Since I'm still unemployed, I've decided that another push toward a stronger, more flexible body, is the order of the day, week and month. I expect one of two results. Either I get strong, fitter and full of energy or I get so sick and tired of working out, I'll work even harder to find a job. Win/Win!
My current plan is pretty simple. It's based on the idea that I need go harder than I have. Nothing complex there. Yesterday, I took advantage of the warm weather and took to the hills to climb them. Not looking for altitude so much, just a slope that would provide a lot of variation for my creaky joints.
While I didn't resemble a lemur, meerkat or some lithe silly animal, I didn't fall over or get et by a bear. (Why is that an obsession? Damn that Timothy Treadwell. "Mr. Chocolate; He's a BIG BEAR!) My knee felt a bit more stable so overall, very good! Plus mossy visuals always are relaxing. My reward for my exertion was going to be a seat by the river, listening to the Spring wash. Still pretty cold for that. Lots of snow around. I was hoping for massive crashing boulder action from the snowmelt. No luck, mainly just angry burbling. Also, no enchanting pic of the river either. Just this one that's okay: In spite of the cold, I had planned on sitting but the big black spiders altered my plans. Thankfully, not poisonous. My field guide book identified them as the "Pacific Northwest Furry Assbiter." Well, I made that up but I didn't want to take the chance so I headed home.
Out of all of the pictures that I took, none were as fun as the ones that I took in the car. I learned that other drivers respect the gleeful madman who is taking pictures as he drives. Thanks for the space everyone.
One of the magazines I read to has a monthly feature called What I've Learned. I am always surprised that any one person has so much wisdom to dispense. Really, if a national magazine called me tomorrow and said, "Phil, now that you're famous, we'd like a page of your wisdom nuggets" I'd have to scramble.
Phrases like "Know when to hold'em," "Wisdom to know the difference," pop to mind. If Kant or Descartes were still on the pop charts, they might make it in. But on the whole, there's little in the way of pithy wisdom forthcoming. It might be a page of near-hit metaphors, since that's what I've been cultivating to understand the change in my world.
My bag of metaphors adds one or two each month it seems. My latest quest is to describe a something that seems to be a subset of the "chop wood, carry water" enlightenment story. (Caveat: no, I am not enlightened yet, goddamnit!) Here's what my metaphor factory is churning out right now.
Something in my life is falling into place. It's like a foundation brick, but it moves. I'd like to say that it's finely machined, like a piston in a chamber. Something so well tooled that, when it slides into place, you have to be patient while the air moves out of the way. Sometimes like a stopper in a drain. A dam? A conduit?
The comparisons that I've been using to understand what I've been up to have all sharpened up within a few weeks of recognizing them. This batch remains without form so far. It's been a couple of weeks and I'm in a muddle between solid and liquid, form and non-form, being and nothingness. (I just threw that in for drama!) My compass tells me that I'm in the right neck of the woods, if you were wondering....
My conceptual scaffolding isn't yet collapsing as a prelude to enlightment, or any such silly thing. Maybe I'm becoming a blade, or the wind or water. Compassion, Love, GiantNobleGoodness are still like cards in the deck, not the deck itself. I'm more like the vase or the flowers than the still life.
It's so quiet right now. Do you know what I mean? Yup, I don't either.
Not News of the Incredible, I know. It started on Tuesday but I didn't recognize the symptoms. Thought it was allergies. Then on Weds, hot then cold, speedy then sleepy. I thought: male menopause? Hoofbeats = horse usually, not zebra.
Slept most of Thursday once I realized what was going on because I felt sick. So much for my streak of no illness! Feel much better today. Nice gravelly voice too.
Hope all is well with you. As they used to say in the old country: May your flowers bloom and your team move forward in its bracket. Go The Ohio State!
According to the radio, a fire in the electrical vault caused our grid to lose electricity tonight. Many of you are probably wondering, "Is he writing this post using only the power of his mind?" Please tell me that someone was wondering that....
Thanks to Ikea, I had ready the candle power equivalent of 20 Hoover Dams. If Hoover's no longer producing kilojuice, move on to your own favored source of choice.
Very proud. I caused no fires and the weird light of the evening enticed me to wander about and take some photos. These are probably analogous to writing poetry while on acid (who would ever do that cliche?).
Such a potent word. I won't riff on all the possibilities here. You can do that for me.
The specific ruin I'm talking about is a tiny painting of my kitty. I messed it up. How you might ask? Well, it's easy to give the knee jerk reasons: not enough knowledge, couldn't leave well-enough alone, blah x 3.
But it's not that. I invited ruin. I was willing to fuck up a perfectly lovely little drawing and painting of my tender little guy. Not a small thing since it really was a very nice beginning which I could have left alone. I liked it enough to give it some time to see if I could call it "done" and send it off. Not yet. More to learn.
That's the program. You can call it process, you can call it faith, you can call it failure. I'm not concerned about the name right now. It's some graphite followed by some paint. Then some additional graphite and paint. Sometimes, the paper, drawing and painting works as I think it should. Then on it goes to someone I love. Then, more drawing, more painting, more ruin.
No, not me or some refugee metaphor, but my camera lens. Let me 'splain.
Tuesday Seattle got the Summer tease: 70 degree weather, sun, balminess. Oh yeah. No job hunting on that day, priorities shift to building fitness! Fitness by walking along the lakes and waterways, hiking the trials in and near my fair burg.
I sometimes walk in the biggest (longest?) wetland in the city proper. It's this fine mess of weeds, scrub and moss that sits on channel leading into Lake Washington. There's always ducks, coots, grebes, uh, birds hanging around. Random turtles. Many of the trees are labeled which is great. I'm not sure if I could now distinguish between the European Silver-Tongued Birch and the presumably American Sandpaper Birch, but I'm well on my way to being able to identify a birch.
So the dislocation: the waterfowl are occasionally friendly and probably hungry. The current thinking is don't feed them. I don't know why but they look hungry and I feel bad about it. That sadness doesn't prevent me from looking well-fed and encouraging them to think that food might fall from me at anytime. That caused them to come up close.
This gal jumped right out of the water to coax food out of me via feathery charm. Once she committed, her shiny partner jumped up as well.
It's not the greatest photo, there are a couple better. But I did want to show the cool blue chevron on his wing. After the stones with the racing stripes and this, I've concluded that Nature is at least as colorful as NASCAR and able to turn in any direction.
Maybe it was the threat of those dull angry hungry bills that made me slip and throw my camera into the water! No, that didn't happen because I dutifully use the wrist loop which saved the day. The camera does not, however, come with airbags. When it hit the deck, its lens got dislocated. It looked like a fighter with a broken nose, down for the count. Didn't help that the batteries were low either.
I'll spare you the gory details as I relocated the lens, brought it home, juiced it up and tested it out. I can tell you that it seems to be working fine. Here's one for the road.
This trio of stones came from the tough beaches of Port Townsend. As a geologist could tell you, each of these stones is a slightly different color and is very hard. A really good geologist could tell you why each stone has its own racing stripe. I am not a really good geologist, apparently.
I am, more accurately, like a little kid or a rock retrieving hound at heart. It's a flow experience for me, restive and reassuring. My eyes were trained on the shore rubble at my feet while Mt. Baker loomed across the sound. I've paid more attention to finding shells and rocks from watery places than I have helping the homeless, stopping hunger or splitting the atom.
One funny thing about me is that I'm always thinking "So-and-so might like this stone..." or maybe I'll find the perfect shaped stone for my love. It's just part of the internal selection process. Do others think about rocks like this? I chose the three above after winnowing down my choices from other fine candidates. Lined them up, Goldsworthy-style, took a family snap. A family of racing rocks.
Ever curious, I have to ask why the job search engines think that I'm a prime candidate for meat-cutting jobs. On the whole, they're pretty good at matching me with some of the jobs out there. But these odd results, including the occasional butchery, will probably continue.
My exciting and dread-inducing foray into job hunting has also included such job referrals such as a graffiti removal manager as well as the aforementioned meat-jobs. This one came from an actual person who was probably using the search engines. Reminds me of the involved set of tests that I took in college to gauge my aptitudes. After a grueling day and a half, two obvious career paths were revealed: mining engineer or clown. Sadly, I've only pursued the clown option, as an amateur at that.
I'm thinking a lot about matching and decisions right now. Databases yield matches based on equations that must be mind-numbingly esoteric. They're just trying to arrive at a sensible match, a helpful direction. A match is not a decision, just an element of it.
Search engines, Jobs, Friends, Love, are all matches that hinge on how appropriate they are in your life. Thankfully, some matches require no decision. That's one of the magic things about living, that moment, that thing, that person that is right as rain. A precious few elements of my life have been gifts beyond my comprehension, mysteries. A good life thankfully isn't solely yoked to reason. But I do know that a match becomes a relationship and matters will arise that require clear-eyed decisions. How do I arrive at the decisions about the most important things in my life? I'm constantly tugged between magical and practical decision making, thinking styles. Magical decisions, or more kindly and accurately, wishful thinking has often won the day. Not the best way of sustaining a well-grounded life.
I have suffered because I did not do the necessary work to make good decisions. I thought that decisions should be breezy, neat and not caked in grime.
My thinking has typically been stunted by impatience and fear about the exploration that deliberation requires. I've indulged in imagination as a substitute for thinking. My fetish for the clean result has warped how I've arrived at a decision. Rather than arriving, I'd teleport to the result. Relying on a technology that doesn't exist is at best optimistic. Might as well don a pair of pointy ears and intone "Live well and prosper" while I'm at it. A good life can be diminished by overreaching faith in a good life.
I am all for imagination, well-mannered or fevered. Always thought that nightmares were kind of cool. But substituting imagining when I needed the pedantic results of thinking has not a help to me. Thinking, decision-making, matching, is a process, a long walk with a sketchy map.
I am working as diligently as I can to put one foot in front of the other, make sure that I'm on the right path and arrive in the place that is true to me. The funny thing is that this insistence on plodding along means that I have made more missteps than I'm accustomed to. That's okay. I've learned that you just back up, adjust direction and move forward based on the best read that you've got. Kindergarten stuff, but it seems light years ahead.
