This That

I keep wantin' to write something, and then not. Stuff to do, can't spare the brain energy, whatever ... but there's an alien needs to burst out my chest. You know the drill.

No subject matter, though. Life is too much the vast crystal cave of distracting multivariate calculations for me to focus on a subject matter. You know how that goes too.

I don't know what the alien looks like. What the aliens look like.

Too much going on?

Example, people are waiting for me to make up my mind and act on this thing of being a married guy. What people? The one I'm married to, the boys she produced, the friends I've confided in, the family members who have entrails of their own to read, and at a lower level anyone who reads people and has a chance to read me.

Example, last night I went to meet up with the local steampunk group. Yah, a whole new hobby I haven't mentioned here yet. I wore something vaguely anachronistic and a lady complimented me on my short top hat.

"I got married in this," I said.

"It's worn well," she said.

"The hat has," I said. General laughter, subdued, ensued.

Well, discussions are on a trajectory not circular. Meanwhile, I have a tendency to avoid mentioning my wife, and then find myself unable to avoid her. She is, after all, a major player. I don't avoid it to be deceitful but because I sense and don't want to share a weird sort of embarrassment. I'm not at all embarrassed by her, indeed people tend to like her a lot (until, in some cases, they get to know her, but only in some cases). I am embarrassed by my ambivalence and indecision and am certain it shows at every turn. Better to avoid the subject when not necessary. And as I said, discussions are on a trajectory not circular, so this state will not persist.

Steampunkers are funny, and I sort of like them. I've always made fun of people who like to play dress-up, but it seems I'm turning into one anyway. I've done the Civil War thing. They're a little too serious for me, too serious about pretending to some misunderstood 1860s attitude so they can be either states' rights or law and order blowhards and pretend to live in a "simpler time" (and I've read enough history to know there is no such thing as a "simpler time"). I've done Burning Man and it's fun beyond words, with dressing like a total idiot being only the self-liberating beginning. Steampunk is somewhere in between, everyone amusing themselves creating characters that belong in a universe roughly drawn by Jules Verne and Edgar Rice Burroughs and William Gibson; and indeed there is a steampunk subculture at Burning Man, some of the elements that flit in and out of its part of the cultural Venn diagram being unspeakably sexy in their desert boots, frilly underwear, toy guns, Gibson Girl hair-dos and corsets. I now see steampunk as another one of the gravity wells of style that have emerged in this post-fashion world, collecting people like porch lights collect whiteflies, along with post-apocalypse, Renaissance, demented hippie clown, and, of course, stark naked.

I pause; so what else is going on? I am hundreds of hours late on my wheelchair project, if being ready for the Burn is the measure. Maybe next year but meanwhile I am continuing to use the creative energy, mostly in hunting down dead bicycles and using their body parts to design and construct a machine of my own. What I'm doing has never been done before to my knowledge so I'm inventing the wheel, quite literally, and it's fun when I have time and things go well, but note that those are two very demanding criteria. On top of this we are creating an array of portable housing units cut out of OSB sheets that have eight-sided footprints and fit together without hardware and are very stable in high winds, our soon-to-be-famed octahuts. This year's theme is "Metropolis" and so we figure we are building an octopolis or at least an octaburb. We hope our octaburban complex comes off as interesting but what really matters is that one can sleep in the damn thing during the daytime. I'm using OSB with Techshield, the same stuff we used on the half of the house that almost never needs the air conditioning turned on, so I have hopes, but I haven't finished building my personal prototype hence it is untested in the Valley's high summer heat.

All right, I wrote about this and that, it's time to get back to work so I can maybe, just maybe, go on the long weekend without feeling I failed the team. That's how my company succeeds, you know: A brilliant combination of employee support (decent benefits, free coffee, weight room, employee-designed Great Place To Work activities) and crack-the-whip paranoia (shark tank designed to make sure every group has at least one person who gets dinged for under-achievement). I seem to be fairly oblivious to the whip, but I have internalized a lot of the paranoia. Real good for the health.