moving people, stationary objects

there are buildings which act as a buffer between the sidewalk and my preferred walking path. occasionally I'll see people in the distance leaning up against the buildings or walking in circles, taking smoke breaks from work or just killing time. or there might be a usps or ups delivery van unassumingly parked in an empty lot, as the driver has some minutes to relax and contemplate going postal. as I approach these people on my way to wherever I'm going, they eventually notice me nearing and it's as if my presence wakes them from their train of thought. they usually leave the spot they had kept till noticing me, back to work or somewhere else, as if they've suddenly been made aware that more time has passed than they had thought. in the case of parked vehicles, they've often moved to the edge of the lot looking to get back on the main road shortly after I've walked passed. usps and ups parked vans are the worst. it's easy to believe that their drivers, when taking a break parked in an empty lot, consider the land in their field of view to be their property and that any moving thing encroaching on their territory is disturbing the peace. just consider how profound it could be for a person who spends their days repetitively delivering an ever-regenerating supply of mailings to their destinations to pull into a quiet area, kill the engine, and close their eyes. "stop walking on my land, fucker. I'll run you over."

4 a.m. holding hands

if I ever marry, it'll be to a girl whose first language is english. having grown up in a bilingual household, I've witnessed the severity of the disadvantage associated with trying to argue your case in a language you didn't learn until your college years. even people who, under normal conditions, have a good grip on a language can get tripped up when involved in an argument because of the tendency for participants to feel under pressure to express themselves quickly before they're drowned in counterpoints made by others. when I was young and saw my mother struggling to say what she meant, I wished the tides would turn and my father would have to argue in french. in my high school naivety I daydreamed of facetiously asking my girlfriend "what's wrong with us, how come we never fight?"

let me play

game developers need to stop striving to emulate reality. eventually, virtual worlds are going to be so convincing that people will claim they were playing a video game when they committed a crime. "um...your honor, when I took out the high school principal with a headshot, that was actually part of a covert operation that I was involved in with the Delta Force Squadron. I'll waive my right to a lawyer because this is all just a misunderstanding. I'm sure you'll be hearing from the pentagon soon." this is a joke. the truth is I would love to lose myself inside a game that felt as real as dreams do when dreaming.

blue is good

the process of creating a piece of work that didn't formerly exist in the world can surround the author of the work in a cloud of bias that doesn't dissipate for a long time. this may not be true for a majority of people, but I've noticed it in myself. I'm rarely more proud of what I've written or drawn than in the minutes and hours after having written or drawn it. when I look back at things I did months and years in the past, they're nice to see in the sense that they can take me back to what my life felt like at the time I created them, but they've lost their potential to interest strangers, a quality that I, in arrogance, was sure they possessed shortly after finishing them. this is not to belittle the importance of creating art. writing stories as they unfold in imagination, hitting piano keys at random until a loop forms and grows into a song, and using pens, paints, crayons, etc. to put lines and colors on paper are all satisfying in a way that nothing else can be. praise from strangers, while sublime, is not as important as the creation process itself.

weeds have feelings too

here's something strange. in my experience, when people say "I have a bike," they're referring to a mountain bike. ambiguity between road bike and mountain bike doesn't exist because so often they mean the latter. none of this is strange yet. it makes sense that the abbreviated form of a word, or of groups of words, be used if the abbreviation is unlikely to cause confusion, here mountain bike = bike. what's strange is that most people seem to ride their mountain bikes almost exclusively on sidewalks, a far cry from the dirt and rocky terrain they were designed for. the smirk potential of the situation is enhanced by how much better suited road bikes are to riding on pavement. the difference in speed and required effort is quite staggering between the two types. I've only come up with a couple reasons why mountain bike dominance on roads has come to be. #1. price and availability: it would not surprise me to learn that the lowest priced mountain bike is much cheaper than the lowest priced road bike. also, the recreation sections of huge department stores are likely to only stock mountain bikes. certainly mountain bikes do better on the pavement than road bikes do in the mountains, so there's this idea that mountain bikes will satisfy all your bike needs while road bikes can only be ridden on half the available surfaces. this selling point is moot if all the riding you'll ever do is on the road, but don't try talking rationally to consumerist culture. sale! sale! #2. possibly due to #1 above, most of the road bikes being ridden belong to insane biking fanatics who most noticeably distance themselves from the common joe and common jane by dressing in tight and oddly colored spandex garments. as such, motivation for purchase of a mountain bike may be to ensure that the rider is not perceived to be a biking fanatic. while I empathize with this motivation, I've found road bikes to be so much better than their counterpart at pavement riding that I've come up with a different solution to the biking fanatic association problem which allows for the use of a road bike: I just wear my t-shirt and jeans.

activity

I've been visiting seattle nearly everyday, recently. I sit at my computer desk chair with legs bent 90 degrees at the knee for about as long as it takes to fly to washington. the effectiveness of the voluminous void underneath the desk drawer, which is supposed to provide plenty of legroom, has been compromised by the presence of a storage box of school papers and a stack of folders and notebooks. the result is that my legs have few position options and most possibilities involve an unforgiving straight edge or corner pressing against a portion of my limb(s). it's like the tray table is forever in the 'in use' position because the flight attendants aren't coming round to collect the lasagna dish that's sitting on top of it, believing it to be too soon to walk up to seat 24E with trash bag in hand because I haven't even pealed the foil top away yet. "no, lady, it's actually that I lost my appetite when I caught scent of what was being passed off as food. I don't want this. I'm ready to throw it entirely away so that I can return the tray table to its upright position and allow my legs to be a fraction less confined." it's unhealthy. blood flow is impeded, especially at the areas where unforgiving straight edges press against my thigh or calf. I imagine small blood clots forming in the wide rivers that are my large veins, little pebble clots giddily being carried by the current into ever smaller veins and capillaries, finally getting stuck in the narrowest paths in my brain, causing strokes and all sorts of fun. maybe death will take me in sleep. as I dream of having a stroke I will actually have one. reality and dream will at long last merge in an unspeakable and glorious fusion.

camouflage

when I was young, I would accompany my father on wholesale ice cream deliveries to restaurants and hotels. some of these places were expensive and glossy, aimed at the rich senior tourist market, or the local affluent community. yet, it soon became apparent that, no matter how successful an establishment was at impressing its guests with its décor, quality, and ambiance, it always harbored an ugly underbelly. this realization has never faded. the knowledge that the same hotel whose lobby boasts a glass chandelier, oak reception desk, and spotless red carpet floor also has janitor closets with discolored mop sinks and a laundry room in the basement which is accumulating cobwebs behind the clothes dryers. or: the $200 dinner restaurant whose clean and sharply dressed waitress took your order without need to write it down has a kitchen staff complete with 8 sous-chefs, all of whom have clean fingernails, but earlier in the day they received a shipment of lobster tails delivered by a scruffy man who doesn’t abide by the same hygiene standards. also, the dish soap container underneath the three-compartment sink has a narrow streak of dried dish soap, starting at its opening and running down its side, that progressively gets longer each time the container’s sides are squeezed to make soapy water and the last bit of soap is of insufficient size to form a droplet and fall to the water so it instead, after the container has been restored to its upright position, commences a slow downward journey over the dried relics of former bits of soap.

things don't have to make sense. and it's okay.

cutting blades

yesterday marked the first lawn mowing. I much prefer the simple push reel mowers to mowers with engines because rather than your sense of smell being assaulted by gaseous fumes, it is instead offered the organic green scent of fresh cut grass. I was pleased to see that the moss survived the winter and is continuing to steadily overtake grass territory. it's unfortunate that by the time moss wins the war, I will have long since left this place. it will be a reason to visit in the summer. a lawn of moss would be magnitudes better than a lawn of blades. similarly, the moss growing in the cracks between roof tiles is spreading in a healthy manner, each year covering more area than the last. I have the utmost respect for the organism. this particular species of moss is green and velvety, as if the bedding for nymphs in some fairytale. the squirrel family which nests in surrounding trees has indicated that it approves of the insulation of choice among humans. there are bits of fiberglass strewn about the lawn, evidence they've been stealing from our walls to insulate their own homes. I'm always glad to sense a likeness with another species. in this case, squirrels and humans have agreed on the best insulation material.

feeling ill

H5N1 is disconcerting because its name implies that there also exists H5N2, H5N3, H4R9, and the millions of other alphanumeric combinations. if ever I find myself lacking things to worry about, I have only to read an article on virology. if their child has been diagnosed with a life threatening disease, sometimes parents will, in desperation, dedicate themselves to learning as much as they can about the disease, even taking relevant elementary college courses so that they may better understand papers published in research journals, as if, even without backgrounds in biology or medicine, they will discover something about the disease that has been missed by the hundreds and thousands of researchers who have spent years of their lives working towards a cure. this disillusioned and emotion fueled attempt at saving their child's life is a heartbreaking display of their love and devotion.