, there were more people criss-crossing and walking than four minutes after the last out at a World Series game.  The height of the buildings and the bustle of the crowd and the noise of the car alarms and taxis laying on their horns overwhelmed me.  When I lived there, and in my memories, I turned all of that off, buried myself in my headphones and walked fast from point to point.  But when you’re in the middle of it… oh, man.  I do miss that, although I just want a small taste, and probably couldn’t hack a week there, let alone any long period of time.  How did I survive eight years there?

I may have mentioned to some of you that I had a health “thing” which of course was bullshit.  I had what I thought was a bad sinus infection that went on for a few months, and after a couple of rounds of you-just-snorted-anthrax antibiotics, I still had problems.  So I fought with my insurance company for a month and got a CT scan of my head, which revealed… nothing.  So I guess it’s just allergies.  But getting a CT scan of my brain definitely freaked me out, especially because I got a CD of it and have it sitting on my computer now.  And if you look, I do have a cyst in one of my sinuses, which is harmless and something like 40% of us have them, but when I first saw that, I was certain that was my death, a big, fat, c-word getting ready to tap into my brain.  It’s not, and there’s nothing else wrong in the scan, aside from my teeth, which of course contain more metal than a god damned terminator robot.  But still, the week between getting the CD and seeing the doctor was not exactly calming.

The mortality trip is a k-hole that I don’t like to fall down.  Everyone my age has parents that are checking out.  Every one of my aunts and uncles on my dad’s side is either dead or has some kind of cancer, except for my dad, and you don’t need to be a statistician to lose sleep over that one.  But it’s not something I can focus on.  All I can do is write as much as I can write, and try to not eat shit and get some regular exercise.  It’s been nice enough outside that I have started walking again every day.  And I bought a kettle bell, mostly because Joe Rogan won’t shut the fuck up about them on his podcast.  I used to lift free weights, and thought this was similar, but I did the DVD workout the other day, and an hour later, was like “why the fuck is the back of my upper thigh so god damned sore?”

I am continuing work on the next book.  I also have a number of old books that were never released as proper books that I’ve imported into scrivener, and I wonder if I should polish them up and release them.  The current list goes like this:

• Air in the Paragraph Line #1-7
• An “essay” book of some of my favorite blog posts
• The story of my 1999 road trip across the country
• This collection of short stories about Bloomington

All of these are “done”, but would require covers, formatting, editing, and names and blurbs.  The big issue is that none of these are part of the big picture plan, the direction I’ve been going with the last couple of books.  And if I had time to work on these, I would work on the next book.  And the big fear is that I will spend weeks and weeks getting this crap done, and it will sell exactly zero copies.  So, tell me if you’d really like to see one of these see the light of day.  For now, they’re all severe writer’s block day alternate projects.

Speaking of, gotta go write.

No, literally. I can’t write a thousand words about one thing, unless it’s “hey, remember the Magnavox TV (x1000)”, and everything within the next 18 months will just be a list, so here is a list.

1. I gave away more books this weekend than I have sold in my life. I hope this is a good thing.
2. I have a CT scan of my head on my computer, and I can scroll through it and see what the inside of my head looks like at any given plane. This is more strange than you could imagine. There’s a sense of mortality to it, I guess.
3. I once had an endocrinologist who looked like Mike Brady and his entire desk was nothing but a vast collection of crystal figurines. It seriously looked like eBay shit the entire crystal figurine category on his desk.
4. I’m going back to Germany next month. I’m actually going to London first, then Nuremberg, then Berlin. I have no idea what I’m doing in any of the the three cities, except “taking pictures”, and probably getting some kind of gastrointestinal malady.
5. I’ve had some strange preoccupation with updating the firmware on one or both of the wireless routers I have sitting around the house that are currently doing nothing. I keep thinking they could get turned into a media center or phone switch, and then I remember I hate dealing with linux and have better shit to do with my time.
6. A company has made a replica of the Commodore 64, except it is a Mini-ITX PC inside. See above comment about linux, and I think the thing, once fully-equipped, would cost as much as a decent Mac laptop.
7. None of the ceilings in my condo are level. I think the entire building, which is made out of cast concrete, has a certain amount of slope to it, so that like, for example, from one end to another laterally, there’s a one-inch difference in height.
8. I got this new entertainment center installed, and had a very brief flashback to the summer I spent unloading furniture off of trucks at Montgomery Ward, mostly because the smell of new furniture has that artificial chipboard processed wood formaldehyde odor to it.
9. Toward the end of Jonathan Lethem’s book Chronic City, he mentions one of the characters is from Bloomington and used to swim in the granite quarries as a kid, and if I had his email, I would have told him I loved the book, but IT’S LIMESTONE.
10. I am already done with baseball season. I have no patience for bad pitching.
11. I need to buy a new pair of shoes, but I hate the fact that New Balance shoes no longer include those stay-tied laces, and the only place that I can find that sells them that isn’t storing customer credit card numbers in a plaintext file on the desktop of some Chinese computer is on Amazon and is charging like $24 in shipping for a $2 pair of laces.
12. All food that is extruded is arguably better than other food, which is ironic or possibly easily explainable by the fact that the human digestive system is essentially an extrusion system.
13. I think everyone is a hoarder, but doesn’t think they are, except for the people who are minimalists, and I think every person I’ve known who is a minimalist is also an alcoholic.
14. I have a macro lens for my camera now, but its mostly shown me that every thing in my house is covered in cat hair.
15. My childhood would have been far less interesting with wikipedia.
16. My article, “List of drugs to take on the MTA subway while masturbating, in order” was recently rejected.
17. I wish duotrope had a checklist that I could use to filter the list of markets that don’t get bent out of shape when you use the word “fuck” in a story.
18. I guess I’m not a huge fan of pasta, and that’s extruded.
19. I’m tempted to wire up something to my toilet that posts to my facebook timeline every time I take a shit.
20. The Safeway near my house in Emeryville always smells like really bad weed. I don’t know if it’s the cashiers or the patrons. Maybe both.
21. I’ve been obsessed with experimental noise/ambient/electronic bands lately, especially ones that have free crap I can download online.
22. I’ve also been obsessed with either making a chapbook or making a combination book and CD, although I don’t have any good artwork for a chapbook, and nobody buys print books anymore, and I don’t know what I’d put on a CD, although I’d probably spend a week fucking off in Garage Band if I found a print-on-demand place that did combo book/CD projects.
23. I wonder what happens if you tried to explain to a creationist that maybe god created the universe, but god was created by a massive expansion of a singularity.
24. I have this strange urge to take my entire twitter feed and put it into a print book.
25. I still have no idea what pinterest is or does.
26. I saw the movie The Hunger Games this weekend, but I mostly went because I’m addicted to eating an entire bag of Reese’s Pieces during a movie. I probably would have went to the newest Tyler Perry movie, provided they sold Reese’s Pieces.
27. I’ve been spending a lot more time reading 4chan lately. It’s probably the most motivating thing I do with my time.
28. I am 89,000 words into my next book and still have no idea what it’s about.

Okay I wanted to write a hundred things, but that’s not happening.

I just installed the Windows 8 preview in a VM and tried it out.  My first impression: these people do not get it.

Here’s the deal: Windows 8 is basically Windows 7 with the Windows Phone Metro UI slapped on top of it.  To be fair, Windows 7 isn’t a bad OS.  I’m a Mac person, and all of my personal work is on a Mac (or iPad), but I also use a Windows 7 machine for my day job, and I’ve been using some variety of Windows for my job for decades now.  (I’m not saying I love Windows 7, but it’s relatively stable, and some of the major rough edges have been smoothed over.  I could write a book about all of the philosophical problems I have with the Windows paradigm in general, but I could also write a book using a Windows 7 machine, and I have.)  Duct-taping this huge piece of Metro on top of it hasn’t doubled system requirements and it doesn’t eat up major CPU or memory.  For the most part, if your system ran Windows 7 fine, you can expect somewhat similar performance in Windows 8.

The Metro UI: either you love it or you hate it.  I personally don’t like it; I think it looks like a poor attempt at a Star Trek: The Next Generation theme, and I don’t understand how all of this swiping and tiling is supposed to simplify life.  Based on the number of ardent fanboys furiously masturbating all over this new paradigm, maybe there’s something there.  Based on the abysmal sales of the Windows Phone, maybe not.  But if you are one of the people who are in love with this UI, the good news is that it’s now glued on top of your Windows interface.  If all of your apps are using the Metro interface, and you’ve got a touchscreen, you can interact with your PC just like your phone.

And there are two caveats right there.  Most people don’t have a touchscreen monitor.  And I personally barely want to lift my hands off the home row of my keyboard and go to my mouse; it would be an ergo nightmare to have to stop and pause and reach for the screen and pinch and grab and zoom and flick and swipe every god damned time I wanted to look at the clock or switch between apps or cut and paste or whatever.  Presumably there will be some keyboard shortcuts, but I foresee this as being a huge pain in the ass.  Plus you have to go drop another three or four hundred bucks (or more) to go get a new monitor?  No thanks.

And one of the great strengths of Windows is the ninety-eight zillion programs already written for it.  Roughly 17 of them will use this new Metro interface at launch.  That timesheet program you have to use at work that looks like it was written for Windows 3.1 is still going to look like it was written for Windows 3.1, but your magical world of touching and swiping and spinning and scratching isn’t going to work so well with its mess of radio buttons and drop-down lists that were all the rage in 1996.  And if you don’t have a mouse to fall back on and just have your fat fingers and that touch screen, forget it.

If you are a power user, and you do need to use the old fashioned mouse and keyboard, you’re probably going to shut off Metro and go back to Windows 7 and the Start menu and the same old same old.  If there’s an easy way to do this, fine.  But this means that Windows 8 offers no compelling upgrade from Windows 7, and there are going to be tons of Windows 7 faithfuls for years to come, just like there were millions hanging on to their XP systems as Vista marched on.

This system-wrapping is reminiscent of Microsoft Bob, Compuserve Wow, the harsh coexistence of DOS console programs in a Windows world, and every other attempt to reskin the complex world of Windows and dumb it down so it’s so easy your mom can do it.  You can create a really cool interface that looks like the fuckin’ Minority Report computer, but when you fire up that garbage income tax program your bank sticks you with, at best it will turn the whole experience sideways and clutter up the whole thing.  Or, maybe it won’t work at all.  Windows 8 does have a fallback, essentially running a Windows 7 desktop and explorer in its own sandboxed metro app.  But it’s as elegant as if you were browsing away on your iPad and a DOS window popped up and started a copy of WordPerfect 5.1, and you had to figure out how the hell to do a Shift-f7 on a keyboardless tablet while a white on cyan monstrosity of a window took over your display.

Here’s the bigger problem: if you are on a tablet, why do you need to bring an entire desktop OS with you?  Everyone’s talking about how Windows 8 will be the “iPad killer”, but if Microsoft thinks this Metro UI is so great, why aren’t they taking a version of the OS running on Windows Phone and scaling it up to a tablet?  When I pull out my iPad and want to look up a movie time or find out what year Leon Czolgosz was executed, I press a button and the screen is instantly on.  When I sit down for a day of work at my Windows 7 laptop, I give it the three-finger salute and wait and wait and wait and watch Macaffee scan my crap and wait and wait and eventually get to my desktop.  Why would you haul around the entire Windows 8 OS on a stripped down computer meant for quick interaction?

And why would you set your minimum system requirements for a tablet OS so high?  The iPad is a different system architecture than Windows(*), but if you could run Windows 8 on it, it would be godawful slow, and would need double the RAM and double the disk space.  And yes, the fanboys will say “well, maybe Apple sucks for releasing such a crappy tablet then.”  Sure, but how is someone going to release a competitor with roughly double the specs, and come in at a price point that doesn’t seem outrageous?  And if you do release a nicely-equipped-for-Win8 tablet, how much is it going to weigh?  How long will the battery last?  (Real world example: Lenovo has a ThinkPad tablet that uses a core i3 processor, has 4gb of memory, and a 320gb hard drive – a real, not SSD hard drive, mind you.  It’s about an inch and a half thick, compared to the iPad’s half-inch, weighs in at about four pounds versus the iPad’s 1.5, and costs about twice as much.  You may say it’s an unfair comparison because the Thinkpad is basically a full laptop cut down into a tablet, but then you can’t run Windows on a lightweight tablet like an iPad, which is my point.)

I said (*) because the iPad uses the A4, which is an ARM processor; Microsoft has said that there will be an ARM version of Windows 8.  That’s good news for tablets.  That means you might be able to use a cheaper/faster machine that’s more optimized for a tablet than your x86/64 Intel hardware.  It also means (but is unclear) that the ARM version of Windows 8 might be stripped down or more lightweight, to fit on a cheaper machine.  The bad news is that those ninety-eight zillion programs that work on your desktop Windows machine won’t work on your tablet.  You’ll need to buy new versions of everything, and that’s assuming that your software will be available in an ARM version.  That obscure timesheet program you’re forced to use?  Not available for ARM.  And sure, it’s not available for the iPad either, but this large base of software that’s a major strength to Windows is suddenly gone.

Tablets are not desktop computers.  Desktop computers are not tablets.  You use a tablet to browse the web or plink away at a text word processor or play Angry Birds.  You spend 90% of your time in a browser looking at facebook or watching YouTube; you don’t need a god damned supercomputer for this.  Yes, Microsoft fanboy, the iPad can’t run AutoCad and can’t render trillions of polygons a second, just like the Toyota Yaris can’t do 0-60 in under three seconds or haul around a concert grand piano.  Does that mean the Toyota isn’t a useful, easy, cost-effective way to drive to the mall?  Does everyone need to buy a $160,000 supercar to drive to the mall?

And why not have different interfaces for different machines?  Do motorcycle manufacturers put steering wheels and gas pedals on their bikes to offer a seamless interface between customers with both machines?  Why does my shower have this confusing two-knob system for mixing hot and cold water?  I’m a computer user; why can’t it have a QUERTY keyboard and a mouse to make the interface seamless?  Or maybe my computer should have a Hot and Cold knob, and for the 90% of the time I can’t run an app with those, I can switch over to a keyboard?

Or maybe because my next little Toyota should have a similar architecture to a large moving truck I’d use to haul around furniture.  They should make a car to compete with the Smart that contains a full-sized big-block V-8 engine.  And then, to make it cost effective, they could detune that thousand-pound engine in a 1500-pound car so it only puts out 61 horsepower, and everyone’s a winner.  Right?

Sorry, I don’t get it.  I don’t see how Microsoft is going to catch up to the hundred million iPads already sold with this strategy.

So I finally saw the movie Into the Wild last weekend.  I’d read the book a while back, and was curious how they’d make a movie out of it, but not curious enough to actually go to the theater.  (I also think it came out around the time we were in a mad rush to leave NYC, but I don’t remember.)  I’d also heard at the time that Sean Penn took many liberties with the story, and I had some worries that he may have gone a little too pretentious with the thing, so I forgot about it.  I don’t exactly remember why we decided to see it; I think it was a special deal on Amazon Prime or something.

I do like Jon Krakauer’s writing very much.  It always reminds me of Seattle, because the summer that the Into Thin Air Everest expedition happened, I had just started working at this place in Seattle where one of the dominant workplace cultures was mountain climbing.  I think all of the company founders had scaled K2 and Everest and were on the board at REI, and everyone there had high-tech backpacks and carabiner keychains and dressed in layers of goretex and had those clear plastic water bottles.  I think some folks there knew one of the guys killed in ’96 on Everest, and I remember the Krakauer article spiking some controversy in the hallways and break rooms.  I didn’t read ITA until much later, I think the summer of 2007, but I remember the CNN news reports at the time of the events.

[2020 note: that company’s CEO was killed in an avalanche in 2016.]

The story of Christopher McCandless is certainly an interesting k-hole to fall into.  There’s a lot of stuff online, even if you don’t read the Krakauer book.  The brief summary is that this guy graduated college, and then, disenchanted by the modern world, decided to drop off the grid, start hitchhiking around the country, working odd jobs, and exploring nature.  The ultimate goal was to vanish into Alaska, live off the land with minimal equipment, and just be.  Spoiler alert: it all goes wrong, and he ends up starving to death in an abandoned bus twenty miles from civilization.

Prior to the movie, there were two primary arguments about this guy, who went by the nickname or alias “Alexander Supertramp.”  One was if he was a genius or idiot.  A lot of people think it’s a highly romantic story, this modern-day Thoreau, going against the one-percenters or whatever, and getting back to nature.  And there are a lot of outdoors types who think you’d have to be a fucking fool to go into bear country with only a .22 rifle and no solid knowledge of what the hell to do, and that this was nothing more than suicide, plain and simple.

The other argument was that in Krakauer’s book, he presented the theory that McCandless was eating the seeds of a plant that was toxic and would block absorption of nutrients, which caused him to starve.  After a scientist called bullshit on this theory, later editions of the book said the seeds may have had mold on them or something.  The alternate theory is that he died of “rabbit starvation”, which is where you eat nothing but lean meat, and your body shuts down because it can’t process protein anymore.  Or he could have just plain ol’ starved to death because he didn’t bag enough game to keep a ten-pound poodle alive.

So, the movie.  First, it’s both beautiful and haunting.  The soundtrack, by Eddie Vedder has something to do with the latter, but the film is beautifully shot, and has lots of scenes of the great outdoors, wide open mesas of the southwest and of Alaska, the kind of stuff that makes you really want to get the hell out and see it in person.  And the story, well, he had to round a lot of corners to get this to work as a movie.  He purposely left out pieces, and fictionalized some of the people Chris met to make it more of a typical Hollywood piece.  While McCandless spent his time in a bus in a mosquito-infested Alaskan swamp, they made the backdrop a little more esoteric and majestic for the film.  The Alaska shown is definitely only a subset of the Alaska I saw when I was there in 2006.  I could see why people would call bullshit on the inaccuracy of the story, but to me, it’s just a film, and I can overlook those flaws.

The part of the film I didn’t like is how McCandless was, for lack of a better term, a bit of an idiot.  I mean, they really built up this stuff about how his parents were assholes and he hated them, and his dad beat them and was married at the same time he started a family with his mom, and it was all a big sham.  That was a little too whiny for me; I don’t know what his struggle was like in real life, or if he had some mental illness issues or what.  Maybe he did, and I can sympathize with that, but the film didn’t do a convincing job for me on this front.

Also, I’m with the outdoorsmen on this one; there’s more he could have done to be prepared.  You can get a copy of the Air Force survival manual for under ten bucks at any surplus store, and just paging through my well-worn copy, I see a million things I would have done differently.  Why didn’t he try to fish?  Why didn’t he light a warning fire?  Why didn’t he look for other ways to cross rivers?  I understand that if he was starving and going nuts from lack of food, he wouldn’t think of this stuff, but it seems like in the long journey before Alaska, he would have thought more about this stuff, and read up on it.   Maybe that’s a bit of armchair quarterbacking on my part, but maybe that’s half the appeal of the story, wondering what you would’ve done differently in his situation.

My biggest question is exactly that: why is this story so compelling?  I know some people see Christopher McCandless as some modern hero, and although I don’t, I keep finding myself googling away, trying to find more information, looking at the site on google maps, reading old articles, thinking about what I’d do if I was up there.  I’m not saying I’m ready to go burn all of my money and hitchhike into the tundra with a bare minimum of gear.  But it’s a serious k-hole to fall into.  Some of it is the nostalgia of that timeframe.  All of this happened between 1990 and 1992, and I have a huge problem with continually going back to that time in my sentimentality trips.  And some of it is that desire to do something completely opposite what I do now, to trade a 30-year mortgage and a day job for a life of reading Tolstoy and gathering berries at the foot of Denali.

But who am I kidding?  I’m not exactly ready to trade in my Four Seasons bed and high-speed internet and start shitting in a trench while being attacked by mosquitos.  I mean, I’ve got 40 acres out in Colorado, and if I really wanted, I’m sure I could buy a shit bus on eBay for a couple hundred bucks and install a wood stove and shelf of paperbacks.  But two minutes into it, I’d want my damn MacBook Pro back.

Anyway, I now need to find my copy of that Air Force manual, and maybe queue up some episodes of Survivorman on the roku box.

I guess I breathe wrong.  I’ve known this for a while, but I think every shrink I’ve ever met has told me I need to breathe deeper or take a meditation class or something.  This week, my breathing is worse because of a sinus infection, which I’m trying to bomb out with a high dose of Levaquin, which is sort of like trying to hunt for easter eggs by napalming an entire township.  But yeah, I guess I need to learn a new respiratory technique, and I’m sure there’s an app for that, but I’m too lazy to look.

I went through a brief period of wanting to be a Zen Buddhist, I think in 1994 or 1995. I mean, in that period, I went through a phase where I wanted to be everything from a writer to a motorcycle gang member to a Navy SEAL to an Alaskan shrimp boat captain. (I also wanted to be a technical writer and an author, so I guess I’m like 2 for 139 on the series.) I read a pamphlet or magazine in my shrink’s waiting room about controlling depression with meditation. And there’s the whole college path of trying to find your spiritual center, or the meaning in life, whatever that is. The good old fashioned Roman Catholicism baked into me at an early age hadn’t done much in that department.

Prior to this I briefly wanted to go back to Catholicism, mostly because I kept meeting all of these Jewish women, and any Jewish guy would seemingly get a free pass. I wondered if being a good Catholic would net me any free access to bad Catholics, so I did my first confession in a decade and started going to this hippy-dippy college version of a Catholic church, the kind that had a 5:00 PM Sunday mass so all of the drunks could show up after a night of heavy partying. But after about two or three Sundays, I realized the social awkwardness and alienation that made me a stanger in this world also extended to Church, so I stopped going and went back to the comfort and convenience of atheism.

The zen thing may have partially been because of Bruce Lee. I saw that movie Dragon and really wanted to learn Kung Fu, so I bought a worn paperback from the 60s that illustrated various Kung Fu and Tai Chi manuvers in grainy black and white pictures. That proved to be useless, because you couldn’t hold the paperback open to any given page and do the moves at the same time. But it led to another book of Tai Chi from the dollar bin at the used book store, and I started looking at the various angles of Buddhism, and zen. And that got me started buying these more expensive Zen books with elaborate color artwork and koans depicted in Chinese woodcut illustrations that always reminded me of a menu from a fancy Chinese restaurant, which always made me hungry for Chinese food, so maybe it wasn’t the best learning tool.

I remember plinking away at a couple of zen books, these logic puzzles really, the kind of thing that would say “does the world weigh as much as a pea?” and a good zen master would think about it for an hour and say “of course!” But I could never think that way; I’d be like “well a pea’s mass is a ratio of its mass to the planet’s mass, and it’s really an abstract concept, but something that science defines… etc etc.” There was a high bar for suspension of disbelief, but then I wondered if I had not been indoctrinated with stories of men coming out of tombs after being dead for three days and the parting of seas and the turning of water to wine, maybe that would seem just as crazy. Maybe I needed to reprogram myself. Maybe part of being a better person was burning the synapses in my brain to appreciate knowing these puzzles like the sound of one hand clapping.

I tried to learn to meditate. I burned a lot of incense, and bought a little rug at Pier One to sit on in the middle of my room. I even took a class once. The Student Union had these activities you could sign up for and pay the fees on your bursar bill. Like they had skydiving classes, whitewater rafting, hiking expeditions, ballroom dancing lessons, all of this outdoorsman, Teddy Roosevelt kind of shit, so kids from big cities could ride horses and camp in tents and meet girls who didn’t wear bras. I really wanted to take the skydiving, but every class landed on the day of a test of one of my night classes. Instead, I scoured that catalog, and signed up for this meditation class that promised to help me find inner peace in a single three-hour session on a Saturday morning.

The night before the class… okay, I won’t get into the night before the class, but we’ll just say it wasn’t very zen-like. The next morning, I was running late, but my roommate was heading to campus — this was when I lived a few miles north and had no vehicle of my own, other than a ten-speed — so he deposited me at another dorm for my class, unfed, unwashed, and not in a great state of mind.  I’m badly in need of another shower, my stomach’s rumbling like a motherfucker from a lack of breakfast, I have a touch of a hangover, and I think I slept two hours the night before. Now, let’s learn to meditate!

The class was at Briscoe quad, one of the big party dorms up north of campus. I’d only been there once or twice; some friend of an old ex from my freshman year lived there and we visited her a few times. Her friend had a full-time hobby of having relations with random dudes the way most people collect baseball cards. (So did the ex, but I didn’t find that out until after she moved in with me, which was wonderful.)  Anyway, this was a dorm of questionable choices, and everyone there was virtually guaranteed a large bill for damages from RHS at the end of the year, because someone would have thrown a flaming couch out of the window.

Meditation class was in a tiny classroom next to the weight machines in the dorm’s gym. It was taught by some middle-aged hippy mama that ran a meditation/bodyworks place out of a tiny hut that later became Tom Donohue’s CD store after I left town. Exactly two people signed up for an 8:00 AM Saturday class: me, and this other girl, a frumpy librarian type that reminded me of a random SNL character. As the class got more boring, I realized this girl probably had no friends and had the same social fears and awkwardness as me, and I knew it would not take much effort to convert this into a date situation, which is horrible.

I learned nothing in the class, except that my breathing was wrong. I thought breathing was an automatic reflex, but I guess I was doing it too much from my chest or doing it out from my chest and not my stomach, or something. I don’t know, it mostly confused me by making me think about my breathing, which made me not be able to not think about my breathing.  The desire to meditate, along with the desire to become enlightened, faded and I quickly became obsessed with writing a vector graphics Missile Command game for linux, or lifting weights, or something else.

The campus was empty in the winter cold, one of those eerie Saturday mornings when nobody was around.  I hiked over to the Brad’s Bagels and got my usual hangover cure, an everything with cream cheese and a giant vat of Coke. After quickly consuming that, I walked home, plodding for three miles in the wind and cold, listening to a Henry Rollins spoken word album, thinking about writing, thinking about what to do next.