Gratuitous Dread Presence

After another revolution

So I googled myself yesterday, and was pleasantly surprised to find a selflink on the second page. It was a poem I put up on Poetry.com a while back, viewable here.

Now my mornings consist of me surfing the net on a laptop and trying to make my daughter laugh. Then at 11:30, rush to dress in business casual and head off to my ongoing temp gig for four hours. I come home, have a nice conversation with Joyce as I re-assume parental duties, and she heads off to work.

Fortunately, Frannie is a good baby. Sleeps through the night without too much difficulty. Doesn't fuss much, and goes to sleep easily, as opposed to my son who fought sleep as if he would never waken again. I'm taking her to Southern California in a few weeks, and I'm actually looking forward to the flight—that's how good she is. But the best part is getting her to laugh.

I like laughing babies. I discovered this quite a few years ago when I was on a bus in western Des Moines. Sitting a seat or two in front was a woman with a baby that was about 6-9 months old. The child was staring at me intently, so I did what comes natural to me: I started making faces.

The baby reacted at once by waving his arms and laughing. His mother immediately looked around to see what made her son laugh, but I had returned to my stoic bus face. When she looked away, I made another face. Mom caught me that time.

After that time, I started doing it on a regular basis. Grocery store lines, bus stops, cars at stoplights. Sometimes it works, and sometimes it doesn't. Francesca likes to laugh, and it's easy to coax her smile into a giggle.

So the best thing I do each day is to make a kid laugh. It's such a simple task with no purpose then a few fleeting moments of joy for someone who doesn't really even know what joy is. It's such a meaningless task, but it seems so full if I am successful. For me, it's like an addiction.

Excuse me while I take another hit.

Francesca Louise

Has now graced us with her appearance at 9:43 am today. May all of us take a moment to wish her safe passage in a peaceful world.

Nuts and bolts

There's a paragraph in the only Stephen King novel that I've read that describes a small town in Oklahoma during the daytime in early summer. He concludes the paragraph with this sentence: "and stretched above the town was the portion of sky that (G-d) had allocated to this part of Oklahoma. "

I have been thinking about what G-d allocates to all of us. Kind of a funny topic for someone who professes to be an atheist. But we are all allocated things to do in life, whether this assignment comes from G-d or from ourselves. What we make of this allocation is what determines the purpose in our lives. And when our lives end, it's how we handled these allocations that will determine whether or not life has been satisfactory. 

Lots of changes here at socialsmoker.net. I've landed a job--probably the most boring job on the planet: I process data for a team of actuaries. It's kind of odd to be doing this, and my skills as a data processor are quickly returning. It's clear to me now that they hired me partly because I have the patience and experience to convert their disjointed data requests into data sets that meet their firm actuarial requirements.

Some of my life is sad, too: just recently, my mother had to put down her dog, Miss Daisy of Winslow. She was a gift from my father, who died in 1999. We also got word from our municipality ordering the destruction of a large elm tree on our property due to disease. The tree has a caliper of about five feet, and I found myself unwilling to condemn something that was older than I to death.

But on to the blog--a couple of notes to explain things to the casual reader. The numbered poem entries are part of a series that I am working on that relates to poetry in a modern society. In some cases, they have separate titles, but for the purpose of this project, those titles are replaced by the numbering system.

I also have one other series of poems that I am working on, titled 'The Thing About Flowers.' It's still very much in progress, and I have not fully decided where it is going, but I have already generated too much in this project to ignore it. The poem entry that precedes this entry is what I currently regard as the 'opening poem' of that series.

and now, a confession:

econ city

I have been hanging out at a few message boards lately. Someone asked me to offer an answer to the question: Who is higher on the philosophical/moral food chain: social scientists or entrepreneurs?

This was my answer:

Both the social scientist and the entrepreneur have ample political and moral righteousness to stand upon when dispensing opinions within the greater argument. And because of the standing of their convictions, both opinions are equally valid.

That is because opinions are inherently true for those who espouse them. In this vein, the level of 'truth' in the opinion is irreverent--what matters is the strength in which the opinion is stated and justified.

Upon close examination, it may appear as if one make a case for being morally righteous then the other. But a long term historical view will reveal that each demonstrate their abilities to achieve a moral and philosophical apogee.

http://groups.yahoo.com/group/Vershire_Poli-Sci/

'I've got ... plan 'B' ability'

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Title is from a Le Tigre song called ‘Fake French.’ I was overwhelmed by the intensive meaning of the phrase, and I actually quoted it to someone else, who then replied “I have no idea what that means.”

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But I do—and I have ‘Plan B Ability.’ I have abandoned my quest to search for an IT position, and now am a manager of a retail based lead generation system. I love the work—but I hate my job. Regardless, it was my effort to capitalize on an early position I held. And now I find myself attempting another plan b—to get out asap.

Interesting that ‘some kinda underground electro feminist performance artists’ worded it so well.

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Meanwhile, back at the ranch, I have done some minor housekeeping in regards to categories. Put the window air conditioner in the garage, changed the internet connection, and put up plastic for the winter. Maybe I’ll pay more visits soon.

And without further ado, a change of direction.

Dead shows

So I went to a Dead concert the other night.

It’s kind of funny that I never really embraced the Dead until late in college. After spending my last two years here, I managed to leave Vermont with only a respect for them … but not much else. I had a chance to see the original Grateful Dead in Des Moines, but I passed. I never got around to seeing them until an old high school friend offered me a ticket to the Other Ones show two years ago. It was a blast, as was the concert the other night.

While I was listening to them, I realized what makes them so hard to understand. Music, despite what it seems, is really a form of language. When music is successful, it manages to convey its message—usually of a raw emotion—directly to the listener without words. The lyrics can often get in the way of the message, but many times they don’t—and the meaning of the music passes through without the encumbrance of a lyric.

Shorter songs tend to give us short, concise messages. Long jamming sessions by the Dead, and others, tend to be babbling. If one isn’t into the idea of music in this way, a 25-minute version of the Beatle’s ‘Tomorrow Never Knows’ would sound long and dull. For those ready to embrace the emotion behind the music, it would be interesting—assuming that one wished to experience this kind of emotion.

I did, so it was good for me. I was most willing to turn off my mind, relax, and float downstream.

This is not dying. But I could understand how one could be confused.

And a fine Saturday Morning it is

Well, dear reader, I think it’s time I spend a few minutes explaining this site. I am a selfish blogger—I intend to post what I want, as opposed to what you might want to read. So, rather then seeing a bunch of links with cute comments, I will tend to bore you with poetry, essays and an occasional story. What follows is an explanation of my categories … a reader’s guide, if you will:

Mechanical: Posts like this one that deal with the direction of the site.

Beside Myself: Poetry, and occasional prose

The Office: A short story I previously have written, expanded here.

The Weederman Story: The adventures of Weederman, the wonder dog.

Basking Party: I keep pet turtles. They love to bask in their heat lamp, and constantly struggle to get on top. Basking party entries are essays on human behavior.

The Right Side of Town: Hitchhiking stories. I used to hitchhike across the country. Really. I did this primarily in the early and mid 1980’s—though I did get a few emergency rides in the early 1990’s. I would stand next to a highway, armed with my backpack, with my thumb out. I got a lot of rides … and hitchhiked from New York City to Los Angles, though not all in the same trip. The name comes from some personal slang: the right side of town for me was a spot for hitchhiking on the edge of town—going away from town, not into it. When you were hitchhiking into town, you’d get a bunch of rides into town, but never one through town. Better to be on the right side—where people were heading out of town.

So with those explanations, read, enjoy, be bored. I don’t guarantee that I’ll post a lot, but I’ll try to be somewhat entertaining, if not self-righteous.

I will shortly be posting a list of other people’s blogs that I read. And I may ultimately change the name of the blog to it’s url: www.socialsmoker.net

Maybe a first entry

Basic design is complete. Only needs some tweaking from time to time. Please return shortly for some actual content that is amusing.

or so I hope.

Salad

I had no salad today.

It was dark

and the bass sound of a barking dog has come across as mechanical. I work in the night; it is the time to put ideas into action.