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Semirrahge
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Country: United States
State: Illinois
Interests: Electronics; Performance driving; Sci-Fi and Fantasy; Writing; Religion and Philosophy; Economics and Sociology; Computer Games (RPG, RTS and FPS); Anything involving computers; Zombies; Movies (Action, Romantic Comedy); Anime and Manga; Japanese...
Expertise: Construction and Remodeling; Printing; A+ Certified computer tech; Basic networking; Writing
Occupation: Lazy, bored, hyperintelligent
Message: message meEmail: email me
AIM:  Semirrahge
MSN: semirrahge@hotmail.com
ICQ:  53983096
Yahoo:  Semirrahge
Jabber: Semirrahge@jabber.org
Member Since:
2/26/2004
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| . . . But I thought, "I've posted this everywhere else - why not Xanga too? I might even get some interesting or funny comments."
And yes - I have no ties that are holding me anywhere, only the giant gap of money. That I am never to shy to abuse the generosity of my friends is welkin (but I do think you will also agree I allow my own share of abuse in turn) - and so if you provide for my transportation, or in some way lead me to a method of travel, place of stay and source of food and/or employment, I will come visit you, for as long as you'll tolerate my presence and drain on your finances. I'm not total deadweight. I'm a treat for pretty much any job you'd care to have me do. I'm not as strong as I used to was, but hey, I'm still only 25. Cut me some slack. Gosh.
"Will Work For Needs."
- - -
WARNING! SUDDEN SCHEDULE CHANGES!!!
Yes, I suddenly discovered tonight, upon careful accounting, I do not
have the finances to cover a trip to Chicago - or anywhere else for
that matter, besides back home.
So. Dutch Auction? You or a group of friend pool some gas money and you get me for as long as you care to bear with my presence - highest bidder first.
And: I really don't want to have to go home...?
- - -
So. There's my outburst for the day. Yes, I know I should write something genuine, but I really just want to sleep. Tomorrow has gone from neatly planned to sheer chaos of mystery timeschedules, opinions, Divine Mercy, disappointment, long drives, unplanned routes, detours, and General Serendipity of Travel.
Although, my travels are often fraught with unplanned and even terrible adventures, but I must say that over time I've found each little journey a part of a bigger one, and so serendipity is a practical constant for me. :)
Have I ever told you that you should travel with me? We should go somewhere. Anywhere. Bring me with you. Everyone has fun with me, even if you have to kick me in the head and laugh as I cry.
LOL
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| It's interesting to watch myself - a high-strung, ADD-riddled
individual - deal with boredom. Many years ago, I had the attention
span of a dead goldfish and was the terror of my mother, who couldn't
make me sit still for any length of time whatsoever.
And then
there are nights like tonight. During my teenage years I grew
increasingly geeky and internet-reliant. I lived in ten different time
zones and considered sleep a luxury afforded only to the dead. The
overwhelming connectivity and unrestrained availability of uncensored
data flooded my juvenile, sugar-and-caffiene fueled brain to fast to be
actually processed and understood, the end result of which was a major
emotional and physical crash somewhere around 18, when I discovered I
could no longer go on 20 hours of sleep a week.
In the last
several years I learned the hard way about 60 and 80 hour work weeks,
and to this day my biological clock has undergone so many rapid shifts
that it no longer has any kind of reliance on the 12-hour standard
day/night cycle.
I've taken drugs of varying strengths for
stimulation and wakefulness, and then drugs of varying strengths for
relaxation and sleep. My infinitely variable body chemistry has
responded by developing a sort of oddly passive existence, where sleep
is casual and unimportant, and the waking hours are differentiated only
by the fact that my brain and body interact with the real world, as
opposed to the imaginary world of dreams.
I can stay awake for
three or four days, drugged to the gills on pain meds, or sleep while
wired so tightly that my muscles vibrate from the flood of chaotic
neural stimulation. Up, down, awake, asleep - these states of existence
are so much the norm that they mean little to me now, whether
psychologically or physically.
Just as equally chaotic is my
disconnection from the earth's time clock. For years every room I've
lived in has had the windows boarded up with all the interior lights on
dimmers. I prefer to live in complete or semi-darkness - and in fact
have difficulty sleeping with any light source around, however dim.
Climate control disconnects me from the weather, and the end result of
all this is something akin to a cave-like dwelling, with the
temperature hovering around 70 degrees farenheit year round, and the
average light source being a 300 watt halogen bulb running at half
power.
I've learned (too late, now) of the many downsides to
this enforced life of disconnection, but there are also several
significant improvements that I've learned, not the least being that
'day' and 'night' are arbitary terms, as well as the time of day or
night being nearly as irrelevant. The only thing that matters to me is
whether I'm awake or asleep. If I'm sleeping, it's 'night' - if awake,
it's 'day'.
Another thing I've learned from this totally alien
lifecycle is how to deal with near-total solitude. In my younger years
I listened to music non-stop during most of my waking hours, but these
days I've grown to value silence, or, more accurately, the artificial
'silence' created out of the constant drone of computer cooling fans,
HVAC units, ceiling and/or tower fans, and the phantom siss of audio
amplifier noise floors elevated to audible levels.
My contact
with humanity has become increasingly erratic and dehumanised, with
most of my communication being channeled through pure-text forms such
as this blog, emails, instant messaging services of varying types;
seconded by phone communication and with personal, face-to-face
relegated to such a distant third that I grow quickly tired of such
overwhelming intimacy and noise, even when filtered through the common
fog of a chemically-altered reality.
Recently I've experimented
with wearing -30dB earplugs when around groups of loud or disagreeable
people, and by a process of slow adaptation have learned to hear sounds
in silence, being able to differentiate the dark pink noise of a
sleeping, distant city from the open crystalline brilliance of a clear
Texas night in the country.
Because of my time disconnect from
the rest of the world, I have learned to sit and vacate, doing nothing
and thinking less - not bored, but not interested, in some weird median
between waking and sleeping.
This brings me to nights like
tonight. One of my sisters informed me (at around 11:00 P.M. Saturday)
that she'd been experiencing increasing abdominal pain throughout most
of the day - having kindly failed to mention it even when dropping by
my room earlier that afternoon to listen to me read aloud from various
books.
So by 12:30 (A.M. Sunday) I had decided that her symptoms
resembled early onset appendicitis enough to warrant the waking of my
parents and heading into Weatherford for a more accurate mechanical
diagnosis (which occurred in the form of a contrast CT, for those who
are curious) - the end result of which was a burst ovarian cyst.
As my sister floated between lesser and greater states of wakefulness
and my mother (bless her) slowly lost the battle against the rising
need for sleep, I sat on the doctors exam stool with my legs locked
against the bed and my back flat against the wall and logged my
increasing pain levels as my opiates wore down, debated the merits of
taking one of my many available uppers (deciding in the end to save my
body's already stressed and limited dopamine levels for this
afternoon), and as the uneventful hours passed while my sister and
mother drowsed wearily - I simply waited.
I did read, a Chuck
Palahniuk book of nonfiction essays called "Stranger Than Fiction" - a
book which I'd read before (as I've read nearly all my books more than
once already), but nevertheless continue to enjoy and recieve
inspiration from. I wondered at his grasp of Hunter S. Thompson's
"Gonzo" journalism, and realised that I have in fact absorbed much of
the same concepts of semi-objective near-fact relativism.
You
can read many of my own attempts at this type of writing - this being
one of them, and in fact during the process of developing this idea
discovered that I have attempted the Gonzo approach long before I knew
what it was called or that a man named Thompson pioneered it long
before I was even born.
For those of you who don't know Gonzo,
or Thompson, for that matter, I will take it upon myself to explain the
concept. Like the quantum theory idea that you cannot observe something
without changing what is being observed, a "Gonzo" journalist does not
make any effort to report mere 'fact', but knows (or, possibly, does
not have conscious knowledge of the process) that he is in truth a part
of what he is reporting on and not only writes what he observes, but
also records the interplay between the observer and observed.
The end result, when done properly (one could argue that the process
requires a more than slightly deranged mind for proper execution) is a
fascinating interplay wherin fact and opinion are blended together to
form an often shocking new whole, wherin the sum is infinitely greater
than the parts.
I am not sure that all of this essay makes as
much sense as I think it does, but that's also part of the process. A
Gonzo journalist writes what he sees and feels, but most importantly,
his writing lays bare how his observations change himself, and the
changes that, in turn, alters how he views his subject.
Those of
you who are familiar with Thompson's work (which I am, admittedly, not
well acquainted with) will likely have their own personal epiphanic
moments, but for the rest of you, watch "Fear and Loathing in Las
Vegas". The true power of this approach to journalism comes in the
latter half of the movie, where Johnny Depp quotes Thompson's eternally
poignant view of the crumbling society surrounding him as the centuries
tick inexorably onwards toward an increasingly hazy future.
Admittedly, I've gotten somewhat (or more than somewhat, as the case
may be) lost in these musings, but nevertheless find it endlessly
fascinating that so much material should be inspired simply because I'm
better at staying awake than those around me.
I encourage you to
take the time to watch yourself watching the world, and in your studies
- whether casual or scholarly - learn to see a deeper, richer view. I
do not suppose that everyone can do this, and I do not presume to rank
myself with Thompson, but perhaps somewhere, eventually, my existence
and the record thereof may leave another with a similar feeling of
epiphany and inspiration.
The very idea is, to me, both
shockingly arrogant and simultaneously humbling - but I think it is
that spark of inspiration that drives me to write as I do. One day,
perhaps, you too will find the need to pass a similar spark onwards in
hope that another might find similar inspiration. | | |
| ...And eventually I knew I'd get fed up with bumming around and, well... I'm pretty much fed up.
But.
My back is still giving me issues, and my lung is not healing anywhere
NEAR as quickly as it needs to. Manual labor of any kind nearly makes
me sick, not to mention I have no stamina whatsoever, and anything
physically stressful always makes my back act up.
I've been on
opiates for my pain for so long that my doses are at long-term addict
levels now - if my doctor hadn't been our family doctor since I was
about 12 I'd have real trouble getting meds.
To make matters worse,
if I let the muscle stress build up it starts to keep me awake... When
I hurt bad enough that it makes me moan involuntarily - I hurt bad.
*shrug*
So, I have to find a job that I can do, but who wants to
hire an uneducated guy with long hair and a stutter? No one. No one at
all.
And all because I don't have some godforsaken sheet of
fancy paper that says I'm $200,000 in debt for four years of
mind-numbing college lectures by professors stupider than I am. I'm
still too proud to go to college and play their stupid games. Maybe I'm
just as arrogant as they are, but I don't get why being smart and
intelligent is a detriment to getting a job. Why is everything in this
world about conformity and mindless servitude?
So I either be
free and jobless and sit here wasting my life away, or I go into debt
and screw away endless hours of my life learning to pretend to agree
with some moron and his plainly asinine views just because he's got a
phd at the end of his name.
Or, I get some cheap and dead-end
job here - except mexicans who can't even speak english are hired over
me, so there's not even any guarantee that I'd get hired for a minimum
wage job.
Not to mention that I'd rather be in Chicago. | | |
| I'm typing this at the Pasadena convention center, which happens to be the most horrible place imaginable for a gun show. The actual building is great, with spectacular acoustics in the main hall, VERY clean restrooms, working HVAC system, and a PA system that is not only audible, but you can understand it. Why is it horrible?
Well, two reasons, mostly: 1) the place is quite small and the promoters pack it with so many tables that the aisles are barely 5 feet wide - even on slow days like today you can barely walk through the place; 2) the people here are about as dumb as posts, or minorities - or both. Now, I'm not racist, and in fact I don't usually pay attention to such things. I don't even believe in the concept of 'races' - human is human, there's no such thing as different species of Homo Sapiens.
What does exist is different social structures, each with its own language and view of the world. You also have nationalities and localised social structures (like Texan) that can be very different from other areas - but people are still people. Another thing that exists is a common level of stupidity in humanity, and because of the way America works, the minorities are encouraged to not only remain backwater morons, but rely on that stupidity and cultivate it.
Even as cynical as I am I never fail to be amazed and royally pissed off at how completely disfunctional people's brains are. And don't even get me started on multilingual signs.
Hmm. Well, it appears that due to a very long phone call I am no longer able to finish this. Oh well. I didn't have anything interesting to say anyhow. :P
Oh yes. Jonathan was kind enough to send me this image... *grin*
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| I had a wonderfully pathetic and whiney rant all done up and ready to post here - but I changed my mind. I haven't blogged here in a dozen years or more, it seems.
The chaos of my rushed departure from Chicago has started to settle down, and my unquiet discontent seems to be fading. I'm not certain why this is - it's just been over the last week or so... But I'm just starting to feel better about things in general. The lack of internet access still eats at me, as does this lonely country life, but I think I'm finally recovering from the chaos of the last couple years and slowly stabilising my frame of reference.
The other night we saw "300" at the IMAX (which is possibly the greatest movie EVER), and on the way home I launched into a dissertation on my view of the world and my methods of doing Christ's work in it. My calling... such as it is, is something that I feel very deeply and talking about it at length invariably reduces me to tears and my emotional state to something resembling melancholy. I suppose you could say that my desire to understand and help those around me is really the driving force for my existence.
Not so long ago I just wanted to have a job and make money. I didn't care how much I worked, so long as I brought in a goodly sum - but now... Now I almost regret the fact that money is so important to the world, because to make money one needs time, time that IMHO could be better spent with my ministry.
In my rant the other night I explained the reasons why I do what I do and go where I go. I look like the people my heart is drawn towards, and, well... Let me put it this way: Last night my father, with his very firmly held black-and-white view of the world, came into my room and basically apologised for the scorn he had for me and my appearance. He compared me to Hudson Taylor and many other highly successful missionaries (?), because I look to go into a culture and be a part of that culture. I don't expect people to come to me, rather, I go to them. I join them in their places of gathering, I wear their dress and listen to their music.
I say a lot of stuff during the course of a day, but for my dad to come to me and say that he was wrong and that he believes what I'm doing is truly the best way - in agreement with my admittedly radical and far-flung opinions (which he doesn't, or at least very rarely, agree with) - what more proof do I need?
That night, after we got home, I stood out on the porch in the starlit darkness and thought while the tears came unbidden. My dad came out and asked me what I was doing and I just told him "crying." LOL But then I asked him (when I could get my voice to work) if I was actually doing the right thing, or if I was just, well, making excuses for unhinged behavior. And then a few nights later he comes in and tells me "yes" so resoundingly that, well...
I'm a difficult person. Always have been - you can ask my mom. I think along bizarre lines and come up with radical (some have said heretical) concepts. My opinions are shared by very few, and it gets worse when I'm around my non-christian friends (which are actually the majority of those who I know), because they don't like anything having to do with such things as the God I follow. Furthermore, I have to stand out in that darkness and stand on what is tantamount to simply my opinion, alone and outcast from everyone around me. I can't go to elder Christians and ask their views on something because I know they'll mark me as trouble. Almost everyone does. And I can't go to the few peers I have because they're dealing with the same things and don't know either.
I live, for the most part, alone - even when around friends - because I'm called to something very very few understand. But to have my dad (and also my mom) tell me they agree with me, well... That's reassuring. I knew I was right, but as strong as I am I don't think anyone can live on their own and even the leader-types like me need signs and guides every now and then to outline that narrow way I must trod.
Things still are in a turmoil, and I doubt if I'll ever be settled. As much peace as I feel now I know that eventually I will go back to Chicago - but for now, at least, I am content to wait here until the Lord opens a definite way.
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