Four months in Virginia

I've spent the last four months in Norfolk, VA attending Radiological Control School as a physical science technician.  A few things of note have happened while I've been here all of which I will summarize in titled paragraphs.

Norfolk, VA  from my apartment.

My first Migraine 


   This came during a school day after a night of very little sleep.  Strobing bolts of light suddenly streaked across my right eye and I couldn't focus on anything.  I couldn't read a single word and faces melted out of focus.  Once that stopped the pain and nausea started.  In short it freaked me out because I immediately diagnosed it as an inoperable brain tumor.  It left me with sleep anxiety for the next few months.  I associated the migraine with lack of sleep and so began obsessing about the time I spent sleeping.  Have to get at least eight hours. The more I obsessed the less sleep I got.  I haven't had a migraine since and I'm beginning to sleep better again.

My first Virginia 2nd Amendment-phile

  One of my favorite Daily Show sketches is about open-carriers, that's grown men that walk around with a side arms as they go about their daily business (check out the sketch by clicking on the link at the bottom).  I was at my favorite local coffee shop (Fairgrounds Coffee Co.) in Norfolk, VA and a early middle aged man with a 1950's crew cut, a beer gut, and shipyard mustache walked in with a holstered pistol and two clips.  Ultimately, I'm cool with it.  If we want to have abortions, gay marriage, and desegregated schools we have to  let the right-wingers have their guns.  Taking away their guns is like declawing a cat and throwing him into the wild.  In order to make it to church, browse at Home Depo, and attend Tea Party Protests safely they must be armed to the teeth. www.thedailyshow.com/watch/mon.../open-carrier-discrimination

My First 32nd Birthday

   Fairly self-explanatory here.  I fee no more mature or wise than I did when I was 22, or 12, or 2, or -10.  

Publish Post

I suck at stick and other unintended puns

I'm learning to drive manual which means I'm temporarily driving retarded.  Stalling out at stop signs, revving the engine unintentionally, and grinding the heavenly fuck out of my clutch.  This is the price I'm paying to drive a new black Volkswagen Beetle.  Its so damn nerve racking stopping at crowded intersections and hoping you can get our of first gear with out stalling.  I'm kind of glad Jade isn't here for the process of this humiliating...process.  One good thing about my new car is that it keeps me from extraneous driving.  That means I stay home because I'm afraid of crashing while trying to come out of first gear.

While I was not at Comicon or Waxing Night Photography

As the title might (and in fact does) imply, I did not go to Comicon.  There was no angle in it.  Expensive to get in (45.00 per day), only open until 7:00 pm (leaving only 3 hours), and a hassle to get to Seattle.  Its this droning "nay-saying" that is transforming me into a 85 year old 31 yr old.  It needs to stop.  Now if not sooner.  I need to plan well and follow through well.  Money anxiety often keeps me from enjoying things while I simultaneously work for the man [if you don't mind I will periodically refer to visual aids in order to avoid writing more than is necessary].   Maybe I will make it over there tomorrow.  If it is any consolation to me, I will be wandering around tonight taking pictures of the things that I've been wanting to take pictures of at night.  Things like

Grand Street of Pullman, WA

  
and things like

Another street of Pullman, WA

and so it goes.  I'm all about the night - I don't go in for all that day shit.  I like moving lights and dissolving images.  I like how the dark swallows things up.  Anyway, I'm going to take some more pictures of the aforementioned effects in the vicinity of my house.  There is a moss-filled wooded area near my house that looks old and evil in that order.  I must photograph it.  The day has not yielded the best photography as of late.  Its mostly because I'm obsessed with minutia and  urban decay.  The execution of this interest is less impressive than the theory.  Take this photo for instance:

worn pay phones across from Pike Place Seattle, WA

The day kind of ruins it because everybody sees things like this in the day.  Its like flipping through a family photo album of someone you don't know.  The scenery looks familiar but who the fuck cares.  Low light allows people to project.  In that respect night photos are Rorschach ink blots or something pretentious like that.  As long as I'm dealing with the day (and the night for that matter) urban decay is always interesting to me.  Not in a political hand-ringing way - its purely aesthetic.  Modern ruins are fun to look at like this 

Abandoned Apartment Building on Capital Hill Seattle, WA

Well, thats quite enough of my preaching.  The point is:  instead of going to Comicon I will be making more of these...which I think we can all agree is less interesting than going to Comicon.

  

Pictures of Alleys in Seattle

I always find myself photographing urban decay.  When in Seattle the alleys draw me in and I inexorably end up documenting these gaps between buildings.  These places are where degenerates go to mug, bums go to die, and garbage go to...throw away.  Alleys symbolize shady places in the infrastructure; unmonitored and unattended. For every roll of film I shoot at least 10 out of a 24 exposure roll go towards alleys and the things in them.  Usually I wait for a person to walk through the alley.  This always gives the picture a forced implication of sadness.  No real incite here its just something I'm drawn to.

One of many dark dim alleys of Seattle 

Drove to a Coffee Shop in Bainbridge Island

I've penetrated the financial barrier and came out the other side of the tax bracket: Bainbridge Island, home of the parlor room socialist.  I like it here and I don't know how I deal with the cognitive dissonance this fact must bring.  Everything about this place is done in the form of independent specialized boutiques.  The coffee shops, the clothing shops, the ledger shops, the grocery stores - they're all locally owned, operated, and supplied.  The people here are rich enough to bring in giant chain franchises and rich enough to keep them out.  But, there is no free lunch as they say.  The money has to come from somewhere.  They make it off the island and use it to keep it off the island.  Now that is cognitive dissonance.  Every man here looks as though he's steped out of a J-Crew catalogue.  Theres a certain hubris of wealth here where the affluent treat poverty as a fashion style, an extension of their wardrobe.
With all that said, I like it here.  The people are intellectually leaning and their politics ironically liberal.  There is a laid back tone set in this place, one that implies a sentiment for family and free time.  The tables of this coffee shop are covered in brown butcher paper with a cup full of worn crowns.  Graphiti, it seems, has been assimilated.  Its the age old arms race of counter culture.  You rebel and they include.  Move outside the definition and they expand it.  You punch them and they hug you.

Too tired to sleep

I hate those paradoxical effects of sleep deprivation where your body can't get into the zone and keeps rejecting the rem.  Lately I've been inundated with radiation math problems at work.  My mind is starting to balance equations that aren't there.  Its like the so-called "Tetris effect" except  I'm placing imaginary equal signs between peoples' heads.   Fences look like square root signs and the road is a Cartesian coordinate system.  But all is as well as it can be with Jade gone.

There are these two ladies sitting next to me that keep slamming their palms on the table every time they laugh.  I'm trying to indicate that this displeases me without interacting with them.  This is difficult to do.  I'm thinking of putting on a morality play/ mime show to get my point across.  However, I'm am fairly excited for open -mike night to begin.  These commuter coffee shops do have something to offer.

Less negativeness this time

There has been some time since the last time has there not?  I just got ran out of the coffee shop that I usually go to because some old ladies were having a meeting.  So, I'm here at  Starbucks with a smile on my face and a good attitude.   I'ts hot in here and it prevents me from wearing my English cap which is costing me cool points.  Not only do I not look cool, but I'm also in Starbucks not looking cool  (我不但不是酷而且在咖啡馆打着字).  I'm sure there are some grammatical errors in my attempt at translating but that is the best I can do with my current level of dedication. I miss the Jade tree and its only been a month...hope everything stays the same.  Work has been getting more interesting lately.  I'll be doing my first class on radiac operation ( devices that measure radiation for the uninitiated).  The colleagues span a wide range of age.  As far as I can tell there are two main classes among us: the academics and retired military.  The retired military sneer at the academics for their lack of experience and scoff at their presumptuousness.  The academics seem...indifferent for the most part although this divide gets more apparent as the days go by.  The academics will move on soon and segue into higher positions, more profitable ones.  The retired military are solidified in their experience, the kind that is so specific they would be obsolete if the strayed beyond the familiar umbrella of the Feds.  Still, I find one guy in particular really interesting.  He is on the upper end of the wide age bracket;  A middle aged man with a jolly red face and a tobacco voice.  He sports a grey mullet and a mustache that might be distinguished and might be goofy.  He told us a cool story about this old couple in the 80's who would send President Reagan home made jam.  I 'm sure he never actually ate any but it apparently made the news a few times.  This couple lived in northern Oregon down wind from Hanford, Washigton a nuclear waist disposal site.  Eventually the white house began to frisk ( it means scan for radiation with a Geiger counter) in accordance with security measures that were new at the time.  Well, the jam they were sending Reagan was ,according to my co-worker, "Hot as shit."  "Hot" is an idiom for something that emits radiation above background.  Reagan was getting dosed via-radioactive jam.

John Mayer and John Denver; two sides of death's coin.

A few more notes on that open - mike night I attended this weekend.  Two of the performers played music that ought not be played, written, or spoken of for the betterment of society.  John Mayer and John Denver.  Where do I start with these two crotch goblins.  John Denver: a sedated, complacent, cornball, singing about the monotonous hard-on he has for rural America.  Country roads take you home?  Mountain Mamma?  West - fucking - Virginia?  What the fuck does that even mean?  He represents everything that I loath and hate about the baby boomers, or rather what they've all become.  George Carlin said it best in his Back in Town album: "a whiny , narcissistic, self-indulgent people with a simple philosophy: "Gimme that its mine!" "  John Denver is the movie sound track for the ex-hippie turned entrepreneur; the ones that work as foreman at the Navy ship yard on the week days and take nature hike on the weekends.  Safe, unchallenging, unimaginative, boring, filled to the fucking brim with cliches.  This is his legacy.  Because this asshole had "Rocky mountain high," my entire childhood was subjected to hearing the fallout from my parents nostalgic longing for theirs, via John Denver mix tapes.
     John Mayer.  So this it, huh?  This is the best we have to offer?  A gap commercial.  Music you hear while having dental work performed? Yes, he's good looking (hell I'de fuck him) but that doesn't excuse him for polluting the collective unconscious with his ring tones.  John Mayer's music can only be described as white noise; sounds that you hear everywhere and that are so common they've integrated themselves into the background.  "Fathers be good to your daughters?"  How in the fuck did this boring cornball sentimentality make its way into the national airwaves?  Everything that Bill Hicks said about Rick Astely you can immediately cross apply to John Mayer.  And he's a stand up comedian.  Trust me, you have nothing funnier than your music.

Fiances are much cooler than wives

Referred to my girlfriend as my finance today without her consent or knowledge thereof.  Fiances are dynamic and exciting.  Its about movement really.  My girlfriend is a kick ass fiance, throwing elbows and gouging eyes.  Always on the go, as they say.  She's in the land of Thai as we speak kicking several varieties of ass,  and getting bit by exotic bugs on the ass to boot.  Marriage seems wierd to me.  Something about the whole settling down and getting morbidly obese before dieing on the toilet of a heart attack and being found 6 hours later by the meals - on - wheels lady who usually stays and chats it up but realized something didn't seem right and walked into the house to see why her favorite senior citizens - whom are usually so gracious and inviting - arne't answering the door...thing.

Going from CD's to an ipod feels kind of like atheism

Let me plow through that shitty title real quick.  Its something I was thinking about on my way here (coffee shop...alright Starbucks).  We don't really have any need for them now and maybe we haven't for a while.  I remember in the mid 90's when a giant volume of CD's meant something.  You know the people who would craft wooden shelves just to display their collection like an amateur library in their basement.  The CD itself was just a medium but I remember thinking it as a physical analogue for the music itself which made it tangible and less abstract.  I remember the CD itself kind of justified the purchase (almost 20 bucks per CD pre 2000.  Adjust for inflation and you can see how that would ruin a kids day).  You pay out the ass but at least you accumulated material for it and you could tell yourself that you were building a library, one that could be archived as a historic collection in the Smithsonian.  But the music is everywhere now and the awkward disks that hold  small amounts of it are redundant and unnecessary.  Its really just sound after all, not material or anything tangible.  Large spaces are open in our rooms and basements that we have to fill with something else.

early thirties and other cliches

The worst thing about aging is everything that happens when you age...slowly (or rapidly) more and more I resemble the people I despised growing up, with their crinkled foreheads and thinning hair.  That is me now-I'm that fucking guy.  It all comes together rather quickly as you get older.  Before, older people were like different species barely resembling my own. I am the missing link, the transitional form from meaningless childhood to boring old age.  To make things even worse I've been cast out of religion's little mind matrix.  No solace in myth anymore just infinite unconscious lies ahead.  Its smothering to think about death but I won't have lungs to feel it or a mind to perceive it.  Infinite expansion competes against the infinitesimal contraction...something has to converge.  Multiplying infinity by zero is not unfamiliar to those trained in physics and math.  Picture a rectangle of width a and height 1/a as shown below in the shity diagram I uploaded.  The area A is simply the width W multiplied by the height H.

We simply substitute 1/a for H and a for W respectively, and let the algebra do the rest.  A = (a)*(1/a).  "The area is just one" says the hypothetical antagonist in my head.  Perhaps, but what happens when a approaches zero?   We can't divide by zero, nor can we really multiply by infinity because thats the realm of the undefined.  The best we can do is examine what happens when a gets very small.  We know the answer to that: a gets very small and (1/a) blows up.  The closer we get to zero the closer our simple formula for area becomes the anomalous expression A = infinity*zero.  As we approach death we approach zero conscious (whatever that means) and events after that expand out to infinity.  We can continue this overextended metaphor/analogy and say that its symmetrical with our birth.  In this light, humans are spikes of consciousness infinite in their reach but infinitesimal in duration.  

Suck on this blog

My first blog and as usual I'm way behind the tide of time on this one.  This blog is here merely to contribute to the white noise which makes up most of the internet.  Every once in a while a distinctive spike stands out above the hum of ascii characters and advertising buttons.  This is not one of those spikes.  So why do it?  Why ask "why do it?" when you are the only one asking or the only one who cares to ask.  Well, I'm glad you asked.  I have nothing else to do.  I can slowly stroll towards death quiet and dignified or I can flail about with these sentences.  This is the only reason.  Anyway, there is nothing else to do that is pointless.
   As I type I'm at a coffee shop listening to Death Cab for Cutie's Photo Booth album which the girl behind the counter has put on.  She started with Plans which was the beginning of the end for me.  Its that whole time passing thing.  Death Cab has been reabsorbed into the collective conscience of music lovers, no longer a distinctive presence.  But, I remember when they were and there are many who don't...It's like joining some exclusive club, paying expensive dues, and suddenly a school bus pulls up in front full of the unwashed masses.  Your standing there in your club jacket whit an expensive cigar, meanwhile the mob is tearing the furniture, flooding the bathrooms, and shiting in the punch bowl.  If I can hop metaphores for a second:  finding a good band to follow is a lot like the plot of every zombie movie. Your're running around a postapocalyptic landscape looking for refuge.  No matter how good of a hiding place you find, no matter how well protected your fortress may seem, the zombie horde always finds you and devours everything that is good and pure.  The end for now.