It only gets louder when you cut off your ear

What's lost was once burning and finally the day seems so long

Workmen are out in the hallway doing something very loud to the escalator and I imagine the clattering can be heard on the top floor.  My door being closed doesn’t prevent their yammering from filtering in; one of them’s declaiming how you can’t go wrong with Schlotzkys, a sentiment with which I very much beg to differ but I’m not getting into the act.  Right now it sounds like they’re busy with a hacksaw and I’ve seen enough movies to know you don’t disagree with the man holding the hacksaw.

Apart from them it’s wonderfully quiet on the hall.  Smelly Gal has once again given the gift of her absence, three weeks “painting in Italy” (how positively original!), so we’re free of her Scarlett O’Hara phrasings for a good long time.  And just as she comes back I’m outta here for another two.  Couldn’t have timed that one better if I’d tried.

Details of the workshop part of my trip are finally starting to come clear and I now know where we’ll be staying (June Lake) and in what campground.  What the elevation there is (6K) and what major gear I’ll need to provide on my own (sleeping bag).  What the outfitting company is taking care of (pretty much everything) and whether we’ll be writing every single day (probably not).  And most important, whether our site has wifi, or internet access at all  (it doesn’t). 

So now I’ve got a little over two weeks to finalize arrangements on my end, like figuring what if any small personal camping gear I won’t be able to last a week without, dig it out and ship it to my sister with the sleeping bag.  (I need a new headlamp, have for years, but that can wait until Berkeley probably.)  Arrange for leave without pay: Nadine says only one day won’t be covered by vacation time, which is much better than I feared.  Make the necessary arrangements to have my Freecycle duties covered while I’m offline, reconfirm my reservation at the one motel in Gerlach, plan cat care and so on.

The most fun prep to date has been brainstorming what I most want to do on our non-writing days: sure, Mono Lake and Bodie and Devil’s Postpile and the predictable upper Rt. 395 stuff with the group, but I plan to see if I can’t get in a trip to the Eureka Dunes also.  I was there 10-plus years ago with burner folk and I recall that as usual on those expeditions there was a lot of drugs and drama involved, so I’d like to re-experience that particular patch of desert splendor from a place of relative internal peace.  Fellow writers understand these things, I presume.

(Someday I’ll get back to Saline Valley too, but it won’t be in a low-clearance rental car.  In 96 I made it in and out in my trusty Golf without even needing the spare and I still don’t know how that happened.)

(Yes, I know Enterprise will try to get me to upgrade to an SUV and I might actually consider it since I want to get in some playa time while in Gerlach.  But Saline Valley’s just too far from June Lake for a comfortable day trip.  Too bad.)

This time the only drugs are going to be prescription.  Neither do I think we’ll be exactly roughing it; roughing it is when you choose a National Forest campground down 30 miles of bad road and on arrival decide you’d rather dig your own hole than use the Augean-caliber privies provided.  Or better yet, just pitch in the middle of a National Forest without any facilities at all.  Where we’re staying for the workshop is a private facility with a website that promises laundry and showers.  Showers!  Almost certainly the type of place I’d have avoided like the plague on my own travels. 

Then again, on my own travels I never needed an electrical hookup to breathe while I slept.  Everything, including plans for day trips, is secondary to getting a good night’s sleep every night I’m there or as close as is possible.  When I sleep poorly it pretty much kills either my interest in writing or my satisfaction with what I produce or both.  If I wanted that I’d just stay home.

(There’s talk about camping out on the lake beach, an alleged 5-minute walk from camp, one night to watch the Perseid showers.    Sounds good if you can find an extension cord to reach that far.)

I’m a little nervous as I haven’t been camping in any way, shape or form in seven years and cushly outfitted though I’ll likely be, being far from home and climate stabilization or even from a friend’s guest room is a barely-remembered experience by now.  I’m glad for the adventure, though.  That’s what I say with two weeks to go anyway.

I pacify myself with thinking of all the lovely pictures I’ll take.  Beats hacking with paint in Europe, I figure.

The still, small voice within that just won't shut up

Rick’s off doing stuff with relatives today so, left to my own devices, I’m mixing it up a little bit.  Laundry and Quacks as usual but after that I’m riding my bike to the Hancock Center and leaving it there while I take the bus for breakfast downtown  (because lord knows you should never do your weekly shopping with an appetite).  After leisurely biscuits-and-migas at Whole Foods I’ll take the bus back, procure the groceries, and bike them home .  With any luck I’ll have it all done by 11:30 (because lord also knows you don’t want to be outside any later in the day than is necessary while the sun is this hostile).

And that, plus a foray down to campus in the evening for lap-swimming, will be my day: simple, low-cost, and more than a bit solitary.  Maybe I’ll even get to the True Blood disks from Netflix before it’s out.

No Meeting for Worship today; went last week and enjoyed it, felt truly at stillness with myself, for the first time in months and months.  I suspect this was partly enabled by the low turnout, a holiday weekend and many Friends off at the yearly Gathering.  I make a point of not attending the following week because the Gathering attracts a lot of the Meeting’s more windbaggy sort and they come back feeling all holy and just have to tell us about it, usually during the silence.  It’s just part of the yearly cycle, one I know by now I can safely skip.

I remember when I was totally fastidious about attending the Meeting’s monthly business sessions, one of which follows MFW today, but I can safely skip those now too.  I’ll get all the salient points in two days when I receive the minutes and edit them for the newsletter.  This is the Quaker equivalent of reading the TV Guide instead of actually watching TV: an excellent way of keeping in the loop without having your patience tried by real-time bullshit. 

Especially Quaker bullshit, which usually contains an unhealthily large dose of hand-wringing.  After almost 50 years, totally had it with the hand-wringing.

I ended up taking my concern from last month about SUVs to Oversight and last I heard they were going to discuss it at their meeting earlier this week.  What happens next I don’t know; maybe it’ll make it into Meeting for Business today, maybe not.  I suspect that Friends’ means of conveyance to Meeting is not a large concern to the FMA at large and from most perspectives it shouldn’t be.  The important thing is that I spoke up instead of letting it fester inside. 

While I was sounding out the clerk of Oversight on my concern she asked how I was.  I took this to mean how is my relationship to the Meeting; since she’s one of the few folks at the FMA I feel comfortable speaking to in close-to-total honesty I told her it hasn’t been good but I’m trying to bring myself back.  She sounded glad to hear it, which I in turn was glad to hear.  “Been finding a little too much inconsistency between word and deed there lately,” I added.  “If I’m going to renew my investment in the Meeting I can’t keep quiet about what I see.”  I hope others are as understanding as her.

Except the SUV drivers.  I hope they’re ashamed and if they’re not on their own I plan to try and make them every chance I get.  One of them is a semi-vapid Irishwoman who’s been attending a number of years and still comes to MFW wearing makeup (which probably offends only me) and perfume (which offends many).  One Sunday she held the entire meeting hostage for 10 minutes during announcements while she preached her newly-discovered Gospel Of The Joys Of Recycling And Simplicity.  Then she got in her shiny black Land Rover and drove away.  People who act this clueless don’t deserve to have their feelings spared far as I’m concerned.

Grrr.

I was a lot more circumspect in the wording of the concern as I actually sent it to Oversight.  While I don’t expect the FMA en masse to give up their cars and begin riding bikes, especially in the Austin summer, it concluded, all I ask is that those who come to Meeting in oversize SUVs give at least a little thought to treating the testimonies I hold dearest with more respect just this once a week.  See?  I know how to talk the Quaker-talk, at least initially.  The hairy eyeball comes later.

Far as I can recall, this is the third time I’ve submitted a concern regarding the life of the Austin meeting.  The first was people bringing in coffee (and half the time knocking it over mid-worship) and the second was the PETA-man.  I’m happy to say that two and more years after the coffee business, worship services are largely free of anything stronger than the occasional mug of tea.  This might be because we’re now housed in a carpeted space, however.

The issue of authentic ministry that I raised in the wake of the veggie-Christ preacher is, I suspect, as old as unprogrammed Quaker worship.  I didn’t expect any solution on that one; again, the important thing is to speak your piece rather than stew.  Even more necessary is to do that speaking judiciously and not wear out your voice or credibility by speaking too often – much like ministry during meeting itself.

I’m sure thinking a lot about Meeting for Worship for someone who goes as infrequently as I do these days.  It’s something you’re not easily quit of, not when it’s all you’ve known since your earliest days.  I am invested, after all.  It’s just acting like it in the most healthy way that I have yet to learn.

To the logical limit

This morning a Facebook friend notes that looking through her high school yearbook makes her realize what a “self-centered twit” she was then, and how embarrassed she is about it.  Commenters are quick to respond that she isn’t now, and everyone is in high school anyway, and to make such other generally supportive remarks as are the norm on Facebook.  In fact it wasn’t until last night on another thread that I saw the first comment I can remember having any aspect of hater-hood, and it was definitely mild compared to what you see elsewhere on the net.  There are drawbacks to posting under your own name, sure, but if it helps cuts down on gratuitous nastiness it might be an idea worth catching on.

Interesting article in the most recent Wired on Facebook’s plan to supplant Google not only as center of the internet but also as its dominant transaction model.  Google, it says, is fine as long as all you want is raw data, especially if you want to make money from it.  Facebook in contrast aims to focus on human interaction – as much is as possible over a computer, anyway – by building a peer network that filters data via friends’ comments, analysis, recommendations etc. to the user’s comfort. 

Couched like this, Facebook’s plan seems like simply a natural step in the evolution both of the net and our use of it.  Google is a highly useful and largely excellent search tool, and at the very least it’s good to have the old Altavista/Yahoo/Dogpile etc. wars behind us, those were such a confusing few years, but too much of the time its search results are still way too much like the proverbial blast from a firehose when all you want is a modest drink of water.  At least for me, no amount of power-user Google tips and tricks is ever going to truly change that.  It’s just the nature of the internet that most of what I’m going to encounter there is going to be useless crap as far as I’m concerned.  That’s a characteristic of democracy, cyber or otherwise.

Not enough filters already put in place, in other words.  For people like me who aren’t too skillful at developing and/or employing them on my own, this is a problem.  So I’m all for anything that will (judiciously, of course) help set up some filters I can actually use.

(And yes, I know about this Bing thing.  Haven’t used it yet and don’t plan to soon because, well, fuck Microsoft for everything except Office 2008.  Redmond has been way too enthusiastic about flipping off Mac users for years now and this one isn’t forgetting it.)

As of today I’m up to 130 friends on Facebook, give or take a few.  I’m not so impressed with this just as a number – OK, actually I am, but only because it’s about double where I initially expected to top out - as I am with the idea that were I to request a product recommendation or financial advice or travel tip or whatever, I could theoretically get 130 pieces of advice.  130 I can theoretically handle (not that most such requests seem to get more than 5% response anyway).  It’s a lot more like the water fountain that I want out of the internet.

(Of course, if you use Facebook you know that not all your friends there are necessarily what you truly consider friends, which in this context means their feedback may not be all that useful.  It’s nowhere close to 100% useful even from real-life friends, so why should it be from those at the periphery?  But it’s still a big step in the right direction.  For a sensitive - and frequent mush-brain - like myself, filters are in the end just as important as the data that gets strained through them.)

Not that all you’re ever going to want from your Facebook is product recommendations, naturally.  When I had that nasty bout of stomach flu a few months back the get-well wishes I received online were a source of great comfort.  And I suppose if I were to be embarrassed by what my yearbook revealed about me years later, I might seek some feedback on that too.  It’s called community, or so I hear: something that in its genuine form we could definitely use more of.

For the record, I did place a comment on my friend’s yearbook revelation.  Admittedly she’s more a friend of friends than actually and we haven’t met in real life (yet), so her mileage is likely to vary considerably on the usefulness of what I wrote, but see above.  It’s still the internet, after all.  What I wrote was something to the effect that if there’s anything going to make someone feel like a self-centered twit, it’s a high school yearbook.

That is, next to a blog.

When the rain washes you clean you'll know

Restoring Evernote on my work desktop proved remarkably easy – just go into the Application Support folder on my laptop, find the Data sub-folder and copy it over.  Once I restarted the application everything worked seamlessly.  It helps that I use the desktop client on all three of my machines including the home iMac now, and have it set to sync every half-hour so I’ll never lack a current backup file – others who only have it in one place and don’t back that up scrupulously might not be so lucky.

Getting through today won’t necessarily be so easy.  Austin air is full of molds from last week’s rain and it’s messed with my breathing, especially at night, for days now.  Saturday and Sunday nights I gave in and took Benadryl and it worked in that I had to deal with a much milder form of grogginess in the morning, but that’s some bad shit to be mixing with Lunesta on a regular basis so I opted out last night. 

And of course now I wish I hadn’t.  Slept like shit and while I’m feeling all bright-eyed and clear-headed at the moment, it’s the kind of energy I recognize as good for a burst of a few hours in the morning but leaves you three-quarters dead the rest of the day.  So I’m getting in everything requiring brain cells while this particular window remains open.

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If anything could ever feel this real forever

The week went well right up through its end.  Palin resigned, and in the process once again exposed herself as a babbling fool.  I wonder how the dude I saw in the HEB parking lot a few weeks ago who’d razored off the McCain portion of his McCain/Palin bumpersticker is feeling right about now, but not enough to drop in on Free Republic to see.

The other big news Friday afternoon was we got sent home a few hours early.  Which as far as the good of the world is concerned doesn’t hold a candle to Palin’s self-ouster, but was a nice bonus anyway.  Especially since a few hours earlier I’d discovered how to corrupt an Evernote database in one easy step – inadvertently yanking out the computer’s power cord mid-entry does the job beautifully – and wanted to get back to my main work.  Evernote does of course have a web interface for entry, but it’s a clumsy and slow tool when you’ve got as much of it to do as I have. 

Actually the current phase of the project is not so much entry, which conjures the image of fingers dancing continually over the keyboard, as it is simple copy-and-paste.  Right now I’m in the thick of my earliest blog entries (July 2000 as of last night), hacking them apart for the good pieces.  Those were the days when I published my first drafts and they regularly came in over 2000 words, 4-5 days/week.  Sometimes upwards of 3500.  There’s a lot of stuff valuable to me in there – family history, political commentary (“oh yeah, that Bush idiot doesn’t stand a chance even against Al Bore”), spiritual awakening, kissing beautiful redheads, etc. – but it’s buried under a flood of dross.  Sorting out which is which is challenging but fun.

And relatively easy while it remains primarily copy-and-paste from web pages or old Word docs.  I’m lucky in that I have soft copy of pretty much every blog entry I’ve ever done, even if it’s just a first draft that might differ significantly in places from the final published version.  The second half of 2003 is lost – got PDFs of everything from then but the Word versions apparently never made it off my old computer at the bank.   The good news is that by then my new job and commute were cutting my blogging time severely anyway and we’re only talking about 36 missing entries here.  The bad news is the entries did get written were still churning out at 2-3K words apiece and that’s a lot of transcription when I finally get around to doing it in toto.

The good news (for now) is there was a lot smaller portion of non-dross stuff came out that year: life in general was less interesting by then, and I’d already vomited out a lot of the most vital history/philosophy and other context-establishing material back in the beginning.  So my typing muscles may get spared some for the time being.

While my official 10-year blogging  anniversary comes this December 15 with my first published Diaryland piece, the unofficial 10th is later this month, the date of my first practice entry.  That’s right: I practice-blogged, working to get the feel of this unfamiliar medium before I went public.  I’d barely kept a journal even just for myself prior to that and I so wanted to do it right. 

You’d think anyone would have been content with a dozen or so trial runs – how hard can it be to write an online journal, after all – but no, I did it 44 times in the next few months.  There’s a convenient intersection between perfectionism and procrastination somewhere among those never-published entries.

Of course, it didn’t help that blog-hosting sites were almost non-existent in those days.  No doubt I would have remained dead in the water for some time, perhaps even let my OLJing desire die still-born, if I hadn’t discovered Diaryland that December.  The templates were ugly as hell but overall the service was easy to use without having to learn any HTML - a project I’d been letting intimidate me a lot more than it should have.  Once I got on D-land I gave no more thought to writing anything I wouldn’t publish.  Or to editing, for that matter.  Or even to organizing my raw content before I constructed an entry from it.  In all of those contexts mine was a pretty typical Diaryland effort for that time.

A few of those practice entries are now seeing the light of day on my personal site.  While none are any great shakes (though I am kind of fond of the one about how target shooting in the Napa woods can help remedy a bad breakup), they are at least short and relatively to the point.  I had a much better sense of proper blogging form before I went and became an online journaler.

I’ll probably put more of them up someday.  For the time being though filling out my personal site is taking a backseat to getting everything into Evernote and I’m going to be spending what part of the day I’m not in MFW on that.  It’s a lot more fun than it sounds, as long as you’re not having to retype anything.