A message to a confused stranger

Girl, I can scarcely speak. I could tell with just one view that you MUST be a model in search of a controller... and you have put an arrow through my heart.

And it brings me great sadness, girl....

See, ShipOfFool gotta be FREE... I'm talking open source and loosely coupled! But, girl, you're so fine, you could make a dead man go proprietary, HIGHLY proprietary, you feel me??
 
Damns... you got me speaking Erlang up in here...

I know you can feel what's in my heart, girl, and that you have already put your hand in mine, which I extend to you in an offer of date-hood that can only become legendary. I will tell you now how our date will go.

First, I will text you and make some SmallTalk, and not use any abbreviations that could mess up you knowing the fact that I was only the best possible verbal artist, the kind of well-speaking person you would be pleased to speak with in a conversational manner between us.

Then I will give you the address of the hoagie shack where we will have our get-to-know-you cup of Java. We will take separate cars. It is ShipOfFool's belief that on the first date, even when it is a sure thing beyond any doubt as it is between us, that this helps a woman as fine as yourself feel slightly less like a trapped animal when I stare at you with my crazy-eyes and let loose with the language of l'amour.

There will be a spark between us - there is no doubt in my mind, girl - and it will build into a blazing inferno of desire that will consume us both in the white-hot heat of a thousand suns. (If I am too intense for you, girl, please go ahead and dial that one down a couple of notches.)

Also, there may be mashed potatoes.

ShipOfFool has spoken the language of l'amour and he is certain that he has been understood. I will retire now to the study, don my burgundy-red crushed velour and virgin acrylic smoking jacket to await your reply, musing with a tell-tale smile over a glass of Boone's Farm.

I know you can see it, girl.

A letter to my love from a place of convalescence

My dearest love  -


I write to you this day from my home office, which adjoins the side bedroom that has been the setting for so many delirious afternoons together.  Tomorrow you will join me here, and I am filled with emotion that I can scarcely contain or describe.

But I will try, my darling, to convey some sense of it to you with its complexities, its wet eddies of of warm and cold, the shimmering water and black aquatic plants, the reflective surfaces and hazy depths.

You see, my love, we have been through so very much these last two years... the utmost in physical and emotional expression and sensation, fearless protestations of our powerlessness in the presence of each other, united in our social defiance, gleeful with contempt for the future, sacrificing everything for each other in the moment, for the carnival, for the roller coaster, the house of horrors, cotton candy and the kissing booth and finally for holding hands seated on the veranda of the cafe with Irish coffee as the moon levitates over the twilight horizon to the east.

And, too, there have been separations and crushing betrayals, and our souls have shrieked at each other with a molten fury that has left our mortal selves cowering in terror of what we are able to summon from within, daring to glance up only intermittently to witness the merciless flaying of our deepest insecurities and self-delusions; and finally, when the banshees are spent and departed to the dimension of their origin, rising hesitantly, slowly, in a fearful and remorseful crouch, edging toward each other on the quivering legs of fawns, scarcely able to look at each other, until at last through herculean emotional effort we touch and are again within each other's magnetic field and collapse together and fuse into a new element, emitting pulses of deep red light from the mysterious new thing we have become as roots and leaves and twigs materialize around us in a new Spring.

I fear we are at the cusp of such a moment now, or perhaps even something worse... for you see, my love, I am aware that you have made the acquaintance of a total stranger on the Internet, a stranger whom you even mocked to me during our trip to the Historical Park one brilliant Sunday.  A stupid man, a not so attractive man, an unaccomplished man, but above all an ignoramus who flattered you so artlessly that I was stunned when I realized you'd taken the bait, even if feigning ignorance.  You are careless, and I have read your communications, my dearest, and I was dismayed how you led him on, at last practically taking him by the hand to get him to agree to take possession of you, asking him directly if he wanted to make you his; and his clownish response makes me cringe with embarrassment for you even now as I write this.

Several times you have said to me that you did not understand my interest in you, that you were holding me back from meeting a better person; and in my love I laughed and reassured you and we tingled in the warm waters of love and affection and acceptance that bouyed us above the deep dark foreboding bottom, littered with broken bottles and rusty cans and sharp black branches and rot and decay.

I must tell you, my love, that it is worse for me in the mornings, the brief moments when I first wake with no sense of self, my ego still disassembled and scattered throughout the many gloomy and shifting Boschean chambers that are my sleep.  During these very short periods of time, I can see you, and see through your eyes, and experience what you do, and feel sympathy for you, and even feel protective of you.  But at last, my mind shakes itself free of the tentacles of night and does what it's designed to do, erecting the massive assembly of identity and rationalization, the corroded beams and gears and chains that are necessary for me to rise each morning and persist another day without melting down and dissolving away. 

Unfortunately I am usually in this state of armature when we text on the five or six days a week that we're unable to be together, and I must regard each of your communications in this frame of reference, knowing that your expressions may be sincere, but they are not exclusive; or they may not be sincere after all, for each of us has tried to free ourselves of the other on occasion, and we both know the anguish and diabolical tortures that lie down that path.  And then there are the long periods of time during the day when we do not text, and I know you are texting with the half-wit, and I cannot communicate to you in earnest because to do so would reveal that I know your secret, and so I remain silent and distant.

This afternoon I am most apprehensive, my love, for I have discovered that tomorrow you will meet the simpleton for the first time, early in the morning for a run, and it has only been two days since you induced him to take you.  And it is tomorrow that we are to meet again in the side bedroom adjoining my office, with refreshing drink and laughter and confidences, and physical and emotional love.  And it is tomorrow that you've told me that a "family obligation" earlier in the day may require you to come to me later, rather than sooner.  I fear you will be smitten with the new-ness and the dangerous-ness and the electrical-ness that will hang like a dank cloud around the cretin when you meet him, and that you will indeed have a family obligation on that morning, my dearest love.

Then you will come to me.  What will I do?  Wall you in with words and with the final brick seal you away from me forever? Conceive of and execute the perfect plan that rids me of you and burns the lesson of your betrayal into your mind?  Unilaterally revise the terms of our association to obligate us to each other on weekends only?  Carry on in full knowledge, while keeping an eye toward the horizon for a mountain-top that is less degraded?

You see, my darling, that my mind swirls like a tall field of gyrating grass overrun with rodents and condors circling above and storm clouds on the horizon and lightning striking the ocean and the sun casting down shafts of light here and there once in a very great while.  I am eager for this day to pass, and the next to start, and to progress to its conclusion, for many questions will be answered then.


I bid you adeiu with an inscrutable smile, and pray I see you sooner rather than later on the morrow.


-  ShipOfFool

A letter to my love from the battlefields of The Office

(To be read in the fashion of a Ken Burns history narration)

My dearest love -


I hope this letter finds you well, and that it gives you the lift and strength of spirit that I am given by communications received from you. I am still flush with memories of our two days together, and with the fulfillment, grim though it was, of tending the wounds you sustained at the battle of Towne Pub and the dreadful ambush at Sand Drift Cafe. I cannot help but feel that with greater vigilance and with a more furious fight I may have prevented your injury altogether. I assure you, my dearest, that I have incorporated these lessons with an eye toward counting more closely in the future, should we again find ourselves surrounded on all sides by mudslides on the rocks.

I write to you now following a march of not great physical distance but great spiritual hardship, having arrived with my fellow conscriptees on the fields of The Office. Skirmishes have already commenced, and my past experience leads me to believe this conflict will escalate and continue for another six, perhaps seven, hours. I assure you that in all my time on this earth I have not endured many places more infernal in their tortures than here.

Still, I receive a bitter comfort knowing that I am not alone - that you are engaged in warfare of your own, thinking of me as I think of you; and I find the sweetest comfort of all knowing that we are both blessed by providence to live another week and meet again in that place that we share from time to time, our Oasis of adventure and respite and, dare I say, ecstacy? Yes, I do dare to be so intimate on this page, for what are the odds that one day a little man with closely cropped facial hair will hire a folksy black man to read these words, and broadcast them over a machine called a "tele-vision"? Remote, I say.

I think of you always, my love, occasionally in a sense wider than the daily combat we share, which, though we share it, is different for each of us and thus separates us in our experiences. My thoughts drift to us in relation to the Almighty Economy, to which we are bound for our very existence and yet which falters in its step in these trying times, promising to bring us down with it. I reflect, my love, on this aspect of our condition, as raw materials for the Almighty Economy, and how its terrible force twists our souls and minds and bends our very beings to its purpose, as the blacksmith beats swords into plowshares, and back into swords again, according to its dictate. The essence of mankind is the Almighty Economy, and the history of mankind is slavery in its service; and we, my dearest love, along with all who have come before us and all who are to come after us, are authentic beings only in the same measure to which we can escape it with our dignity intact.

This existential blight is something we share, though it takes different forms: I by my conscription into this tormenting employment, and you by your forced domestic co-habitation, which, though ending soon, you have endured for so very long. It is ironic that these blights have played a role in bringing us together, and that through their malign energies we indirectly nourish each other's inner Spartacus to take up arms and carve out a spartan but self-determined existence, working in service of ourselves and of those for whom we care, instead of those who have fashioned the terrible wrath of the Almighty Economy into instruments against us.

I consider our similarities and our differences, and sing quietly to myself now the old Negro spiritual popularized by Louis Armstrong (and it is mandatory that I sing it in his voice):

Tomato, Tomah-to,
Potato, Potah-to,
Vagina, vagina,
Vagina, vagina...

Tomato. Potato. Vagina. Indeed, Louis Armstrong, indeed, fare thee well in the embrace of the hereafter. Your spirit carries on after you through the voices of those still living.

My dearest, the conflagration of slave-war rages all around me now and I must tend to my survival this day. It is with great reluctance that I close this letter, and though I am saddened that I must divert my attention to the threats immediately at hand, I have the assurance that thoughts of you will ever be in the background, ready to step in when I have a moment free from peril; and I am strengthed by the knowledge that we are one day closer to our Oasis, which incubates in our imaginations during the week and is realized upon week-end. We do not know its exact form ahead of time, but there is always drink to refresh us, cool shade from the cruel sun, quiet and leisure, occasional bouts of unimaginable terror - and each other, with whom we share conversation, confidences, and physical and spiritual love.


With love and care, I remain -

- ShipOfFool

Corelle

The door-to-door Corelle salesman said "...and they're virtually unbreakable!" before dropping the plate from waist height, shattering it into many pieces that scattered across our kitchen floor*. He closed the deal anyway, somehow, and left my parents with a set of Butterfly Gold that has held up for forty years.

Today I need a dish set. I am nostalgic and utilitarian so I buy lightweight, durable, affordable Corelle. The Butterfly Gold pattern is long gone. I choose Memphis, with its orderly rectangles on the rim of the plate radiating outward in four colors: red, yellow, and blue - a nod to Bauhaus? - plus a weird green, for whose presence I have no theory.

I wonder how these colors are associated with Memphis, but Google fails to yield a plausible link with the city in Tennessee. I try Memphis, Egypt (you're probably ahead of me), but again come up empty-handed.

I abandon my search and attempt to learn something about Memphis, Egypt, beyond the fact that it exists. Wikipedia tells me that it's on the Nile river, it was once a center of production and commerce, and today it's uninhabited.


I continue to read: "The city reached a peak of prestige under the 6th dynasty as a centre for the worship of Ptah, the god of creation and artworks... it was Ptah who called the world into being, having dreamt creation in his heart, and speaking it, his name meaning 'opener', in the sense of 'opener of the mouth'. Indeed the opening of the mouth ceremony, performed by priests at funerals to release souls from their corpses, was said to have been created by Ptah."

Which is rather deep and dark and creepy, and it gives you goosebumps if you read it at two in the morning in an empty house. But then you yell "Eureka!" because you see the illustration of Ptah in the form of a mummy, and he is painted red, yellow, and blue, plus a weird green.

A connection between this dish set picked up at Walmart for twenty-five bucks and the ancient Egyptian god is highly unlikely. Still, I imagine an industrial designer in the Corelle studios applying the bitterness of a failed art history career to the creation of this pattern, concealing the divine message behind the name Memphis, a name with two meanings - one that attracts the consumer and another that points the way to Ptah, the god of creation and artworks, a tribute to the designer's squandered potential.

The simple, colorful pattern of the Memphis dish set catches the eye of the Memphis Walmart shopper, who will pile these plates high with babyback ribs for her brood while The King croons from a boombox on the picnic table, unaware that they are summoning Ptah with their own opening-of-the-mouth death ceremony as they ladle body-temperature potato salad down their gullets.

Yes, Walmart shoppers like me, although I do not eat meat; so instead of ribs my Memphis plate sees as its first meal another exemplary Memphis dish: a peanut butter and processed american cheese-food on toast sandwich, which I last had forty years ago, surely on Butterfly Gold, surely in my parents' kitchen. A meal fit for a King, thank you, thankyouverymuch.



* In fairness to the Corelle corporation, their salesman, and his plate, it had probably made a thousand similar trips in its lifetime before finally meeting its doom on our kitchen floor.

The fire is so delightful

While browsing the NASA JPL website for home-made Christmas card material, I came across two images:


It reminded me of another pair of images:


And that made me think of the personings and unpersonings that I had been part of over the years.

I took another (lawfully prescribed, entirely medically justifiable, and perhaps off-labelly-therapeutic) Percocet and got back to work on those cards.

unHappy unHolidays, Plutoids!

An unsolicited reply to the New London punk

Re: I have a mohawk yes. What of it?! (New London)

Let your freak flag fly, Mohawk Guy! Sure it can be annoying when people get more excited by your getup than you are, but don't let it get you down.

I like to see mohawks because they remind me of the glorious 1980's, when I would have liked to have been the guy that would have had the self-confidence to rock a mohawk, which was not the case, for obvious reasons (namely my over-conjugation of conditional past-perfect verbs and reckless disregard for run-on sentences and misclassification of elements of grammar).

If you're annoyed now, boy will you be angry if I ever drive by you on the street! Because I'm going to roll down the window and scream "New London Calling...!", and then you will cry a little inside. But I will not throw devil-horns, because that is Metal.

Now, if you'll pardon me, I'm going to give that kitchen floor the once-over with some Lemon Glow.

A message to "It kills me"

"It absolutely kills me that people who have a job will quit because they don't have enough hours or pay. Well, isn't some hours and some pay better than NO pay or hours??"

Not necessarily. When you calculate the ACTUAL pay rate - accounting for vehicle/gas, day care, Work Costume purchase and maintenance, having to hire others to provide services that you could do for yourself if you were at home, the psychological toll of being subjected to degrading power relationships and personality conflicts at work, and simply being tied up in a suck-ass job so that you don't have time or opportunity to find a better one - it can actually be a net negative to work. All those costs, though hidden in that you're not always consciously aware of them or don't always relate them to your job, are real.

Even someone who is fully employed might benefit by spending less time on the job and investing that time in learning more general-purpose life skills, like home maintenance, vehicle repair, starting a garden and growing your own food (or fishing/hunting if gardening isn't manly enough for you), starting a simple home business, and getting involved with neighbors to help each other out and solve common local problems. Having a diverse skill set and relationships with people local to you is just a good idea generally, and probably more so as the economy continues to wind down.

Sounds kooky, doesn't it? That's because status-driven consumer culture has locked us into a mentality that prevents us from seeing the obvious even when it's right before our eyes.

Let's all get on my ship and sail away to Self-sufficiency Island. We'll never set another alarm clock again.