Obsidian Noise

ROugh  night. Indicated by the capital O. Instead of jamming, a friend and I went off to watch the second game of the eastern conference finals for NHL, Bruins against Pitt. It involved much beer. I partook for the sake of the game, and besides that I was just in the mood. I had already trained and was hungry. It’s nothing to do often if you’re training hard, but it also won’t wreck your gains if it’s not a regular aspect of your life.

Hockey is a great sport.

Boston wasn’t supposed to make it this far and playing Pitt was supposed to be the end of the road (after defeating Toronto and the New York Rangers to get to the eastern conference finals.) Pitt is the highest scoring team in the NHL and they are absolutely more skilled, quicker, and have a handful of Hall of Famers. Yet, Saturday night the B’s took it 3-0, the first shutout Pitt has been handed in something like 90 games. And last night, the Bs were up 4-1 in the end of the first period, which is already a high-ish scoring game (in hockey). They went on to win 6-1 in a game that was never close.

The only reason I’m commenting on it is because it’s a good highlight of the importance of the collective mental state of a team. Pitt was flustered very early by a fast goal in the first minute, and they never recovered. Because Hockey is so fast, it’s incredible hard to “regroup” as you would in the NBA or NFL. They looked like a totally different team once they lost control. They tried to play physical, to apply more pressure, but no team should do that against a team filled with fighters like Boston is. It’s just the B’s style of play. They have a guy who’s 6’9″, 256. Another who’s 6’4″ 230lbs who loves fighting. And actually up and down their bench they have collected a roster of huge, skilled guys who like to play rough on the ice. When it get’s physical, they really get excited and end up hurting people badly. When they have lost games handedly, it’s because the other team doesn’t engage on that level, and instead stays on the outsides and takes many shots.

I’m sure the opposing coach was trying to get his team to settle down, but while trying to achieve that, the B’s kept scoring. When Pitt got physical, the B’s just took them out. If you’re getting beat down physically and you’re losing the game on points, it’s just nearly impossible to recover. So the result is that it wasn’t even close.

6-1 in a finals game is nuts.

We found a bar near Gaslamp which is downtown San Diego. It was a perfect place to catch the game as no one else there cared about it.

Off for now, catch you guys later.

Hi there. You might know me. I’m the person who makes you feel relieved because of how ridiculous I am. Compared to me, you’re all freakin’ geniuses. None of you will ever, and I mean *ever*, screw up as badly as I have, and will always be capable of.

So there, just remember that. In your times of sorrow, in your times of embarassment, in your times of lowest of the low, in the back of your mind just remember and think to yourself: “Ahhh, but it’s nothing compared to that guy…”

I know this. I know this!  I probably carry a recessive gene from our early eras that just happened to get switched on, despite it barely being human. Maybe it happened from falling out of too many trees while my brain was still forming. Don’t know. I’m probably now just one RNA switch from having an extra set of teeth. Or gills. (Which would be fantastic.)

Back to Coronado just as NYC heats up.

Train it out, sew it up, go again.

Thrive: Verb 1.  To grow or develop well and vigorously…

VIGOR, babies!

93. I like it.

No more blazers though.

Late start to the day but I grabbed a little extra sleep, which seemed badly needed. I feel pretty good. Eyes are a little stingy and I smell like sunscreen. The head, you know?

My jeans smell like hay. My feet are sticky. The Red Sox won last night. The Bruins are going to the eastern conference finals. I’ve been eating super hot peppers with every meal.    My fingernails are too short because I peeled them off in my last meeting. My abs and shoulders are sore. My performance review is at 3. Cobalt is playing tonight at Saint Vitus, but I really need to clean the apartment.

I had a vivid dream that had two parts. In one, Henry Rollins was visiting. I tried to tell him how much I enjoyed his spoken word performances, but I wasn’t able to say it very well and he ignored me. As he was leaving, he came right up to me and asked where my parents were. I said my mom had a stroke and was home, forcibly retired, and my dad was dead. He nodded and walked away.

The second part was more interesting. I was at my old boarding school in India. My ex girlfriend and I were visiting there. I walked her down to see the old swimming pool, which was a cement box filled with rainwater that had been treated to kill all the amoebas out. I stripped down to my boxers and was about to jump in, and she was going to do the same, but then she stopped. She said her stomach was hurting and looked a little distraught and uncomfortable. I know how bad that can be,  a bad stomach while traveling is the worst, and tried to be as comforting as possible.  I put my arm around her and walked her up to the nurse’s office. She asked the nurse there, an old, plump Indian woman, for pepto bismal tablets. She took some out of her purse, and they were in the shape of crescent moons. My ex was relieved and seemed to know exactly what they were, and started telling about how they were the best kind, the moon shaped ones, and couldn’t believe someone had them in India. We walked over into a side room, and my jam buddies were all there getting ready to play. It seemed perfectly normal to me. I said. “It’s so strange… this is our jam space, I mean, it’s our jam space, and now it’s an international school.”

When I woke up it was 8:30a. A little disoriented, I jumped in the shower, grabbed a banana, and got ready for the day. Here I am. It’s about 1p on May 31st, 2013.

I’ve been putting lotion on my face every day, the kind with SPF, and a different kind, actual sunscreen lotion, on my head. I walk in a cloud of UV protection. My skin looks rosey and healthy. I probably should have been using lotion much earlier in life, especially since I train so much, which means lots of sweating and salt and showers, which probably takes all my natural oils away.

The only thing about the suncreen cloud is that it irritates my eyes quite a bit, leaving them a little pink in the white part, which makes the blue part stand out more. Chlorinated swimming pools does this to me. As does plant cum, and cats. Fuck cats, actually.

I need to get settled a bit and figure out how best to present myself at my yearly review meeting. Probably should have put a blazer on since it’s air conditioned in there. But walking to work with a jacket just made no sense at all. Either on me or folded over my arm, it would have been awful. Stuffed in my backpack, it would have been ruined. This is the way of dainty clothes. It adds to your style, but it wrecks your style!

This will be all from me today, probably. Long list and I want to chill out tonight. I hope your weekends are great. What’s on your list? No matter what it is, pretty sure this weekend is the right one to do it, compared to all the others.

Bye.

Morning. Going to be 90 today and I’m in adventure shirt and shorts. Because I can be.

I’m behind on some work, and it’s not good because it’s performance review time. But one can only do one’s best, so we’ll see what they think when that time comes, tomorrow afternoon.

Let me just switch my converse over to flip flops. One moment.

Ahhhh. Better.

What is your worth? How do you determine it? Is it the amount of people who like you? Or is it the kind of person who likes you? Is it something that’s determined by “the invisible hand of the market”? Is it something we have any control over? Is our worth a stroke of luck, like winning the lottery, perhaps being born with the right skill at the right time? Is it a matter of time-and-place circumstance? Would the same “highly valuable” people be as valuable in different times or places?

Just asking.

Did you know that more rain falls on Saturdays than any other day, 22%? Think about how weird that is. For one thing, “Saturday” is a human invention, and so is the 7-day week. To the earth, Saturday is arbitrary. To nature, this coming “saturday” will be, for example, day No. 4,540,233,846,204.  I mean, yes there are cycles, such as our orbiting of the sun and our moon’s orbiting of us, but those don’t map onto the idea of “7 days a week”. That’s a new invention, and one that doesn’t particularly match up well. Our months have different days in them. Heck, even our year does. So how is it possible that more rain falls on what we call “Saturday” day than any other, when “day of the week” isn’t a recognizable thing to the rest of nature? Religious people think it’s because god wants us to stay home and be pious on the weekends.

Well, here’s the thing. The only thing determining “Saturday” to be a thing is us. We’re the only beings that label that day and who can say that more rain falls on it than any other. So what else is implied by our identifying what happens on the 6th day of our invented 7 day cycle? For one thing, we work Monday-Friday and usually do not work on Saturday and Sundays. The schedules of the trains, the amount of traffic, the amount of trucks moving stuff around, the amount of factories burning stuff, the amount of human and machine activity overall– the amount of ACs on, the amount of dumptrucks running, the amount of cement being poured–is higher during the 5 days preceding the 6th.  Is it possible that 5 days of a certain kind of mass activity could lead to a 6th day that’s different in some way?

So there’s one key thing missing here. Does it rain more on “Saturdays” everywhere in our world? What about in the middle of the ocean? What about in the middle of the desert? What about in the Himalayas? Well, that’s the right question. It turns out this “rains more on Saturdays” statistic–which is true–describes areas around populated places, like the eastern and western seaboards. Not in the middle of the ocean. Since people don’t commute or mix cement in the middle of the ocean, it’s highly likely that it’s us causing there to be more rain on our Saturdays.

So, that’s all.

Have a great steamy day, drink your water before you go for your training. If you’re a chick, wear your bikini top as you tan because there’s nothing hotter than dat contrast. Yee and haw monkeys.

Monkeys, I’m late here. Sorry about that. It was an extremely full, long weekend, and I’m just back to work now, basically recovered.

The “Super” party on Friday night turned out fine. I went as “super string theory” and just wore all black with a white string pinned to my shirt. There were other, way more creative costumes. The one I liked most was this hippy guy who had a large picture of fish in the shape of an “L” on his shirt. “Super fish L”. Nice-ish.

There were some hot girls there and I spent time talking to all of them. One was a biochemist and we talked about nanobots and lobsters being functionally immortal. I loved it. I left around 1:30a.

On Saturday I got a text from one of my best friends from childhood. He suddenly said he was thinking of driving to the city with his wife and a couple friends and was wondering if I’d be around. I told him hell yes I would be, and from then on I was in guide-mode.

My friend is a resettled refugee from Cambodia whose family was placed in my tiny town when I was in first grade. At that time, and for years afterwards, we were more like family than friends. That’s the kind of relationship we have now, too. We don’t talk often, but we don’t have to. We introduce each other as brothers, and I can’t imagine an actual brother being any different.

They left NH at 4a and arrived at 9:30a Sunday in an attempt to salvage a holiday weekend plan that had been derailed the day before.  They pulled their SUV up infront of my building and there was an empty parking spot right there, miraculously. I brought them all inside for a quick drop off of their stuff, marveled at the fact he was actually there finally, and then we headed out. It was the first time any of them had been to NYC. We went up to campus first and had brunch on the block there, then down to Columbus circle where the girls hit the mall there and we guys waited outside and we smoked and talked about things and gazed out at the park on a perfect day.

Once the girls finally emerged, we walked across the park over to the southeast corner to 5th Ave, and the girls hit that stretch and we guys took off to find the guitar store. My friend is a bass player in a well-known band out there in NH.

At around 3p we started drinking, and that lasted until 1a. The next day we started early out in town, did the ferry, did Freedom Tower, did Union Square, another Guitar Center, then a bar around 3p again, and then a walk up to K-town where I treated them all to a massive Korean feast. We all got wasted, smoked and joked, and made it home by 2a. The next day I was wrecked, hungover like the flu, and stayed home from work. Today I’m back in and am racing to get back on top of things. Training tonight.

I have pictures but it’ll have to wait for now. Two steps behind, but I’m bearing down.

More soon.

I’m home today, took the day off. Though I’m working, of course. This is what happens.

But I got up at 11 and it was great.

Oatmeal and whey powder, and now a huge coffee. I’m trying to get ready for a conference call this afternoon. Afterwards I’m going for a bay swim with fins on. It’s going to be cold, but I can’t wait. I have a kayaker drafting me in case it gets too cold and I start to cramp up.

I accepted an invitation to a party tonight and now I kind of regret it. It’s themed. I hate shit like this. The theme is “super”. What the fuck. Not only does it take more effort now, but once there everyone will be talking about each other’s costumes. I should have said no.

I will either go as “supper” and say I’m misspelled, and that way I can just carry some food around. Or otherwise I can go as “superfood” and carry a bottle of acai berry juice and feed people or something. If there are hot chicks there, that could be OK.

I’m going to need to change my attitude somehow between now and then. Or I could just text that I can’t make it. I’m considering that.

Time to get going. Have a great holiday weekend.

(The following is an addendum to the last paragraph of yesterday’s post about The Tree.)

The stone I found for Sage’s grave is special. I found it on the beach in Maine, and it was massive and black, very out of place, like us. I used “Beauty”, my old, rusted Jeep, to bring it back to our woods. It weighed 141lbs. Once at the trailhead, I put it in my seabag, which at the time was active duty.  It took me 15 hours over two days to carry it 5 miles, partially up hill, and get it to wear it needed to be.

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It’s supposed to storm today and I hope it comes soon. I came in a little late today because I got drunk last night, had a large General Tso’s chicken from the down the block (which almost killed me), and woke up feeling like shit. I did all that too myself, I put myself in that mood yesterday.

I’m here at the desk now, a little too hot, bags under my eyes, and thinking about all the work I should be doing. Looks like I missed a meeting that someone added to my cal without asking. I’m sure I’ll be hearing about that very soon, and not caring very much about it.

One thing about getting drunk when you’re in a heavy training cycle is that you drop lots of water with every drink and then over the course of the night. For training, that’s not good at all, and can take days to replenish. But one effect of rapid dehydration is that it thins your skin everywhere, and depending on how your physique is, that can make you look freakishly muscular, like the skin is being pulled back tightly over every part of your body. So that’s neat and freaky today.

I’ve been wearing white collar shirts lately, cycling through 4 pairs, mostly over jeans, of which I now also have 3 pairs that are work appropriate. One black, one dark blue, one lighter blue. If I add a blazer, it’s set. This has simplified my life considerably and I should have been doing this years ago. Also, a female told me I looked good in white collar shirts, so, here I am, like an idiot, now with 4 pairs of white collar shirts of different makes. I have Brooks Brothers, Express Men, J.Crew and Banana Republic. They all fit slightly differently. The Express one is sort of a stretchy fabric which makes me look kind of douchey because it’s tight on me now. It was already a little tight when I got it (for a wedding I think), and with the extra muscle now I’m probably really pushing it, but I like the collar it has, it’s a perfect size collar for me. The Brooks one fits the best overall and is probably the best fabric. It’s an $89 shirt, so the thing better last at least 2-3 years. The J.Crew one is the softest and is the one that needs ironing or super-power whipping by hand so it dries without wrinkles. The cotton of that shirt is so soft that if you whip it, it sounds like a flapping sail on a windy day. The thing I like about the Banana one is that it’s not long, unlike other dress shirts, so it can actually be worn without being tucked in and not look ridiculous. When it is tucked in, it doesn’t create a whole bunch of stuffing for the pants. I have my own stuffing for the pants. (Read that as you will, but I was mostly talking about the backside.)

White collar shirts are easy to clean because you can just bleach the shit out of them and hang them up to dry.

_______________________________________

Just sitting here today. I took tomorrow off. I have too many things on my mind at once and it’s left me unable to focus on any singular thing. Will have to fight out of this, again.

This is why I shouldn’t drink very much. The next day I can feel my chemistry out of whack and I’m a dark cloud. Pallbearer on the iTunes. Where’s this goddamn thunderstorm.

As with so many things that you return to after many years, The Tree was smaller than I expected. In fact, for a good 30 minutes I wasn’t sure it was even the right tree. I knew approximately where it was and had expected it to jump out at me, not giving me a choice about finding it or not. But the constant growth of the forest means it’s never the same, and especially not after years apart. In some ways it felt like the growth had violated my territory, invading it from all sides. That doesn’t make too much sense though, because for one thing, it’s the State’s land, and for another, plants are just doing their thing, in the same way we do ours.

There were no bugs and the sky was nice for a while, before turning gray and rainy as it got dark.  There was no fire to be had, but that was fine, and meant I could climb into my shelter earlier, something I was looking forward to anyway. I had a camping hammock strewn between a couple trees and as the rain grew in intensity, I climbed in.

The sound of rain-taps is one of life’s great things. Whether its on your umbrella, your roof, your rainfly, or your Red Sox hat, it’s always nice. But there’s something nicer: it’s when the rain is falling in the middle of an expansive forest. As I lay there between the trees, I realized the sound of so many rain drops hitting so many leaves is the sound of the ocean, and how interesting it is to realize that, in many ways, it is the ocean falling from the sky. It felt like it was reaching out to me.

I was born on the sea in a town called Newport, which is in Rhode Island. There’s a Naval War College there, a famous bridge, and a walk of mansions that the tourists like to gawk at, holding for themselves temporarily the thought that museum-sized buildings must be nice places to live. My birth certificate is from Newport General Hospital. My mom used to say that if a newborn’s first breaths are of salt air, they’ll have special relationship with the sea for life. I used to like thinking about that, and how well it explained the feeling I got–and still get– when I’m back near the big water.

So, out there in my hammock it felt like I was being called to, gently, and I liked that feeling very much, and I felt called to in other ways, too. My last time out at The Tree, my dog, “Sage”, was with me.

Sage and I had a special relationship, one that will never be repeated in my lifetime. I picked her out from a friend’s dog’s litter on a farm about 20 miles away, “Frost Farm” it was called. I named her because of a Simon Garfunkle song on their “Concert in Central Park” double cassette that I was given for Christmas earlier that year, and had by then already memorized all the lyrics to. Sage used to walk with me to school and be there when I got out at 2:16p. We’d dart homewards immediately to drop my school bag before heading out into the woods, which we did nearly every day. That continued right up until I left for boarding school in high school. As I spent more time away from home, I felt lonely for Sage and wished I could have taken her with me. But she belonged out there in the woods, near The Tree, and every visit home was an ecstatic ordeal for both of us. My mom used to say that Sage hibernated whenever I’d leave, and would pounce back to life whenever I was home. I felt similarly about myself.

The Tree was sacred ground to me, and I’m pretty sure it was to her, too. She would become docile and pensive on that lookout point, and would sit with me there, something she usually had a hard time doing, because, like me, sitting still wasn’t in our wiring. But that area was good for both of us.  That’s where we grew up together and had our times, including our last time together, when she struggled to climb over the roots and the rocks, and kept looking at me, seemingly embarrassed that she somehow couldn’t keep up. And as much as it breaks one’s heart, you know, that’s what happens. The last time I was with her, I carried her the rest of the way and we sat there together for hours, just looking out from that hill and over the land we had conquered together. The stone I found for her grave is special. I found it on the beach in Maine, and it was massive and black, very out of place, like us. I used my old, rusty Jeep named Beauty, to bring it back to our woods. It weighed 141lbs, and I put it in my seabag, which at the time was active duty.  It took me 15 hours over two days to carry it 5 miles, partially up hill, and get it to her grave.

So you want to hear about the tree, eh?

EH?

It’s coming.

Hi Monkeys,

It feels like Virginia outside, and by that I do mean vagina. I don’t mind. I got to work around 8a for a meeting, and at that hour it was pleasant. But I wouldn’t dare wear a blazer outside right now.

WTF. Did I just talk about wearing blazers again? What in holy fuck is wrong with me.

My jeans smell like hay when my legs sweat in them. It’s always been that way. Turns out the kind of jeans doesn’t even matter. I have new ones on, and, yep, hay.

Whew, that’s better.

It’s been a long day. I had sort of a weird meeting at 11a that left me empty and annoyed, but I’m not sure if I’m more annoyed at myself or someone else.  During the meeting, clients were sharing some concerns and ideas and giving us a rundown of what the summer work will be like. I had a senior colleague in there who wouldn’t shut the fuck up for basically the entire meeting. Unlimited amounts of things that didn’t need to be said, and barely giving our guests–clients–time to fully express themselves.

I was annoyed at him for interrupting so much, for filling any and all space with as much useless verbiage as one can imagine, and so frequently saying so very little.

I KNOW, monkeys. People say that all the time, “so much talking, so little meaning…” and etc.  But it truly was like that this morning. Run-on sentences forever, sometimes 3-5 minutes at a time, misusing important words, conflating concepts, mucking the shit out of everything. Often all he needed to do was provide a single sentence answer. Also, he was always so quick to respond to client questions, usually cutting them off before they even finished, spending lots of time responding, often resulting in the client saying: “That’s all fine, but what I was asking was…”, or “what I meant was…”.

He went on and on and I found it unbearable. Somewhere around the midway point I realized I probably was going to sit in silence for the entire meeting. And that’s what I did, in entirety. I sat and listened to 95% meaningless BS for 90 straight minutes.

Is it Tuesday? Christ.

I miss The Tree already.

Have a great day.