revision

newton's 3rd law of motion does not apply to life events of a personal nature.

rescued by the feds

the federal government has made me an offer I can't refuse, and that should only facetiously be interpreted as an allusion to the godfather.

it's a step backward in the sense that I'll be returning to alaska. it's a step forward in the sense that I'll be in anchorage, living in a place of my own. this talk of location introduces a glimmer of hope: there is a possibility of traveling to japan or south korea, among other countries, before too long.

I'm looking for plane tickets. will possibly be home in a week or two. my start date is august 3rd.

what have I done to deserve this good fortune? I've lost a friend.

I strongly believe newton's 3rd law of motion applies not only to physical objects in the traditional sense, but also to life events of a personal nature. (how appropriate that I start on the 3rd. soon I'll be whistling triplets). the positive development of a good job offer is counterbalanced by a development of equal magnitude but opposite (negative) characterization, e.g. I've lost the friendship of someone I admire very much.

no one wants to be told that they mean the world.

my life is a fiction

if you go very long without speaking to anyone, only observing people speaking to each other, you're likely to begin experiencing a bizarre sensation of isolation. it's bizarre for its contradiction: feeling alone and invisible despite all the people around you. it's like something out of the martian chronicles.

the other day I was reassured of my own existence by a security officer who spoke to me, polite but stern, saying "Sir, you can't hang out here; it's a meeting place." or "Sir, we're closing now."

I'm losing track of which things happened on what days, or what things happened on which days. part of this is because I've developed something of a morning routine, so that it's difficult to differentiate one morning from another.

it begins at 6:00 a.m., when I wake to the intercom voice of authority thrusting itself upon the quiet spaces of every room. the front desk attendant speaks into the mic like a diseased mother, offering the same spiel as always: a morning greeting laced with the rising intonation of mock sincerity, a statement of the current time, a call to rise from one's bed, a reminder of the places off limits at 6:30 (restroom, smoking room, kitchen), a warning that everyone is to be out by 7:00, and, to end on a positive note, a decree that everyone have a good day.

breakfast at this place is often lacking. defense of statement: the only things to drink are chlorinated tap water, drip coffee made with said water, and cow's milk. there are numerous loaves of bread, but the only substances available for spread are butter and peanut butter. maybe if jam were known as jam butter they would have a jar of it available. I'm aware that being critical of the food is a tasteless act, considering my homeless status and that everything is provided for free. if it isn't obvious, I'm not being exactly serious in my criticisms and would be, in fact, very grateful if the only service provided was a safe and warm place to spend the night. that cheap laundry, free showers, and dinners prepared by volunteers from a different community organization each evening are also offered makes this shelter quite the little homeless hotel.

back to breakfast: given the aforementioned, I usually reject their offerings in favor of biking down a couple blocks to branch III, where I can indulge in a bowl of instant oatmeal and a thick slice of buttered and jammed toast.

around 7:30 I bike towards downtown in the dedicated bike lane that follows park ave. for a good length. in a few minutes I find myself sitting on one of the rectangular, wooden crates spread about gold medal park. in the mind of the landscape artist who designed the area, they are the post-modern equivalent of benches. here I stay, reading, writing, thinking about things of inconsequence, until 8:00 or 8:30, at which point I enter the guthrie theater to continue more of the same.

at the guthrie, I'm either on the 5th or 9th floors. there are comfortable chairs on the 5th floor, also near power outlets for charging of phone or music player, and it is far enough from the 4-story escalator that the repeating, automated voice recording that blasts navigation instructions the length of the climbing stairs (despite it being too early for there to be anyone around to listen) is quiet enough to be blended with a background hum and ignored. the 9th floor is a small place, usually void of people and staff at the early hour of my presence, and glowing a calm yellow on account of the amber-infused glass windows (pictures provided in a previous post).

near 10:00 I'm on the move again, this time to the library. there, I logon to a computer to check my mail, write posts like this one, or apply to be a sperm donor. I've been approved! they want me to come by for a test sample. they pay $150-300 per visit, and I can donate up to 3 times per week, provided my jism maintains sufficient sperm count.

after my internet fix it's 11:00 or noon, and from here my days get more varied. things I've done in the past few:

capitalized on happy hour at 3:00 (half-priced appetizers) at the lyon's pub downtown.
biked to uptown and lounged on the grass at a field near calhoun blvd.
had lunch at whole foods.
stayed at the library to make more progress on the burgess novel I'm reading, creating lists of the unfamiliar vocabulary I encounter and looking up/writing down definitions found in the 20 volume oxford english dictionary.

I had to smile when I saw that the author of the novel I'm reading is quoted on the inside flap of the dictionary! burgess states "I have taken this book like a mistress to bed (a weighty one but handleable) and pored over a great many pages, looking for omissions. nothing is omitted, however slangly or scabrous or high-tech."

all around us livelihood

some of the things I've come to realize as a consequence of being here could have been, or were, explained to me by friends and family before I left alaska, but no matter how convincing and articulate their promises of what I would find here may have been, there is no substitute for firsthand experience. I needed to be here in order for these things to leave as lasting an impression as could be left. to further safeguard against amnesia, I write the next paragraph as a note to my future self, to be reminded, after the passage of time has obscured the past, of how I feel at this moment.

never take your job for granted. quit your work only if you're retiring or have been formally offered a better position elsewhere.

on the grass & book

I'm making an effort to keep an even lower profile than usual because lately I've increasingly felt myself becoming a tempting target of violence and robbery. steps I've taken towards this end:

1. I've stopped carrying my backpack. I leave it in my locker, together with most of my other things. I exit the shelter with approx. $20, map, water bottle, and cell phone (turned off so that correct pin # must be entered to activate).

2. I refer to my map for development of alternate routes to and from the shelter. this lowers the risk of ill-intentioned loiterers picking up on any kind of daily routine.

a couple views of the modest downtown skyline:





-- saturday, 6.13 --

hung out with this girl I contacted through couchsurfer. she just finished grad school in architecture at the U of Minn. and reported that, like her classmates, she has little to no chance of finding a job in her field in this economy. it made me feel less bad. we went down to uptown and walked through the sculpture garden. it's a park with sculpture installations spread about, notably a large spoon with a cherry. my favorite was this rabbit on a bell.











we had some time to kill before meeting up with her friend, so we went to this homemade ice cream shop, sebastian joe's. I chose malted vanilla, placing my order confidently and in a manner typical of one who has grown up in the ice cream business, providing the server at the outset with all the information he needed: size, flavor, cone type. how cruel it would be if I found myself behind the counter filling customers' orders, the dairy cows taunting me with their moos from the depths of the ice cream boxes as I scooped their sweet product.

we picked up her friend and drove to lake calhoun, a body of water with a 3+ mile perimeter that is outlined by two paths, one for foot traffic and the other for bikes/rollerblades/etc. there are 3 sandy beaches spread around the lake and each was packed with bikini-clad sun bathers, like a scene out of the florida keys, the only things missing being palm trees and salt water mist. bad photos:







after walking the loop, which hardly felt like 3 miles, we dropped her friend off and continued to the last attraction of the day: guthrie theater (no relation to woody guthrie).





it's a building for stage productions and contains three theaters of different design: one where the seats are arranged as in an amphitheater, another as in a movie theater, and then one called the dowling studio, where productions by university students are put on and the seating/stage is of experimental structure. it's a new building and location for the apparently long established guthrie theater, one of 3 construction projects undertaken and completed around the same time in an effort to put minneapolis on the map for tourism. she cites the library downtown and the modern art museum near the sculpture garden as the other two projects.

it's a public place, so anyone is allowed to walk around inside during the day for free, though the theaters themselves are closed. it really is a pretty cool place, only a few years old and exhibiting some nice design, as well as the longest escalator I've ever seen (4 stories). being an architect, she pointed out the many aspects of it that she particularly likes, and lamented that it's under-appreciated by the general public. hometown<-->mpls connection: she says the architect who designed uaf's new museum of the north is from minneapolis.









on the wall are stills from past productions.

structure and architecture are interesting, but what I found equally worthy of memory allocation were the stories of spider infestations. shortly after completion, the exterior of the building was overrun with large spiders from the river nearby. even though the worst of it is over, it's an ongoing problem, and thick cobwebs decorate the edges of windows. it's easy to imagine that when the arachnids were in full force, the place felt like a horror flick, like hitchcock's the birds, only with another species.



gold medal park, right next to the guthrie:



a view from 4th floor:



-- sunday, 6.14 --

something never before seen: a woman of eastern(?) ethnicity (I'm too culturally illiterate to provide a better description) with a full-sized cell phone, opened and ready for use, which was affixed to the side of her head by means of the tension in her headscarf. it struck me as quite the amicable union of technology and tradition.

milestone on road to residency: today I was asked for directions. nice black man in his 40's, wanted confirmation that he was headed towards lake ave. he was beaming, telling me how he had lived in the area 30 years ago and that the place was still beautiful and didn't change and that he was experiencing nostalgic memories.



this is loring park. if you hadn't already noticed, mpls is big on parks. in the foreground is what appears to be a vampire cemetery, with stakes driven into the chest area of each casket space. the tombstones aren't made of stone but of wood. no names, only numbers. to be honest, I don't think anyone is buried there.

this bird wouldn't fly away, so I took its picture.



met an okc girl who lives in uptown. very hospitable/helpful. she hooked me up with a bike, which is such a convenient way of getting around here.

*****

glanced through a newspaper. obvious, but worth mentioning due to how different it is from fairbanks: drunk drivers in the city don't make it very far; there are too many obstacles. also, when they do crash, they are more likely to cause property damage and/or injure/kill people. it's not the same as rolling off the highway into a ditch.

add this to the small world coincidence list: the other day I saw a kid wearing a vintage hot licks t-shirt. he has never lived in fairbanks, but it turns out that he's the nephew of the man represented by the ice cream cone playing string bass in the 3-piece band logo. maybe we should've exchanged numbers, but his soft-spokenness, combined with my difficulty in making new friends, meant that our meeting would be a one time chance occurrence.

the value of having a good fiction novel to read has never been more apparent than now. to be taken to another life. in this way, libraries seem impossibly generous.

urban camping

my mom started crying at the airport. it was very uncomfortable for me to be around. I quickly left them all after completing the mandatory embrace.

the flights went smoothly. no delays, plus both planes flew at roughly half capacity, nice to have a whole row of seats to myself. the picture below depicts the moon rising from an endless, flat bed of clouds. the sight was most impressive when it had only come through a third of the way, glowing a pale orange. it created a very convincing illusion that the plane was flying higher than the moon. I was so taken by the view that I grabbed the camera, but it's up to your imagination to overcome the blurred photo.



-- monday, 6.8 --

initial striking aspects of mpls: an unusually large # of residences/establishments have ceramic lion statues at their entrances. I've only seen 3 such places, but that still seems alot considering how little time I've been here.

the light rail cars have a beehive-like black mesh covering their glass, so if you're at a window seat, it's strenuous on the eyes to look outside. as far as I can tell, however, there's only one light rail line. most public transport is via the bus system, which is extensive.

the humidity here has been about perfect. it has been more humid than fairbanks, yet less humid than I expected. it has also been quite cold. I could see my breath all of last night.

as you would expect, incidence of police/ambulance sirens is higher, too. within 24 hrs I heard about 8 separate instances. it could be that I was in a bad neighborhood, but it didn't look too sketch. I've not been messed with yet.

it's such a relief to be in a place where virtually no vehicles run on diesel fuel.



this is a picture of my preferred water source. it's in the middle of a park I came across. unlike the tap water at most places, there's no hint of chlorine, possibly due to being masked by minerals.

this city has an amazing support system for the homeless. I walked into the salvation army office and was handed a thick booklet filled with lists of places for free clothes, food shelves, free meals, health services, transitional housing, and shelters. I was lucky to arrive on a monday, since every monday night there's a lottery for available beds at 3 shelters. I missed out on a bed that night, but got spot #2 on a shelter's waitlist.

you know you're homeless when you catch yourself scoping out places to sleep on the ground while walking through a city. I briefly considered sleeping in one of the trees at my water source park, but found my backpack was too heavy to safely climb branches. I rejected lying down on one of the many benches in the area for being too visible. this is where I ended up staying:



it's in the front lawn of a cathedral-like building whose function I'm not sure of, but the two people I saw exiting the place were blind; one had a dog, the other a stick. the best thing about this spot was that the wall of shrubbery kept me well hidden. I'm really lucky it didn't rain, as all I have that's waterproof is a rain-jacket, and even wearing all clothes layers I still shivered. I laid out my towel so as not to contact the moist ground directly, and used my backpack as if it were two pillows stacked together and filled with oddly shaped objects instead of feathers. despite the discomfort, I managed to sleep a few hours. I awoke around 11pm having to piss, and couldn't subsequently fall asleep. the remainder of the night was spent wandering about the general vicinity, sleeping lightly and intermittently on a hidden bench at the back entrance of the blind building, thinking of fire to stay warm (no, not really), and eating trail mix/drinking water.

-- tuesday, 6.9 --

arrived sleep deprived and sore, but otherwise fine, at a place serving breakfast. many of these places have particular requirements regarding a person's eligibility to receive food, so I was thankful that my state id sufficed. the place also offers 30 day storage locker rentals for a mere $1, but they were understaffed that morning, so I was unable to take advantage of it.

I walked up to downtown. it's pretty nice. clean. some creative architecture, office buildings/skyscrapers with reflective glass sides. there are lots of 2nd floor corridors between adjacent buildings, so that you don't have to step outside if you don't want to.

went to the public library. really nice library, ugly on the outside, though. on the 4th (top) floor they keep their old collection in an area called the dewey stacks, where the books are catalogued according to dewey decimal, a system the library stopped using. the dewey stacks are 21st century book shelves: they're on tracks on the floor, and lock together side by side. if you need a book shelved on one of the stacks, you press an arrow on an adjacent stack and all stacks on that side move a couple feet, creating an alley for you to walk down to find your book. even though there are safety measures in place, I couldn't help but imagine the stacks closing while I was in-between them. outside the stacks there's a reading loft, comprised of a line of desks with modern/minimalist looking lamps. I've been issued a temporary library card.

near the library's main entrance there's a coffee joint. I hadn't had a coffee bean beverage in years, but ordered a mocha because I didn't know what they're like. a few sips into it and the abundance of coffee shops was explained. what an easy habit to get into! I want to get a latte next because I still don't know what those are like, but I can't justify it financially.

I love how there are sidewalk newspaper dispensers for the onion.

per the instructions on the form declaring my waitlist status, I called the shelter before 5:45, leaving a message stating that I still needed a bed. I was at the shelter's entrance around this time, too, the doors scheduled to open at 6:00. while I was waiting at the entrance, a number of the shelter's current residents similarly waited. so far, I've found the homeless people here to be friendly and talkative. they were surprised that I'd come from alaska and were sorry to hear that I'd spent the previous night outdoors.

at 6:00, this girl who looks to be about my age opened the door and we all walked in, forming a line whose destination was the front counter, where a breathalyzer was administered. the girl asked people their bed number, but the guy ahead of me was similarly waitlisted and she told him they didn't have any openings and to try again tomorrow. my hopes sank, convinced that I'd have to spend another night outdoors, but my rejection was less harsh: she said try calling at 8:00, they might have an opening. I walked to the lobby area to rearrange my things and overheard her tell another waitlisted person that he should try again tomorrow. the only legitimate reason for this difference in treatment is that I had a higher waitlisted spot, but I got the sense that that wasn't even being considered. I was feeling conflicted about the whole thing and decided not to bring it up. I stepped outside and pulled out my map, staring at it absent-mindedly, as if it could tell me how to sleep indoors. within minutes, the girl opened the door a crack and shouted that they had a spot for me.

the bed I've been given is good for 28 days. it's pictured below (top bunk).



extensions of up to 90 days are possible if agreed to by your case manager within your first week at the shelter. I have a bs in electrical engineering. if I can't find work as a dishwasher or other menial task within 28 days, then I deserve to sleep outside and succumb to exposure.

saturday I'm going out for a drink with a friend of my uncle's who owns a business and is looking to hire a new EE grad. I'll have to opt for a soda or water instead of a beer since the shelter is sober and apparently one resident lost his bed for registering a blood alcohol level of 0.03%. I hope my meeting goes well.

precursor to cloud slicing

for the past few days, anytime someone in my family has done something that usually bothers me, it hasn't. my father's audible nasal breathing at the breakfast table, or my mom making the till downstairs with the loud coin-sorting machine, none of it has bothered me anymore. when they happen, I think of how it'll be their last occurrence in my vicinity, and I smile internally.

I can't wait to be pressed against the seatback as the airplane accelerates down the runway.

attn shoppers: there's a sale on coupons

I went to the writing center on campus and printed bawd blue cohosh, but was dissatisfied with the results. it was readable, but not without some difficulty. the imprecision of the printer yielded blurred words. simply throwing all the paper away seemed a wasteful and uncreative solution, so I walked across to the library, climbed to the sixth level, the fiction floor, and left my unfinished manuscript at a study booth near a shelf stacked with books by kafka. I hope it is discovered by and confuses a student, rather than discarded by a janitor.

the biggest motivator for me to learn german is to have the ability to read kafka's work as originally written. it would never approach all that I could understand if I spoke german natively, but it would potentially be better than reading the english translations. more generally, all translations irk me, especially when done by someone other than the author. I hesitate to get lost in a fictitious world when I know that it was tampered with from its original form by a person whose task was to build a bridge across two languages. humans are imaginative and have depth, and our languages reflect that capacity. there is no one-to-one mapping for a word that has multiple meanings in one language and a single meaning in another.

I think translation would be a totally legitimate operation for use with robot languages, if they existed. I expect the first generation of robot languages will be flat and cold, void of any double-meaning punnery, consisting of bleeps and blips.

which social experiment determined that people prefer machines speak to them in human-like voices and not in the voice chosen by stephen hawking? at the fred meyer self-service checkout counter we are faced with a juxtaposition: the voice of a professional, early 30s, and polite woman emanating from a box that houses a circuit board and barcode scanner. her prompts to "please place the item in the bag" traverse through the cacophony of shoppers and into the ear of a human cashier, bubblegum-chewing sixteen-somethin with a pony tail. does the sound of the robotic woman instill her with fear of outsourcing? no, of course not, and why should it? in fact, she would've preferred that the customers in her line had opted for self-service so that she could have gone on break early.

wake up

five days from now I'll be in minneapolis. I'm excited for the potential that it will be a significant enough change from so much of the past that I'll be shaken awake and will feel alive. aside from a few exceptions, I've felt like a corpse since junior high.

inventory:

passport
state ID
insurance card
towel (per the hitchhiker's guide to the galaxy)
shaving supplies
10x copies of resume
official transcripts
cell phone (refilled with a healthy dose of minutes)
printouts of bus schedules
map
handful of band-aids, A&D
toenail clippers
toothpaste, toothbrush, floss
soap/shampoo
digital camera
deck of cards
cowon iaudio x5L
headphones
glass mason jar
1 pair pants
4x pairs socks
4x pairs boxers
2x shirts, 2x t-shirts
sunglasses
copy of bawd blue cohosh (book-in-progress)
a vision of battlements, 1965 novel by Anthony Burgess
the long day wanes, a malayan trilogy, also by A. Burgess
spiral-bound notebook, college ruled
photocopies of piano songs I've written
cable & combination lock

what have I forgotten?