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Straight Edge Life #page { background: url("http://www.straight-edge-life.com/wp-content/themes/ari_theme/images/kubrickbgwide.jpg") repeat-y top; border: none; } Straight Edge Life The Journal of a Straight Edge man in America Where? October 11th, 2008 I am sad. Not quite sure why. Lonely I guess. Every day I see things, beautiful things, ugly things, strange and wonderful things. Alone I see these things and most of the memories fade before I get a chance to tell anyone about any of it. I don’t want to spend my life alone, don’t want to forget all these amazing things. More importantly, I don’t want to stop seeing them just because I know I have no one to share them with. Shit, listen to me, I’m not even talking about spending time with someone, only about having someone to talk to about the time I spend alone. Ergh. Posted in Uncategorized | No Comments » Want September 28th, 2008 I want to feel the bite of winter. I want to be cornered. I want to feel the pinch, the squeeze. I want to know I have no option but to make a choice. A choice that matters, desperately. I want to streamline, I want to simplify. I want to feel free to move. I want the soma purged from my system and the bare edge of the knife pressed hard against my flesh. I want the brush of a feather on my skin as I lay blindfolded in a field. I want clarity and freedom from distraction. I want to stop numbing myself. Like everything else in life, this I will have to do myself. I will have to be the thing that I want. Nobody will bring it to me. I wouldn’t recognize it if they did.None of this is new. I’ve been here before. Been here before and when I’ve managed to get out of it with any sense of success, or more importantly, grace, I did the same thing, again and again. When I want something, many things, any thing, I almost always get rid of something else. There’s only so much room in my life and sometimes things need to be shuffled around a bit. Man, I want to go on a road trip right now. Want to experience something unusual, interesting. Something new. Want to drive through the night until I can’t drive anymore. Want to sleep on the side of the road with the sunroof open. Want to have an experience that money doesn’t buy. Want to see things at times of the day when most people don’t. Want to walk in to a Milonga in Las Vegas and dance with a stranger. Starting January 1, 2009 I’m giving up TV for a year. Maybe movies as well. Perhaps all passive visual entertainment entirely. I’m tired of being entertained. I’m tired of being pacified, tired of sitting and watching. I’m also going to average biking or walking to work 2 times a week at a minimum. I’m going to chart it, document it. I’m going to continue my food project for another year. Posted in WebLog | No Comments » Lost and Found September 15th, 2008 Man, I don’t know what the hell is going on right now. I’m feeling beyond unsettled. A wicked hybrid somewhere between cabin fever and fuck-it-all-itis is consuming more and more of me every day. For a couple of months now my mind has been feeling trapped, pinned, lost, cornered. The odd thing is that I don’t feel out of balance. In fact, quite the opposite. I feel very balanced, balanced on the edge of two gigantic crevasses maybe, but balanced nonetheless. It’s like I have a very important decision to make but I don’t know what it is. I know it’s important, I know it’s imminent, I know it’s almost impossibly critical, but I have no idea what it is. Perhaps there’s a clinical description for this almost overwhelming feeling of being unsettled. Generally I know how to tackle large personal decisions. I weigh the options, or I don’t, and I make my jump. This is different.It could be about the house. Keep or sell? Rent or find housemates or live in it alone and work around the clock? I suppose this unsettledness could be about my romantic life. Start things up with the ex, who is open to the idea of giving things another shot, stay single and date, become monk, or just not worry about it? I will admit that I miss having a best friend around and I almost dread the process of attempting to build a history with someone new. It’s odd how much energy goes in to building friendships and how much it sucks more and more with time if they fail. Honestly I’m not all that in to dating. I don’t really like dating. I prefer friendships that become relationships… Of course, all my friendships are with my photographic subjects and they aren’t going to evolve into a relationship and I don’t date co-workers either. Dating websites are like roulette. So, I definitely know that I have some questions about my love life, but it doesn’t really feel like this one area of my life is enough to cause this amount of uncertainty. Lately I have been trying not to build up too much hope or too many expectations. Up to the point that I started trying to throttle expectations I think I pretty much lived on hope, dreams and expectations. They drove me. By limiting these things I could simply be experiencing transitional weirdness. Like I don’t know what to do with myself if I’m not living on my dreams. What, exactly, do I do with today if today isn’t about what I want tomorrow? Is the puritan work ethic that embedded in me? Have I really forgotten how to enjoy what today has to offer? So yeah, I’ve got some shit to figure out. Posted in Uncategorized | 1 Comment » Goodbye September 13th, 2008 The first cut is always the hardest. I hesitate, I scratch the surface, I knick the first few layers feeling the sting in my eyes as they start to water. This feeling is only a hint of what’s truly coming next. Soon enough it will flow. Maybe this time it won’t stop. Maybe my prayer for absence will be answered and my heart will stop what my brain can’t. This place is all that remains of an entire life. Figuratively and literally as her ashes sit on the top shelf, waiting to be joined by those of my living father when he dies. I am the caretaker, I am the one. The job has been left in my capable hands. This is her room, this is the place she took her last breath. The last place her voice echoed out into the world. The last place her crappy eyes strained to read Science and Health. The last place my father held her hand. The last place I gave her a hug. The last place my sister had a long conversation with my mom. This house was hers. My father may have thought he had an influence on the way things were, but it was easy enough to see that this was not the case. His influence was limited. Paul’s hands picked up shells and interestingly balanced stones from the beach. They rested on window sills around the house, on bookshelves and on banisters here and there. They rested there because my mom knew he enjoyed the ocean as much as she did, enjoyed their time together at the edge of any given continent. The stones and shells are gone, have been for years. Physical reminders of their love, no matter how insignificant filled this house. I was always aware of that. We never had anything very expensive in this house, but everything meant something to someone. It’s getting harder to remember the way our house was laid out. Filled with so much foreign clutter for so long after she died, after a couple of years I started to have trouble untangling the images in my head. Things started changing when my sister and I moved out for college. New curtains here and there, a few new dishes. Not a lot, not really much at all. My room was still my room. Naomi’s was still Naomi’s room. The cupboards were still filled in exactly the same order. Teas over the sink, cereal in the first door on the right. Microwave on the white cabinet in front of the horrible oven. I will never fully appreciate how good my mom’s cooking was. Now that I have a full understanding of just how bad the oven is, I understand a bit better… I feel the pain of that oven but I have lost my taste memory. I remember watching people try my mother’s food, her baking especially, and seeing their faces light up. Critics, fools, people who aren’t in to food.. they all lit up. How she made dishes that built her reputation as a baker and cook using that unpredictable and moody beast of an oven is beyond me. Perhaps the ovens she used growing up were even worse. She complained about it from time to time, but she managed. She did more than manage, she kicked ass with that thing. I can’t remember how anything but her turkey tasted. I remember the pies we made together, but they don’t sell the berries we used in Oregon so I can’t remind myself of how the crust tasted with the juices very easily. Her turkey I know how to make, I know the secrets. I should have paid more attention though, to everything else. The magic of linzer square tortes and pepper cookies may be forever lost now that she’s gone. I have the recipe cards but no memory of which direction to stir things or exactly when to add the egg. The big hanging cabinetry that hung over the island and breakfast bar, obscuring light and views, blocking communication between kitchen and dining room, is gone. You can now stand in the kitchen and both see the dining room and feel the morning light sneak in through the front windows. People can stand or sit in different places and still talk. If we wanted to talk we had to be all in the tiny kitchen at once. When we made pies together we were always close. Very close. I remember the way it felt bouncing into each other as we pivoted around looking for egg beaters, measuring cups and spatulas. I got rid of hundreds of dishes from 3 generations of my family to make that change.The dishes never meant much to me. Given that no family claimed them tells me that nobody else cared for them either. I wouldn’t mind a soft hand on top of my head as I mix batter though. That I miss. Or her arms around my shoulders and she showed me the proper way to kneed a given kind of dough. Nobody claimed much of anything to be honest. Small things, here and there, but nothing much. It was me who ended up with a house full of objects and memories. Whether I wanted them or not. I sometimes wonder if my dad knew that I would be able to handle this, that I would turn this whole experience into strength. That I would take my time and let it take me, embracing every change it brought, no matter how difficult it may turn out to be. He said he wanted to keep the house in the family, but he did not himself want anything to do with it. In fact, he found comfort thousands of miles away. Not that I blame him, but I feel I was last person on earth who was ready for a house. Back to the room…This is the last place in the house I haven’t changed in any way. The room was always a mystery to me. I’d go in there from time to time to snag handkerchiefs from my dad’s dresser. I always had a stuffy nose as a kid. Asthma too, but I didn’t know about that until just a few years ago. Explains a lot. But I digress.. their room was always a little scary to me. Off limits without really being defined that way. It was grown up stuff in there, stuff that both bored and intrigued me at the same time. Books, strange clothes with buttons up the front and things were not only clean, they were organized. It was dark too. North facing with tiny windows. Nice in the summer but a bit scary in winter.I’m weeks into a project that should only have taken weekends. Part of it is my body not being able to handle all that time bent over blanks of bamboo with a nail gun, part of it is hesitation, procrastination and downright sadness. I’m almost done. I could cut bamboo and hammer planks enough to finish the place in a couple of days, but it’s still hard. The room is blue now, not white. The window trim is white rather than black. The ceiling is white rather than exposed fir. The ceiling is, in fact, due to be sliced open for skylights next summer. The room doesn’t feel the same. It’s not the same. And now I’m wondering if I still belong here. Posted in WebLog | No Comments » Dawn August 26th, 2008 If I make it to the dawn, will I be OK? Will my finger ease off this trigger? Will the tenifer steel and polycarbonate feel less solid in my grip? Will I find hope? Will I find forgiveness in my heart? Posted in Uncategorized | No Comments » Dave Bullock - Defcon Network Room August 12th, 2008 “When I imagined the Defcon network room, I thought of a steaming router, bumping like a broken clothes dryer, manned by uber-geeks in black T-shirts with huge horn-rimmed glasses, half-mad on Monster Energy drink, yellow with Cheetos, injecting Goatse and Lemonparty into unwitting browsers.” - Dave Bullock (from comments on a wired.com story on the Goons running the Defcon network room) Posted in Uncategorized | No Comments » Transition August 1st, 2008 The transition has begun. I’ve finally put the work in to migrate my existing content over into the WordPress schema. As much as I love my old layout, the administration area was seriously lacking in functionality. With the WordPress system I can leave the development of the admin area to the WordPress community and focus on the content of my site. There’s a lot of work to be done as I need to restore images and finish building this theme, but I’m pretty happy that the process is showing some results. I am writing this entry in WordPress’s fantastic post editor. Good times. Posted in Uncategorized | No Comments » The Ring July 21st, 2008 I’m a photographer, right.. and a visual artist. So when I tell a story in my head it’s told in images. Tonight I am reminded of how I am not alone in the visual nature of my mind. Oddly enough the reminder comes from watching the tail end of a movie. The Ring. Like other horror thrillers it’s a story that can and is told mostly with images. As gruesome and twisted as the film may be, the experience is so complete that it really hits home with me. It speaks in a language so similar in style (if not in content) as my own mind that I can’t help but lose myself in it.The Ring, The Cell, Akira Kurasawa’s Dreams, all of them, among many others, open me up and talk directly in my own language. It is not unlike being the last english speaking man on earth, living like that for decades and trying to learn other languages, only to one day find another who speaks your native tongue. You don’t care if they’re an ax murderer, you just want to get lost in the sound of the words as they leave your mouth and hit your ears. Posted in WebLog | No Comments » Long Time… July 17th, 2008 …and then just like that, it was back. All the numbness gone, all the richness and love that life has to offer, back. It’s been a long time my friends. Far too long. But here we are, together again. I can’t say for how long, or just where this may go. You know what though? That’s ok. I’m ok not knowing what may happen next. I think a life of unpredictable beauty and unexpected pain is better than a lifetime of knowing exactly what comes next. I’m back to help articulate a massive change in my life. I’m back to try and express the overwhelming sense of joy that arrived with the subtlety of a tornado and planted itself in my veins like an affliction. Maybe in trying to explain it with words I’ll find a bit of clarity. More importantly I hope to find even more ways to indulge in enjoying and feeling life again. Right now it’s so very overwhelming. I feel so much good, so much love I don’t feel like I have a clue how to express it all. Posted in WebLog | No Comments » Outsider January 6th, 2007 When I feel like an outsider is when I need it the most. When things are chaotic and barely in control that’s when I want it. I spent my entire education learning this, learning that art and photography are the only ways I know of making sense of chaos. In the last few years I seem to have forgotten this entirely and moved on to more controlled areas of interest. I don’t really want to think about that at the moment. This is a moment of chaos. This is a moment when I feel like an outsider. 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