Category: Essays

This week saw me shed some ten pounds in under twenty-four hours.  Without nary a fever or otherwise symptom my innards basically completely shutdown.  It may be obvious but it was not the most pleasant twenty-four hours I have spent at home.  And even some three days later I am still wobbly on my feet as I replenish myself on rice, bananas and live-culture yogurt.  Yumsers.  All this time staying near to the home facilities, as it were, gave me a lot of time to myself.  Actually, it gave me a lot of time period.  Maybe even too much time for this über-introvert.

What did I discover?  Not much really.  At least, no great revelations.  I wish I had something more poignant to write about.  I wish even more I had something deeper to admit to cogitating upon; I do not.  I merely sat and saw time slip past me.  I imagine it is the lack of calories and lack of exercise but these past days have been wrapped under white linens bedecked with a trine of pewter-heavy candlesticks: trouble, fear and ironically soothe; my only guest Time.  In its eminent presence so manifest I felt more my place best on a silver platter being served than serving as host.

Time is not to be mastered.  Even when we try to marginalize it as a “resource”, we can neither refine it or store it or do anything with it other than spend it as quickly as we receive it.  Without it our world of causality falls apart and we return to the eternal, timelessness of an existence so many believe they want but I suspect would be driven mad upon achieving.  Time is maybe one true tonic against the insanity of godliness.  Time flows past us till we become the weary, the worn.  The well-lived?  For some this process can eat us out, husk and whole.  For others it seems to not diminish but instead fill us with a life’s memories, not mere ghosts to haunt and taunt but truly spirits who bring with them the merry whispers of yester laughs.  I wish I knew tomorrow or Tomorrow but I do not.  I do know that I am now some halfway through my life.  And so writ, I wonder how I shall see the coming years: as hollow or hallow?

I am a person used to rules, a person comfortable with creating and living by rules both real and perceived.  Since my childhood I have created a large collection of rules, even collections of collections or systems of rules as it were, to describe not only how the world around me operated but also to set in order how I should operate within this world.  I felt, even adamantly believed blindly, that Teutonic discipline and principled self were absolute and necessarily required to operate successfully in the world.  The weirder and stranger my world became the more I tried to delve these hidden rules, rules that everyone but me seemed to understand intuitively.  If asked I swore that I was the last person not in a secret club, a club that had a seemingly infinite number of secret hand signals to which I was not privy to no matter how much I asked, begged, or scrutinized.  Everything, and I mean everything, became an abstraction back to some level of invariance which could then be encapsulated as a rule.  As I grew up I had complete systems of rules I used in order to operate within the word and no more specifically than for my interactions with other human beings.  Whenever things did not work as anticipated per these set of rules I assumed the deficit lay within myself; a more sane and rational human being might have first suspected that those pesky underlying rules themselves were to blame.

In the past couple of years I have realized that much (all?) of my general loneliness, unease and unhappiness are directly correlated both to the rigidity by which I applied these rules and to these rules’ impoverished nature to describe, anticipate or predict the very subtle, even sublime, nature that is the human experience.  As fallout to my last divorce I finally acknowledged my own hand in my downfall, deciding not to be further victim to my ineptitude and so started to leverage the very analytical skills I had honed to craft this byzantine maze of conditional if-thens as a means to dismantle them.  In areas such as work, career and my personal life I decided to remove all the rules and replaced them with the simplified, even rarefied and most basic first-order question:  Am I happy?  And based on this the rule is a straight-forward set of conditions: If I am not happy then I change my behavior; and, if I am happy then continue my current behavior.  I am not sure I can make it simpler than that.  The only place that hereto now I have not challenged is the realm of personal relationships.  Till now.

I recognize now that whereas I used rules to provide a means to engage with others, at least with respect to day to day relationships, I used rules in more intimate settings to protect myself from myself and even going as far to protect others from me — two divorces have tended to batter my self-confidence in these matters.  But I also recognize that in order to grow, mature and further deepen my happiness I need to allow people into my life in a more than cursory manner.  As a very good friend said after a long evening: “Ward, fuck all these rules.  Give people a chance to love you.”  It was the proverbial boot-camp kick in the ass I needed.  Frankly, I acknowledge that I fundamentally, even principally, need to trust myself to know what is best for myself irrespective of rules that either I, others or even society may impose.  In some ways this is an embarrassingly scary proposition both to undertake and to admit.  Scary in that I have no means of a priori predicting what the right thing is to do in any situation.  I am flying by the seat of my pants deciding what to do next based on the current moment.  It is embarrassing that has taken me this long to grasp how simply things really are.  I appreciate I will make mistakes.  Crash and burn even. And more so I appreciate that as a consequence of this newest undertaking I will put myself in a position of vulnerability where no rule or principle, no matter how canonized, can be used to shield me from my own decisions.

Here is to rules: fuck ’em.

My only proviso to this newly adopted response of “fuck ’em” to rules, at least in the domain of relationships, is the adoption of the contra-positive corollary, or “don’t fuck ’em” rule, best exampled by John Waters who said, “If you go home with somebody, and they don’t have books, don’t fuck ’em!”

In this day of Facebook “Like” I found myself wondering what is it that I like that does not have a convenient, spiffy button next to it?

I like?

I like running 10k first thing in the morning. Every morning.

I like coffee in a French press on a Sunday morning.

I like Cafe Solstice in the evenings after work where people know my name and where I can get a finger and a smile from the barista.

I like playing a kick ass mage on a rainy day.

I like to read.  A lot.

I like traveling and Traveling.

I like to smile at attractive women. I like it better when they smile back, their skin creasing at their eyes.

I like a woman who knows who she is and is in the world to live and not wait for it to come to her.

I like jumping off of cliffs.

I like that my work is periphery to who I am.

I like lemonades that spike your tongue in bitter, sweet awesomeness.

I like warm molasses cookies with a large glass of cold milk.

I like chocolate milk.

I like to peel off the plastic covering on remotes.

I like to imagine. I like imagine a couple in a room with the end of the days light coming in from the bay window. It is Fall, maybe October toward the end of harvest where there are still leaves on the trees even as some stand denuded in readiness for the Winter coming. It is one of those clear days when the shadows freeze you and the direct Sun makes you sweat even though the slightest breeze wicks and cools you uncomfortably.  Her name?  I am not sure her name any more than I know his. But I can well imagine her name might be Amelia, maybe because of the aviator or maybe because of the film. A lovely French name. A kind name. A name that even in the dusty years of later life comes equally to your ear and from my tongue as something young and flapper-ready for a new adventure.  She is reading a book, he napping.  There is a fire in the fireplace, he closest with a blanket wrapped around his legs.  She looks up and over to him.  She remembers yesterday and the picnic outside, he placing the items around them all the while laughing.  She cannot remember why but it does not matter why, only that she remembers him laughing.  It is enough.  Even now as he sleeps there is the remains of an impish smile dusting his lips.  She closes her book and gently rests it to her side along with her glasses.  She wishes to linger longer looking on him but she knows there is a time when we must all close our eyes.  So she does. He now wakes.  It is now dark outside, the sun having set hours ago.  Only embers remain, a soft glow touching her cheeks and eyelids.  He takes the blanket from around his legs and puts it over her frame, it now fast fading in the late hours of the day’s remainder.  He kisses her lightly and then picks up the book and sits back down to read where she left off.  But he only looks at the remains of the fire.  There is no heat left in the room.  And he knows that he too will soon sleep.  He turns to her, takes her hand in his and smiles, his eyes closing.  The room is now black.

I like this ending.

It may seem a surprising thing, even absurd really, when you read that in the thirteen years that I have lived in Seattle I have never been picked at the airport by a friend; until last night, that is. It is funnier, maybe even ironic, that this most auspicious event is hallmarked by maybe an even more auspicious week wherein I decided that my home, for better or for worse, is Seattle. This decision comes on the heels of a rather extensive interviewing with numerous companies in and out of Seattle, including but not limited to NexTag in San Francisco and Google Japan. However, these past three months searching for something I thought I needed I discovered instead I was already in possession of what I need most: a home.

Three months ago, upon experiencing a moment that crystallized my recognition that my well-being, happiness and general state of life are entirely in my control, I began to look outside of Amazon for alternatives both to company and city. As much as the event that precipitated all this is an unfortunate intersections of stressors, nevertheless, in the final analysis I was afforded an introspection of my life in Seattle which, while slow and which has at times shriveled back to bud, has finally taken meaningful root. I came to realize that I, a person who is pathologically shy at self-introductions, has built a small, but deeply committed set of friends; people who regularly call me to see what I am up to and how I am. As small a thing as it is, I have even begun to re-explore my world through art and photography. So much so that a cafe is currently exhibiting some of my photographs. These may not have been the reasons I was so explicit about when I set out from Buffalo back in September of 1998, my then car loaded with hopes to someday return to soil more foreign than the that to which I was born to. However, in these past thirteen years I have lived a bit of a life here in Seattle. It is a life worth continuing and a set of friends worth staying with to cherish and celebrate life with — in Seattle.

And from now on I will have to remember that pickup at the airport is on the ground floor next to baggage claim. Thanks, friend.