As I watch the CSPAN coverage of the RNC, I find myself alternating between irritated and amazed by what I'm seeing and what I'm not. Since I'll be watching for days, I think I'll be updating this post as thoughts come to me.
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A few interesting emails came in this morning. One was from Denali regarding an email she was going to send but then reconsidered. The email she wanted to send would have been redundant, anyway, since we'd talked about it's contents yesterday, but I appreciate the followup anyhow. The other was from my HotorNot subscription, informing me that my payment had been rejected.
Throughout history, people have used relay signals to transmit urgent messages. We came up with jungle drums, smoke signals, lookout tower fires, the pony express, and on and on all the way up to today's internet. On the Great Wall of China, smoke or fires were used to alert neighboring towers that there was danger approaching, so the word could be spread quickly. One can only imagine the feeling of being the final link in the chain, seeing that nearby fire and knowing that danger is coming from too far away to see, but close enough to be afraid.
In this case, that one is me. I've been waiting for my credit card to be rejected for some time now. I'd like to think of it as an American right-of-passage, or another pre-employment birthing contraction, but sadly I'm smart enough to recognize that it's merely an effect of the crushing mundanity of miserable financial planning. So I go trembling to my online account summary, forced at last to face up to the past couple of months; to pay the piper, as it were.
One could only come to the conclusion that the piper is either the busiest man in showbiz, or he's got one hell of an agent. In no particular order, I'm:
Stunned! to see just how much debt has accumulated.
Shocked! by the penalties and additional fees WellsFargo has charged me.
Amazed! by how my credit limit has magically extended itself.
Horrified! when I fully realize just how fucked fucked can be.
Naturally, I do what anyone in my position would do - ignore the whole thing and pop off for a drink.
It's on the way to the cafe that I noticed my physiological advance-warning systems had activated. Shortness of breath, stomach cramps or nausea, clenched jaw, and a very narrow perspective... why it's my old friend primal instincts dropping by for a visit, uninvited, as usual. Mentally, I thanked the hot girl I hadn't noticed for tipping me off that something was wrong and immediately began to de-anxiety myself. Being distressed over debt was one thing, but going blind to beauty was unthinkable. Since by then I was entering the cafe, the easiest refocus was to order some coffee.
Almost thwarted by the sleepy-looking European, who aborted my engrossed thinking of what to order by instantly guessing exactly what I wanted, I was saved from re-anxiety by having my fingers scalded by the house coffee which for some infernal reason was always ensured to be at white-hot-magma temperatures. Yet somewhere between the pain of my fingers and the search for a sugar packet, I found my muse and my solution.
Donald Trump. That's right, I said it. The Donald. A man who has seen debt so deep his accountant took a bathysphere to work. A personality who defies understanding. An economic force of nature who simultaneously represents the best of capitalism while clearly circumscribing the entirety of garish. If this creature can escape the suffocating death of debt, so can I, and no fiddle-faddling logic or reason will convince me different.
You'll just have to imagine the ten to twenty lines of "LOL" to surround this link.
Comments are saved pending approval by me, so if you don't see your comment come up right away (or for some time), that's why.
Sorry about that, but until get my comment-spam filter set up it's just not worth it to have the comments open. The alternative is to have everyone register, but I'm not really ready for that. I don't think anyone else is either.
Up until late in high school, I was a very short guy. I was second in line for my elementary school graduation ceremony. The ceremony involved marching down the aisle and then organizing into rows on a stage, so there was some mechanic to the shortest people being in front, but that was small consolation (ha!) to those of us in the front of the line. We all felt like flower girls.
I didn't get picked for kickball teams, and my short-but-exciting basketball experiences in high school was more Charlie Chaplin than Michael Jordan. I was staring at girls chests starting in junior high school, unfortunately not because of puberty but because they had all grown up and I hadn't. You really can't appreciate the plight of the small person until you realize how many unpleasant containers, frequently lockable, are exactly their size and how many truly diabolic people are large enough to take advantage of that fact.
But despite the incessant penalties of being height-challenged, there were a handful of benefits. Short people have less weight to hold them down. I was always able to easily scale fences, signposts, walls, and anything I could get a tiny hold on. Short people almost never bump their heads on anything. They find far more things lying on the ground. Short people always keep their chins up.
Somewhere around 15, my body punched the Nitro on my HGH and I sprung up about a foot. Suddenly I could reach the fourth shelf. My running speed became unreal. The additional altitude gave me new vistas, including an instant classic - cleavage. Travelling through crowds changed from a slalom through shifting, unsympathetic meat walls to cruising at 50,000 feet, enjoying the flight.
It took me a few years to tune into a subtle side-effect of this growth. Because of the severity of my change in height, I had developed a new center of balance and I was no longer as agile as I had been. All my muscles had been trained to operate a sub five-foot body and upgrading to just under six had made me significantly more clumsy. Imagine wearing one-foot platform shoes for the rest of your life, starting now, and you'll get some idea of how I have felt.
Worst of all, falling had acquired all new dimensions. When you're only a couple of feet off the ground, it's no big deal to tumble or go sprawling. Jump that up a bit and you find you're hitting quite a bit harder. I used to be good friends with the ground. Whatever might have happened, the floor was always right there for me, and popping back up was a snap. It may sound silly, but I miss that.
It was in the shower this morning that I realized that this experience resonated far deeper than I had been, or wanted to be, aware of.
Well, I've upgraded OpenMatt.com with the latest version of Movable Type, only to find that my comment system needs some tweaking. Not that anybody cares, but comments are now sent to an approval bin, where I will have to "approve" them for publishing. Although that may seem elitist or draconian, I can tell you that I've deleted and blocked hundreds of SPAM-posts from the comments here on my site and it's much easier to stop them before they get here.
For now, the approval system stands, but within the next month or so I'll have my old spam-blocker back again and we'll pick up from there.
I came from a place where there was little strength or foundation. I came from nothing and drew from inspiration enough to find enough purchase to continue. I was alone and I was without hope, but I had a desire to reach out and touch further than I knew. I had no notion of what my purpose was, yet I persisted with some perverse idea that my existance would yeild... more.
I was lucky. I found enough solidity to build myself. I had good teachers who presented moral hand and footholds. It was no decision on my part, but rather a combination of luck of intuition that led me to climb their leads. I held close primal notions like I must survive and I must create and I must assist. Although my notion of family and community was fragmented, it was tested and tried constantly in a crucible of ignorant youth.
I'm older now. There is a me now, one who makes decisions and judgements. I have a perspective, and it's recursive only insofar as it's certainty about tentative understanding. I don't know anything. I may not ever know anything. But I also do not hesitate to understand or place judgement. I have made the distinguishment between uncertainty and doubt, and uncertainty has won.
Without truth, without knowledge, without certainty, I am without recourse. I rely on you. You are like me, and you are me. I need you as much as I need myself. You are the extra eyes, the extra minds, the extra vision that I need if I hope to continue without being lost. Your experience is as critical to me as it is dear to yourself, and more precious to me for it's exceptions. I need you more than you will appreciate, and more than is understandable.
Welp, apparently today is the big day. It's been about a year of me doing a Wile Y. Coyote over the cliff edge, and as of today I can see that I'm actually pinwheeling over thin air.
I'm broke. Not broke in the way that BART is, or in that patchwork-coat-with-a-bottle-that-has-XX-on-the-side broke, but rather the more contemporary about-to-have-men-in-coats-walk-off-with-my-furniture type broke.
My search for employment has been a real roller coaster of fun an excitement. Fun in the sense of getting a bottle broken over your head and realizing you're too drunk to care, and exciting by way of cardiac arrest. In short, it's been a bust, which incidentally goes along with the whole 'broke' motif.
Although I realize I've been more out of touch than an outstretching fakir on the clay floor outside some temple in Abu Dhabi, in my delirium I envision the impossible, like a spamless email box or a week of chain-banging hot young pop stars, and reach out to people to help me in my desperate hour.
I need a job. Any job. I'll spray bowling shoes with Lysol. I'll string cable through sewer pipes like a nerdy Rambo. I'll do anything that involves me actually pulling a check so I can futilely fling it at the slavering hulk that is my mosterous debt.