Obsidian Noise

Dissertations are like the day after Chinese New Year: you eat a ten course meal, you love each dish, you’re totally loving stuffing your face, and eventually near the end you’re fuckin’ sick of everything and never want to eat again. And the next day you take a massive poop and everything is great again. Right now you could say I’m in the middle of the night after consuming 3 years of brain meals and am ready for the poop. Very, very ready. Uncomfortably ready.

The weekend was full. I had work to do on Saturday and I enjoyed it because I was in my ideal space: an empty-ish living room, a big empty table, the smell of fresh coffee wafting in the cool-ish air, the lights bright and natural, remnants of bacon and eggs mixed in, a classical music-ish station tuned in, and no distractions-ish for the day. Loneliless solitude. Notepads full. Full of shit maybe, but yeah. Notepads full.

By the time it was over, and all was done, and it was time to relax, and it was dark then, and it was just solitude. Of the relatively lonely sort.

Go through mails? Respond to that text? Go out? Call that person back? IM? Temptation for contact was high. Almost on cue, around 10p, I got a text from a chick I’ve been flirting with a little bit. An architect intern with a penchant for expensive dinners and risque clothes. Her tattoos are extra loud because of how extra pale her skin is. I sort of knew she’d write eventually, the smile at the end of our last conversation was too long. That was a week ago. This is not the girl who told me I made her feel small. This is the girl with red hair who runs triathlons and likes the pinup look. The girl who lives in Fuckface Town, aka Williamsburg (and where else would you expect?)  When she did write, I was tempted to write back immediately. Yes, lets go hang out. I’ll shave and wear clothes you probably like so that you’ll feel comfortable with me, maybe comfortable enough to… 

After torturing myself for a bit I remembered I’m taken man: I’m dating the All Night Room.

What’s inside,
How would you know,
That you could grow?
‘Cause what’s inside,
Comes outside, And
fucks your shit up.

Training has been great. My swimming is almost as comfortable now as it was in the seemingly distant past of my early-mid 20s. Those swims were mostly ocean, and if only the ocean here wasn’t toxic, I’d be out there regularly, probably. This is my East Coast life. The San Diego side of things… now that’s just a pretty picture altogether. That place means mornings on the water, evenings in the sun.

Coffee now, and more later. No meetings today but much work ahead. Training in two hours. Oops, now 1:45hr.

Happy Monday, my missed little monkeys.

Last night after work I grabbed my liter water bottle and headed into the sauna. Since the day was cold, the sauna felt extra hot. With midterms here, and also the unofficial start of spring break, the place was empty. I lay out flat on the boards, which are arranged in three tiers, and listened to the hum and clicks of the burner as my body heated up. The only lights in there are these dim, yellow, caged off plumber lamps. They’re probably specially constructed to function in very hot environments. The effect they have is that you feel like you’re very deep in the bowels of something. They look like the lamps miners might use. Or deep sea divers.

After 10 minutes your sweat starts to bead up and drip down your sides. Lying flat as I was, if you bring your knees up so your feet are flat on the boards, you can actually watch the individual droplets form, grow, and slide down your skin.

I stayed for 40 minutes. It’s a good time to stretch and heal up.

A couple of you asked about the leg routine. If you run and swim a lot your legs will not continue to grow past a certain point because it’ll be come inefficient. Your body is very good about regulating that kind of thing. The more endurance-oriented you train your body to be, the leaner and tighter you’ll become, which is what you want.  So don’t worry– you can keep your squatting going, stick with the 3 sets of 20, and keep getting stronger. If your legs are weak (like if you can’t do 20 reps with your body weight equivalent loaded on the bar) then for the first few weeks your legs will grow. But don’t get freaked out. For me, they’ve stopped about here:

Which is about right. If I stopped the running and swimming, they’d probably start swelling up more, but speed and endurance is what you want in the ring or the cage. You want your legs to be super strong, but not bulky, especially if you have to swing them up into someone’s head frequently. You want them to be very durable, springy, and powerful… able to take lots of abuse. You need that because everything you do in the ring starts with your legs, and your opponent will be trying to attack there as much as anywhere else. I’ll keep going with my routine and you do the same. I’ll put more pictures up as time passes.

Time to book it. Have a great weekend… and do that thing you keep putting off.

The room was dark and time was slow. At last check it was around 3:30a. I had written around 4 pages, descriptions of a thing, and was being tortured by the wrong words, or the empty spaces indicating what’s missing. The agony of holding onto what can’t be described is pure. Like the All Night Room, empty spaces can remind me of how singular all experience is. Even if I wanted to share and connect with a person, I am never able to. The words are always wrong, the meanings too easily interpreted in different ways. Everything communicated feels like an approximation, and not the actual thing.

You know, they’re perfect for each other– Words and the All Night Room. They dance there. They love it. Hell, they make it happen… I mean really, they force it to happen. Selfish if you ask me, because they trap me there. Maybe it’s a form of entertainment for them. I guess I’m a pretty funny guy. I’d laugh at myself if I wasn’t busy destroying myself.

Today my legs are swollen and vascular from The Routine. The soreness everywhere, from my ass to my calves, is fantastic. It’s not excruciating. My legs are not damaged or injured. Just sore– enough to feel nice when massaging, and enough to feel like I actually did some hard work, enough to appear worked over for a day. My shins are a little bruised from kicking the pads, first the heavy bag routines and then with a coach holding targets. He said I have some of the strongest kicks he’s ever felt,  but that it’s inconsistent. Sometimes my hips are loose enough to swing my legs like heavy tree branches into the target. That impact is among the greatest sensations I have known, maybe second to you know what. Other times they tighten up at the moment of impact, diminishing some of the power, and that’s frustrating and uncomfortable.

I do not have a full day today. I have plenty to do, but only two meetings scheduled, 2-3, and 3-4 with my boss. That’s a nice feeling. I’m thinking about how nice it’ll be when the day is done and I can hit the sauna and massage my legs and drink protein. I can’t wait for that. I’m 201lbs and lean as hell right now, feeling efficient. The machinery of my body is solid, no weak links, clean inside and out.

If only the machinery of my mind was as easy to work on.

I missed yesterday’s posting as all was chaos in the land of projects and management. I was finally free at around 10p, after training like a motherfucker for an hour, and after which I ate, stretched, showered and slept.

This morning I awoke without the help of an alerm. I felt well-rested and refreshed and was psyched about that. Then I looked at the clock to see how early it was and… fuuuuuuu…

9:55a. Forgot to set the alarm. 10:30a meeting. God damn. The happy feelings drained away like a popped water balloon and I sprinted through the necessary: pants, shirt, collar shirt, socks, Limmers, teeth and a splash on the face, out the door. 15 minute walk to the meeting, made it with 2 minutes to spare. Hit the bathroom quickly to make sure all my sleepy eye gook was out. I looked OK. 20 seconds to get psyched up for social engaging, a couple small bounces and some fist squeezing. A couple jaw stretches and neck benders. Let’s do this.

Meeting was OK. I hate them, but not all are total disasters. I’d rather talk with them about other things, like how they feel that day, or their personal mission in education. I don’t actually care that much about the project work, or who did what. I don’t care about the meeting minutes. Fuck all that shit.

Big meeting at 3p today, and that’s next.

I’m not feeling balanced. I feel on edge, like people better stay away from me. I’m not in their face or aggressive, but I know I will be if they get too close. Looking forward to MMA tonight, and I know that will fix me up as it always does.

I used to find balance in the little things about loved people.

Now I just want to break stuff in half and fuck both pieces.

Scrambling as per the usual. Late night in the all night room, thinking too much. Someone told me some things about how I make them feel, and it was pretty powerful for me. Still processing what they had the courage to tell me– a girl I’m spending more time with. I won’t get into particulars, but I had heard some of what she said before, and it was hard to hear, but I really took it to heart. The unintended impacts we have are important to be aware of. She wasn’t angry, but she wanted to tell me how certain things that I say can make her feel small, even if it’s clear that’s not my intention. I don’t want any of my friends to feel that way, and I hate the fact it happens. What was most concerning is that I’ve been told this, or have seen this from myself, before.

I have many things I need to pay much better attention to, and I’m extremely grateful she took the time to share with me what was on her mind.

I’ll resume processing that later, once the buzz of this morning’s busy work quiets down, perhaps later in the afternoon.

Keep in mind your interactions, and consider what emotions are involved, and how they might evolve without signs. Be mindful of your impacts and presences, and you’ll be better for it. We know ourselves best by the outcomes that arise from our interactions with our physical and social environments.

Snow everywhere, blizzarding nicely, happy day. Coffee while it snows outside the window is the best of the best. Taking in every minute. My romance with snow continues.

Headed uptown for a meeting, then back to semi-normalcy where I will update all proper like before the weekend.

See, this is romantic. I can be romantic.

I just save it.

Continues. No time. Not even an minute to write in this box right here that I’m writing in. Not sure how this is happening. I need to be somewhere else at this very moment.

Better head there.

More soon. After the long, long day.

Consider the theory that the universe is an engine for the production and conservation of novelty. The life forms that evolved on earth are a natural consequence of inevitable “newness”, the ongoing consequence of a nearly infinitely vast and complex universe of information, and that newnesses occur naturally, necessarily, in ebbs and flows around all of existence.

That “existence” could also be called something seemingly mundane, but is in fact the deepest and most important presence there could ever be:  information.

Information is all there is, and all information is code. We interact with our environments by manipulating code that describes it. When we say we “process information” in our minds, we’re speaking very accurately: our brains process code that we receive from our various inputs. We interact with ourselves through the same code, our inner monologues, structured into what we call “language” but is in reality just the symbols and signifiers that we use to help us assemble and interact with The Code that we are. Our language is a mere efficiency gain.

Culture is like our operating system. To an entity, its operating systems is everything there is. A windows computer can’t imagine being a Mac. It can see the Mac, and it can know the two are different, but the root structure of the operating systems differ so markedly, to explain to one how it is to be the other would be meaningless. What would happen is that as soon as one started to describe itself to the other, the receiver would immediately interpret whatever is said in terms that make sense to its own operating system, and instantly the chance of understanding the other, or even imagining it, is impossible.

The operating system affects every single function of process,  and in our terms, process is thought, and is our reality. Our culture controls, restricts and scaffolds our processes, our thoughts, our thinking, and limits our interacting with The Code because of how our root system controls our inputs, and what it allows us to read, and what it allows us to process at all. Mac OS can’t process a single line of Windows  XP. Windows XP might recognize aspects of The Code that are valuable, might enable the running of incredibly valuable and useful programs that were written by Windows XP for Windows XP, but to the Mac, not only can it not run those programs, it can’t even fathom what an information architecture different from its own would be like. The Mac can’t imagine or even begin to process the universe contained within that other, different operating system, they literally have different realities and the two do not converge.

Such as there are many operating systems, there are many cultures containing and housing human processes. Some are better for interacting with The Code than others. Some are so self-contained that the processors–people–spend their entire sentient existence interacting with simple little programs, and are completely unaware of the possibility of The Code, of reality. ‘Murica culture is this way, as are many others. The juvenile programs that run on that OS are ultimately meaningless to The Code.

But changing operating systems is really hard. Recognizing that such a thing exists, and that such a thing is your primary limitation of consciousness…

this opens the possibility of some kind of progress, at least.

Wednesday is halfway over. Let’s go punch a heavy bag for the rest of the day.

So now it’s later. Sorry about that. I ended up with just a few free minutes the entire day yesterday before needing to crash. It was a morning of meetings, a race to get 40 minutes of exercise over lunch, a race back for some collaborative work in prep for another Thursday morning staff meeting presentation (part 2 of what started last last week), and then a meeting in the late afternoon that took me up to jam time in the Hollow Way, which went long, and after which I needed to do some work: some emails, a one-pager, edit a project proposal for a friend in California, and then it was 12:30a and the eyes squinted up, warning of impending snoozery, and I obeyed. I took a shower and was out on contact with the bed. I woke up naked and in the usual state, greatly pained at the physiology of it all. I cursed and grunted my way up into the shower again.

Here in the office now, and it’ll be another race around day. I don’t mind it. I’ll take the work wherever I can. A full plate is good for me so I don’t have too much idle time to over-think and self-analyze into oblivion.

Jam was good. Rob got a new guitar, a baby blue Fender Stratocaster, and it has a killer sound. It’s a cheap axe, and it sort of looks like a big glob when it’s in your lap, but it has a nice wail to it. Heavy fucker. Two single coil pickups with a heavily painted solid mahogany body and maple cap, lots of switches and tone selector nobs. I suppose it’s a bit twangy for me, for my ears I mean, but that’s part of what makes the Fender so legendary, and for certain grooves it’s perfect.

We had a fun time, though I think we all secretly missed the sax accompaniment we were so lucky to have last time. He’s coming back, by the way. He’s going to try for once a month if his schedule allows it. He said he doesn’t get the chance to play improvised licks in his other bands. They focus on songs. Up in Hollow Way, we focus on sounds. It’s basically an ongoing practice of total experimentation. Group experimentation can be great, and can lead to great things. Not at work, usually. But in Hollow Way, usually.

I was happy to get a text from a new friend I’ve mentioned before, the lead guitarist in a fairly legendary death metal band from Tampa (the birthplace of American death metal). We’ve gone to a few shows together here in town and we get along well. Anyway, he texted in the middle of Sunday night asking if he could crash at my place for a while– he needed to sort some things out with his living arrangement and relationship. I’ve met his girlfriend before, a 22 year old aspiring actress from Ohio. Very pretty. They started living together just a couple months after starting their thing. Seems risky to me, to put yourself in that situation so quickly. I suppose it’s romantic in a sense– the quick decisions made based on passion– and sometimes they work out. More often (by far, statistically) they do not and both people take a hard lesson to heart, holding it there for the rest of their lives. Sounds like a drag to me. I’d rather have people pass through my place than pass through other peoples’.  Why is that?

I’m also not the most romantic person. And if ever I tried to be, my inescapable goofiness probably prevents from happening whatever those romantic gestures are supposed to enable.

Back to the death metal guy, I’m not sure what their issues are, but when a man starts contact friends, new and old, in the middle of the night, asking for places to stay… well, that’s not a position I’d ever want to be in. Since I’ve gotten into a bit of real estate here in town and out in Coronado, I’d say the best thing about my whole situation right now is that I have options. Options are one of the most important things in life, and we always have them, though sometimes it might feel like we don’t.

OK better get on with things. Hope your Tuesday is  just as you need it to be. Let’s enjoy it.

Come back later, tied up all morning and through most of the afternoon.