Writing and Life

We finished filling the first 20-yard dumpster yesterday. 10 years of living in a place means not having to think about what is truly important to preserve. We have only a matter of months to prepare for our next adventure, forcing us to appraise all of this physical stuff with a more critical eye.

Yesterday we took apart the collapsing remains of the garden walls. A tangle of rotting boards and wire fencing. The neighboring townsfolk are not upset to see them go.

Concert last night; a famous chanteuse from the old city. Nostalgia for a time half-remembered. Afterwards, we sat around the kitchen, drinks in hand - thinking about the future.

This morning I wondered about living in a reality distortion field that was so strong, I could not see any possibility beyond what my curated army of yes-men reflected back to me. And lashing out like a scared animal when the walls of that distortion were perturbed in any way. What a horrible life.

Evening situation: improving. (rye manhattan on the rocks, like god intended)

I’ve been re-reading an email I sent yesterday. It’s one of those situations where I know I responded in the right way, but I still feel uneasy about it. In a relationship that has subsisted on me nodding along to their bullshit, I just drew the line on just how much bullshit I’ll passively absorb.

Needed a place to clear my head that was relatively anonymous. Too much shit going on in the world.

Last Thursday, my regular D&D group of 25 years gathered on Zoom and I ran the last session of a long-running campaign. It was a relatively rare situation of us wrapping up a full start-to-finish campaign, and it was particularly notable for two reasons. First off, it is the last campaign that I will ever run in the bespoke game setting that I started building over 20 years ago. Second off, it was my last regular game session of any sort with that gaming group for at least six months. I’m taking an extended leave from running table-top RPGs and significantly limiting my participation in table-top RPGs until Autumn.

When I was a kid, I had some dreams that were so vivid that the sensory experience of them was almost indistinguishable from being awake. On Monday night of this week, I woke up at 3:30 a.m. with a picture-perfect recollection of the dream sequence I had just had. It was so shocking and moving to have that sort of experience after many years of barely remembering any dreams at all. So I did my best to capture what was happening across the whole sequence. On the surface, it’s just random shit, but with each section of the dream, things came into sharper and sharper focus until by the end, I was certain that I was awake up to the moment that I actually woke up.

I don’t even know where to begin with this month. I have strong emotional reactions to just thinking about it, but why bother trying to capture all of that negativity. I won’t appreciate reading it later - if I ever bring myself to reading this particular article later. So I’ll just try to capture things in chronological order and leave the rest for future me to work out.

My father passed away yesterday. I’m still very numb about the whole thing, still processing, but I didn’t want this moment to go by without some writing. Going through old articles from a previous version of this blog, I found something I wrote about my dad on the occasion of his retirement from performing surgeries in 2008. I’m reposting it here for posterity. Rest in peace, Dad. It’s Who You Are [Originally published on May 6th, 2008]

I’m a big fan of the Mass Effect video game franchise. I’ve played the main trilogy through so many times that I could talk you through the whole plot and the big decision points without loading up the games.

Twenty years ago today - the Ides of March, 2002 - I enlisted in the Army National Guard. Unlike most of the young men and women going through in-processing that day in Boston, I was already a college graduate, I was already married, and I wasn’t exactly young. I was twenty-eight years old. Had a full-time job as a software engineer, had a mortgage. What motivated me to join was a sense that I could be doing more to serve others. It was just after 9/11 and I felt like it was something I could do.

When I was in high school, I had a fast food job in the local shopping mall. I was in Danbury, CT, which was close enough to New York City to attract a lot of business from urbanites looking for a change of scenery on the weekends. This made for very busy weekend shifts, and absolutely insane holiday rushes. Each day as Christmas of my senior year approached, hungry shoppers would be stacked up in twisting lines, five people deep, in front of every restaurant in the food court.

In October of 2018, I got my annual physical and came face-to-face with the reality of my current weight and fitness levels. I was at 30 BMI and at my lowest amount of regular physical activity in years. The trend was not good.

Here at The Internet Shipyards, Friday night is cocktail night. Today’s special guest: the Rusty Nail, also known as the World’s Simplest Cocktail.

We lost Mia today. I’ve always read posts like this with some amount of indifference because in the back of my head I am thinking “this is just an animal” and “this is not a person”. And so I forgive you for feeling the same way. I understand that response. This stream of thoughts is really for me, and it is also for my wife and kids and anyone else who feels the loss of our “just a cat” as acutely as I am feeling it right now. But maybe you’ve been here, too, with your pets, at the end of a chapter in your own life. Here is a rememberance for us.

A moment of clarity from the folks at HuffPo… > Here’s the best part: When you detach happiness from achievement, these five things that happen are the key ingredients to success. Disconnecting happiness from achievement is the best way to achieve anything…

Bastion shook his head, and the ghastly images faded away. Glancing up, he could see that the others were watching him. No one was shocked or concerned; they wore their professional detachment like masks. He blinked, glanced up at the cold winter sun through the tree canopy, and then back to the dead forest floor. Signs, patterns, stories. Two people had come this way, one supporting the other. Bastion read their desperation and their determination in lurching footprints that broke the frozen carpet of leaves. He read it in the dried pools of blood. A cold sweat had sprung up on the back of Bastions neck, but he made a broad sweep of his hand and began walking again, deeper into the woods. Taking the cue, the others started walking as well, spread evenly in a line perpendicular to Bastions course.

The quiet evening stands still; a tapestry A history woven in sodium light A memory Hospitals never used to bother me; I would follow my Dad to the nurses station Wait quietly for him to conduct his rounds and watch people get better. You never got better here And I’m wearing this stupid yellow band Like it matters I’m sure Lance is sorry for us I’m sorry that I was never sad at funerals But they keep getting closer They hurt more now