wild nights

I had an interesting evening yesterday. After hanging out with some people from work at Fuel, a relatively new Caribbean-themed restaurant/bar, I rode my little bicycle right on home to make some dinner. About 10 minutes after I sat down on my couch, though, I started feeling incredibly strange. Then I began trembling uncontrollably. Then I got extremely cold. Now, my house has exactly two window units, and it’s almost always warm, which doesn’t bother me, but it’s not the kind of place that gets chilly without some serious AC crankage and a cool night. So I was surprised to have sweatpants on, a blanket over me, and still be cold. Quickly realizing that I was perhaps coming down with a fever/flu/mystery disease, I decided to go to bed and sleep from 10 pm until 7 am, when I had to go to work. I turned off all of the air, put an extra blanket on, and tried to go to sleep.

I fell asleep, but did not really sleep; instead, I woke up every 45 minutes, feeling like I was dying of too much heat, having bizarre visions. Yes, visions. This happened to me once in high school, when I was laid up at home with a fever during the day. I put on Pink Floyd’s The Wall because I was bored, and proceeded to have strange altered states while my head felt like it was going to explode. So it didn’t completely take me by surprise, but it was still a supremely weird night. Most of the night, I thought I was calculus. Not that I was doing calculus, but that my body and my essence were the formulas and expressions and tangents and the like. This may have happened because I’m reading a novel set in the late 17th century and involving Isaac Newton, Leibnez, the Royal Society, and things such as alchemy. Riveting, I know. (Aside, it’s actually pretty good: Quicksilver by Neil Stephenson, Volume I of the Baroque Cycle.) So Ive been having weird thoughts about science, mathematics, and 1675 London. And all night I was calculus. Bizarre. But interesting.

It’s things like that that make me think it would be interesting to try crazy drugs, or camp out in a sensory deprivation chamber for a few hours. Most of the time I’m so literal, not given to daydreaming, at least when I’m focused on a task. So when my mind goes a little crazy, in my dreams or fever delusions, they really interest me as an altered state, as a way escape the humdrum literalism of my everyday thoughts. LSD anyone?

Elvis Rocks. Don’t Hate.

ok

moving time

A little backstory: I grew up in several different homes; my first was a single-wide trailer that had been added to with a ramshackle two bedroom/living room addition, thus creating a hybridized living situation whose full strangeness I did not appreciate for years. The second was a much classier double-wide trailer where I had a big bedroom, as well as a family den and fireplace (movin’ on up, as they say). After my parents’ divorce, there was a crowded house where I shared a room with my brother, then a small house on a major highway (literally, our driveway led to the highway) where I had a tiny, tiny room. Then another double-wide, which, if you know me, is the one that burned down while I was a junior at the College of Charleston. Then came our current, much classier double-wide. Personally, I’ve lived in Buist, a freshman dorm where I had two roommates and a hall bath; then came Rutledge for two years, where I lived with one other guy, in what amounted to an on campus apartment with an actual kitchen!! For the last two years, I’ve lived West of the Ashley in a nice two bedroom two-story townhouse. I didn’t realize it until I was moving during the last week, but I had become rather attached to that cheap townhouse.

Packing up all my books, all of my odds and ends, computer parts and shoes and shelves, I became quite sad; it wasn’t just that I was leaving, it was something more, something that I can’t put my finger on. Partly, I honestly think, it was packing up my books. I have many. Many many. And I’m constitutionally unable to throw them away. Boxes and boxes of books, taken to storage or to my new apartment. Partly I think it was the impending drastic change in behavior; for the last two years, I have ridden the bus every day, twice a day, for two hours, almost every day except Sunday. While it will be very nice to not have to get up that extra hour early, it feels strange already.

Mostly though, i think it was the memories, and not even the memories that are necessarily tied to the place itself. It’s instead a feeling of passing, of moving on to something else, of growing up and yet going nowhere, of becoming established in another place without setting down any roots. In fact, I seem to be losing my connections everywhere, some a long time ago and some today and yesterday. Some are going to be pruned tomorrow, I already know. And all of that is folded into the feeling that I want to settle down, I want to know what I’m doing and where I’m going, and with whom. But many of the whos are missing in action, the wheres are uncertain, and the whats are swirling around in a maelstrom inside my head and heart. So everything is changing, yet nothing feels different, in this in between moment I’m trying to find out who I am while the people and things that made me who I was yesterday seem to be drifting away. It’s exhilarating. It’s incredibly frightening. Navigating between those two extremes is becoming tiring. Also, moving forced me to realize that I have entirely too many things. Not in a complaining sort of way, but in a larger spiritual sort of way. As in I’m too attached to all of my things, and I think that they give me security, the books and little things I know so well. I knew that was an illusion, but now I know that it’s foolish–which are two different things.

Things to Do:

1. Liberate myself from earthly possessions. After all, nobody who seems like they know what they’re talking about says “Go forth and accumulate things, and thou shalt be happy!” Rather the opposite; think of the man who questioned Christ about how to get into heaven and the eye of the needle. Buddhism asserts that man’s (gender inclusive, of course) attachment to possessions ties us to dis-ease, to samsara and the eternal cycle of rebirth. Islam demands a religious tax on material wealth. You see the problem.

2. Work on 1.

anger

Sometimes I get so angry, angry at myself, at people in my life, at people who have never even thought about my existence at all. Sometimes I sit quietly, sometimes I pray, sometimes I shake in rage.

And sometimes I watch this:

Then I feel better.

ps-It’s really better if you go to youtube and watch in high quality.  I promise.

…

…

What are we all doing?

And why is this one of the most affecting songs I’ve ever heard?

unintended

The other day a friend and I got together far too late at night, drank far too many beers, and stayed up much too late; we did this because she has a crazy schedule at the moment, and I don’t get off of my new job until 5.30, which means I get home at 7pm usually, thus leaving precious little time for things like friends. But we hadn’t spoken in a while beyond the silly phone conversations that you have when you don’t really have time talk, when you’re both rushed and on your way to do something else. That’s not really the point.

The point is, she asked me what I wanted, after we’d had a few drinks and I was feeling more honest than usual (not that I go around spouting untruths and misleading everybody….or do I?), and not what I wanted in the sense of ‘Hey do you need another beer?’ but in the sense of ‘What do you want, you know, out of this whole existence thing?’–an entirely different animal. And without thinking, I said ‘A family…that, and to change the world. That’s what I want.’ I wasn’t joking, I’m pretty sure. Those are the things I want. I want to be a husband and a father, and raise little boys and girls into strong men and women who know honor and decency and love; to go to their soccer games and their school plays and have stupid family vacations in strange national parks that no one else’s dad thinks are cool, preferably involving a station wagon of some sort, because that’s what I remember from my childhood. I want to love my wife and never leave (whoever she is) and be a father to my children (whenever they get here, hopefully before I’m too old). That, and change the world. I’m not even sure what I meant when I said this, but when I look around, when I ride the bus through West Ashley and down Spring St. every day, twice a day, I see a world with so much pain. I see beauty, I see numberless faces who make me smile, but I also see this world cleaved from what is good and just. My heart threatens to burst, and I know that we can do better. We have to do better. Even though we might not like to admit it, especially in America, we rise or fall together, and we, as a people, as a global community, are only as high as our lowest number. While chains exist anywhere, we will never be free. While hunger lives, we will never be fed. We are a people grown callous, cocooned in our first world bubble of prosperity and wealth (myself, more than anyone); we are a people from whom the saints would, or should, it seems, recoil. If they did not, it would only be because they were better than we. We would give up liberty for false safety, honor for money, righteous struggle for shameful acquiescence. I see this in myself, I see it around me. I am a coward, frozen in my soul, and I don’t know what I Should Do, in the largest sense.

To be a good person, to change the world, is it enough to be a good father and husband? Is it enough to tend my little corner, and hope that the (hopefully) lessons of justice and love and honor taught to children and students (there will probably be students in my future, let’s be honest) ripple outward from the thrown in pebble? Is that enough? Or is that selfish? I can’t help but think of Simon Peter and Andrew; they didn’t listen to what Christ had to say and go back to their nets and think about it. They heard him, threw their nets down, and followed. James and John left their father, alone, old, and followed.

They walked the path, as have so many others. We stand peeking through our fingers.

unexpected

So I have a job; it was surprising, in that I applied to it last September, didn’t hear from them for quite a while, and then they called me up and asked me to reapply at the very end of April. Then I had a crazy little group interview, and 3 days later they offered me a job. A real job, with a salary, my own desk, a new computer (just for me!), my own phone, a key to the building (two buildings, in fact), and on and on. As to what it is, it’s a position at The History Press, a small publishing house based here in Charleston, SC, with one other office in Salem, MA. My official position is ‘Graduate Trainee,’ which means I am a sort of junior editor/editorial assistant (EA, in the lingo, btw). Hence the long absence, what with all the settling in and such. Also long work days make it hard to do anything but fall into bed, much less go for a run or write a blog post, you know? So I’ve been there for just over three weeks, and I am kind of in love with the place; it fits, with a few hiccups, the image I’ve been carrying around (without realizing it, of course) of what job should be like, with smart people who know what they’re doing, care about the quality of their work, and don’t treat me like an idiot because I haven’t been there that long. So if you find yourself needing to write a book focused on local and/or regional history, I’m you’re man. Call me. Seriously.

The time that hasn’t been spent doing neat things at work has been fairly consumed with trying to figure out where/how to live now that I’ve got a whole ‘adult life’ thing going on, which is slightly terrifying. Since my roommate is leaving at the end of July, several options present themselves, some of them more expensive than others but really neat (such as living alone in downtown Charleston in a sweet studio or some such), some are financially sensible (such as staying where I am and finding another roommate or moving downtown with a roommate), and some are kind of in between (such as staying where I am without a roommate or living on the third floor of a normal, regular family’s home downtown). Since I haven’t even received my first paycheck yet, I am slightly wary of budgeting for swanky downtown living, but July is fast approaching. Any reader input here, anybody?

Also, in case no one told you, Barack Obama is just fantastic:

duchenne smiles

Here in Charleston, as many will know, we have a great little thing called the City Paper. Now, I’m a loyal reader of this publication; lately, there’s been a new addition to the City Paper: 11:11, a magazine centered on ‘Living, Knowing, Being.’ It’s very new-agey, kind of weird but sort of interesting sometimes. Riding the bus today, I came across an article on smiling. Apparantly, and I did not know this, there is only one form of the smile that you can tell reflects inner joy/happiness: the Duchenne Smile, named for Guillaume Duchenne, a crazy french doctor who lived during the 19th century. When someone smiles a Duchenne Smile, different sets of muscles are put into play, in particular the upper face around the eyes (the Zygmatic Muscles ). Thus, when a smile incorporates these muscles, the eyes crinkle, forming crow’s feet on the skin.

Now, I thought this was pretty interesting, considering that a) I love trivia like this and b) it made me think about my own smiles, and the faces I make in various situations. I realized, upon some consideration, that I am prone to the type of smile that borders on the smirk, with the left side of my mouth upturned and my lips closed or parted very slightly. When I chuckle without taking a breath, that’s what my mouth does (it’s almost always the left side of my face). If I laugh open mouthed, or smile broadly, then I actually pull more with the right side of my face, and I tend to pull my upper lip upwards (like most folks) showing my teeth.

The ‘True Smile,’ the Duchenne Smile, where my whole face gets involved, happens more than I thought it would, especially here lately. I take this to be a good thing, since, apparently, it reflects an actual state of mind and not some forced cheerfulness. And certain people seem to bring it out, often; them, and then the random, unexpected things in which we sometimes find honest humor or pleasure. The jasmine on the vine, small children tottering along and talking to themselves, or, this one time, the rain falling hard on Vanderhorst St. in downtown Charleston. It was dusk, and as the large droplets hit the pavement, you could see them rebound into the air becuase of the shining lights of cars; they hit the blacktop and then bounced into the air in an expanding cone of movement. It looked like they were dancing sideways in the wan light. I grinned for about an hour.

Also, lately the song Go Places.

the Big Things

Earlier today, while on facebook, I changed my status to ‘Daniel is thinking about the Big Things.’ And while I couldn’t ignore the irony that updating my status on facebook was in no way one of the Big Things, it was true as far as those kinds of declarations are. Lately, and really for the past year, with only a pointless job in food & bev to occupy serious chunks of my time, I’ve thought a lot about the things that we’re told you’re supposed to figure out in college; maybe I just missed the memo. Don’t get me wrong, I loved college, defending my ideas and working out what I thought about texts and beliefs and all that jazz, but I have to agree with those who see the dissolution of any overarching system of guidance or values in higher education (not that I think that disintegration of the overwhelming white, Western, and male system of values and behavior is necessariy a negative). I guess that I was just looking for something to color in the holes that I came to Charleston with. To put it another way, I learned about and debated Aquinas’ proof of the existence of god without deciding whether or not she/he exists; I argued the coherence of capitalis systems as opposed to socialist, but didn’t decide whether or not one was evil or good (although, based on things I’ve read outside the curriculum, I have to come down against capitalism). I learned to grapple with these problems that I had trouble placing in a context of material reality and moral behavior. Had I been raised with a set of coherent strictures, such as a religion or a systematic philosophy, I wouldn’t have had so much trouble, I think, I wouldn’t have been so adrift; I would have had a system against which to measure the validity of ideas, found concordance or dissonance among the bewildering array of new thoughts I encountered. But I didn’t, so I did that only against the somewhat diffuse set of morals I’ve developed over the last few years.

Which brings me to the big things. Being outside of all of that, moving beyond the environment of abstraction into a world of concrete reality, has forced me to consider the things that matter as a matter of actually living life, the process of becoming in this world. Chief among them, god/God/Allah vs. atheism/agnosticism/non-theism/etc. It seems sometimes that I spend an inordinate amount of time focused on questions of belief, on the systems that make sense (or not, as is more likely) to me. This is hardly new; although those who know me may not realize it, I considered very seriously becoming Catholic for about a year, eventually deciding against it for a variety of reasons (which was in turn a very different place to be than when I was entering college and still thought of myself as an Objectivist in the Randian sense, or at least an atheist, and is in turn a spectrum’s length away from the strange aggregate of Zen Buddhism, socialist ethics, and perhaps Sufism that I find myself having much in common with today).

So religion preoccupies me, constantly shifting places with questions of love and relationships; I hesitate to share to much, but suffice it to say that I’ve learned much in the last year, about myself and about the way to be alone and the the need not to be. Even these wanderings of the mind, the constant spinning of tales in my head, is eventually plowed back into questions of belief, questions of the Cause and the Root, or at least the Purpose (such as, do I have one? Is it constructed by Western society, and is that necessarily a bad thing?) Should this Purpose be subordinate to personal satisfaction, or should I even be thinking about personal Love and societal Love, Eros and Agape, as dualities or as shards of the same vessel? And why do I naturally place a wall between these parts of my psyche, the wants and the needs, needing comfort and requiring something larger from myself? Because who am I if I don’t do something, if I am not able to shift the course of events from this to that, from good to better? Of course, this tension is mostly in my head, and not real, but the seemingly unshakeable belief that the duality is real makes it real to me, even if I know that it’s not; my perceptions create my reality, as egomaniacal as that may sound.

So the big things, God and Love. When I figure it out, I’ll let you know. Or send you a copy of the book.

time to dabble in the arts

I’m not a creative person. Well, perhaps that’s not quite right; I should say that I was never taught that being creative, that expressing some sense of the artistic, was important. Part of this is just the way I was raised. After all, someone has to do the chores, and what with homework and all, what time could there have been for frivolous pursuits like art or music? I wasn’t discouraged really, from being an artistic little boy. I went along with music class in elementary school, after all, banging those silly blocks (or sometimes sticks) together to give some sort of mystical beat; when we had to sing, I sang loudly, which will surely shock those of you who know me now (or perhaps not, considering my proclivities to foot tapping and the singing of lousy pop songs at my desk). But for the most part, my….energies found other outlets. My imagination found activity in the works of others, in science fiction movies, tv shows, and especially books. I never found it difficult to dwell in the possibilities presented by authors writing of other worlds or times or in the spaces in between the stars. In fact, it is probably true that I felt more comfortable in these places than I felt in my own home, some of the time. That was a role I enjoyed, from an early age: a receiver of the creative efforts of others, of a critic (dare I detect a foreshadowing of my collegiate endeavors?) rather than a creator of those works myself.

No one ever challenged me to foster or develop creative talents on my own part. I play no instruments, I can’t hold a tune, I can’t draw very well or paint at all, and my attempts at creative writing are laughable in their heavy-handedness. When I come into contact with people who are creative, who can act, or write, or paint, or sing or play the piano, I am somewhat amazed, for that is an area of human activity that I fundamentally don’t understand. Even when I used to blacksmith in high school, I tended to make things like hinges and fireplace sets instead of sculptures or the like.

I’m not given to flights of fancy or bouts of carefree dancing; in fact, it has been said I have a serious nature. I wonder how much of that is wrapped up in, is bound within the idea that I was never encouraged to lose a sense of conscious effort for whatever I’m doing? Some of the only times when I lose myself, when I act not without thought but on the other end of thought, with focus beyond the activity itself (look at Keats’ Negative Capability and you’ll see kind of what I’m talking about) is when I have written certain papers or when I run for long stretches of time. I can’t help but thinking that I’m missing out on an activity that is in our basic natures, the irrational exuberance of creativity; I know that I wouldn’t have painted the cave walls at Lascaux, and that I probably would have gotten angry that whoever was painting them was wasting time we could be using to hunt. Perhaps I simply haven’t yet found the key needed to unlock my vaults of expression. I’m on the lookout.