Overdue words on an overlong flight

This is already the longest I’ve worn a mask.  I’m fortunate in many ways, and this is one of them.  Much has changed since my last post, and while I’ve been thinking it would be good to write about that, I’ve not really felt up to it.  I’ve been experiencing new stress in new ways.  Different ways at different times, as the waves of despair and uncertainty wash over me, tossing me against the rocks of an unrecognizable shore.

And yet I’m fortunate, in my little lighthouse against the storm, clinging to rock against wind unseen, the microscopic rain and hail of humanity’s dark hour invisible in the small-town spring.  

More frightening than the storm is those that are too stupid, too ignorant, or too deceived by charlatans to acknowledge it.  These, the worst among us, the least able to acknowledge that other people exist and have value, row frantically toward peril to the tweeting chant of their psychopathic coxwain.  

And then the fires.  The unbinding of structures by oxygen.  The pent up rage of a nation, bound tighter with each casualty of violent hubris:  Rodney, Tamir, Breonna, George.  An impossibly long list of bloody hands extending throughout all history, but nearest of all the hands of blue on the necks of black.  The structure designed to divide and subjugate is now seen in the light of the burning.

But there is light.  New structures begin to emerge even as old ones continue to fall.  Columbus, Lee and Jemima replaced by BLM signs, pride flags, and calls for universal healthcare, police reform and basic income.  Voices long shouting into the darkness patiently heard at rallies.  Change, finally, i hope.  

I haven’t had the words for any of this, and still don’t, and I know that nothing i say can ever be enough, but despite that i cannot stay silent.  

What i can talk about with more expertise is myself, so I’ll bring this back to that.

I’ve always been a bit of a prepper.  I was a boy scout after all and our motto, to “be prepared” was taken to heart. As a result I’m a bit of a pack rat.  I’ve managed to avoid hoarding status, but I do purchase possessions for the possible prevention of peril. And i cling to them.  It’s not very zen, but it does come in handy when a power supply dies and i have a spare from that old router.  I’m a fixer, and an aspiring maker, and it takes tools and materials to do either so it’s easy to rationalize saving that perfectly good box, wire or sturdy foam.  I’m not complaining, it’s just an acknowledgement of who i am, and why.  

So it was expected that when I saw the first signs of the pandemic i prepared.  I got many things, rational and otherwise against unknown eventualities.  I have an abundance of hand sanitizer, and I’ve had N95 masks since the early ebola outbreaks.  Copious calories clog my cupboards. My RV too was stocked for options last year, with multiple ways to purify water and stay warm.  Too many, really, but that’s how i roll. One reason i purchased the RV in the first place was as a bug-out vehicle.  Imagine my frustration at it being four thousand miles out.

Normally during the spring and summer people tend to take days off, but for those like myself, who were already working remotely, days off grew sparse as new patterns developed.  My employer noticed, and since they’re required to backstop our PTO with cash, their books got fat with stagnant cash.  So, they asked us to take some PTO, and this coming week i scheduled some.  Yesterday i started to wonder what I’d be doing with myself.

I recently purchased some new toys, which for me means tools.  A Prusa MK3S 3d printer, and from the harbor of freight, a boat load of shop equipment, including belts for sanding and sawing, nails and staples and pins for sticking, and glues and tapes for also-sticking.  And of course all sorts of things that make things be bigger, smaller, attached or detached from each other.  More is on the way.  

My desire is to eventually develop the skills to use all the things to make all the things.  To have all the tools and materials and knowledge to bend reality into my vision of it.  I’ve been watching a lot of YouTube videos.  (Thank you Adam Savage, you’re a gift to humanity.)

What I’ve not been doing much of yet is actually bending, mostly for lack of vision.  I am trying to forgive myself for that part, since I know I work well when I have a project, and expect that will come with time.  Perhaps during low tide.  Meanwhile I have been cleaning and sorting and learning, so that when I do stumble on an idea I’ll be able to de-Platonize it into physical form.  

There is significant value to this, because while I wait for the physical world to call me to action my mental world is reshaped.  Each new tool is a knife, carving the putty of my brain.  Doors of possibility open and i gaze upon new vistas.  I deeply enjoy this experience.  Learning new things makes me feel alive.  I’m not one for mastery though.  I like to know enough about a thing to understand how it slots in with the rest.  To assemble my own tapestry from piles of puzzle pieces.  To build my brain from the inside out, scaffolding outward as quickly as possible.  

I think this is what I enjoy about board games. Learning new games means learning new systems.  I’m a systems guy.  I am usually quick to pick up on how things work, and knowing how things work gives me comfort that i can predict and guide my future. That future-me will be prepared.  Mostly I’m successful with that, but since everything changes it’s a constant effort.

We’re in a time of increased change. The ground feels unsteadier than usual.  The illusion of stability is translucent.  This is both unsettling and inevitable, and recently I’ve been trying to allow for both and forgive myself for being a flawed person, just like you and everyone.  I cannot be perfectly anything, and letting go of that is ironic and required. There is no zen destination, only the path to it. There is no there there. There are no right answers, only the value in looking for them.  

I should, in many cases, be trying harder. The comfortable path isn’t always the right one.  My privilege and fear have kept me away from protests and action. My desire to help outweighed by my indecision and the stagnation of idealized perfection.  The perfect is the enemy of the good, and lately I’ve been mediocre at best.  And this knowledge stagnates and depresses me further.  I need to meditate more often.  I’m losing my tools while I acquire others.  

Also I’ve been hurting. I wake up sore for no reason.  Aging is the process of whittling down the positions where we feel comfortable.  I’m down to two for sleeping.  Part of this, i know, is that i haven’t been swimming, or exercising in general.  I’ve been fortunate that I’ve been able to eat well and in moderation, so I’ve been keeping my weight in the range where I feel better about myself, and am not putting undue stress on my body.  But my cardio is crap and I’m weaker than I’ve ever been.  I’m not OK with that, but I’ve also been unable to muster the motivation to change it.    

Each day is a new opportunity though, a rebirth.  I named my RV Metamorphose, choosing the grammatical form that commands myself to change.  To turn myself entirely to goo in my rolling cocoon, for only from goo are wings formed.  Some days it works, and I go to bed happy with my choices.  Some days i remember I’m human and flawed and clinging to low rungs on the infinite path to enlightenment.  Some days i can forgive myself.

This is a five hour flight, so it might be a long post, if it isn’t already.  I didn’t sleep well last night, waking from fitful dreams, likely trying to solve problems i couldn’t.  Very un-zen, subconscious-me. Present-me wishes you were better at unconsciousness.  I could theoretically nap, but I suck at that on planes, and the mask would probably make me dream of drowning.  Suffocation is one of my biggest fears, likely stemming from childhood asthma.  I have now-asthma too, and though it’s controlled by better drugs, it justifies my extreme fear of the virus.  As I’ve said before I’m a very fear-driven organism.  That’s probably fortunate, because opportunity-driven organisms frequently don’t have much to eat.  Despite my recent weight loss, i have no problem on that front.  

Fortune is a word I’ve thought about a lot lately.  I’ve always been uncomfortable with the word “blessed” because it implies an other, an order of things, and a hubris of understanding.  For some reason “fortune” feels less so, though i think it too has religious origins.  Privilege, as a term, is in fashion now, and though I’m increasingly able to acknowledge that, not all fortune is privilege, at least in my head.  I am afforded much of both, and that makes me always want to do more than i do.  I think it’s everyone’s duty to themselves, their ancestors and their species to make the most of themselves and their path, however they landed on it.  I’m trying, but i suck at it, and I’m trying to let that be OK and not-OK at the same time, for different reasons.  It comes in waves.

Maybe all things come in waves.  The oscillations of reality certainly do at any level at which we can measure them.  Without dusk there would be no dawn.  Damn, but it’s hard sometimes in the darkness.

I’ve thought about that a lot lately, the dichotomy of dark and light, of black and white, and how intrinsic it is to our psyches, and how harmful it is to the melanin-abundant, and how it is that it never occurred to me before.  Growing always, i am, refining the version of me by cuts and scrapes and putty knives to the brain.  Shaping a version of myself I’m a little happier with each day, as the pieces wear out and scar.  Two opposing waves carving the slow cycle of my existence.

I was once told my blog would be easier to read if i stuck to one subject, but that’s just not how my brain works.  I generally have no idea what I’m going to say until I do, and once said it’s nearly impossible to pick apart the pieces from the whole.  I take consolation that this is a more authentic version of myself as a result, if not a better one.  I write for myself, i think, but i have no success unless I’m talking to you.  I figure it’s because I already know everything i know, so why write about it to only myself?  Of course I’m wrong about that, since I learn much about myself through this process, but somehow the audience is required for the requisite brain juices to flow out onto the proverbial page. 

And for some reason i need disconnection too.  Even though my row-neighbor is on his laptop, across the vast one-seat crevasse across which no virus dare pass, i pretend his internet too cannot reach me.  It’s a useful illusion, and I’ll take it until I can learn another technique for juice-squeezing.  

I do consider myself a writer now, years into this blog.  I may only have a few readers, but I’m generally happy with the squeezings.  A writer writes though, and various versions of me don’t, which disappoints.  I’m a bit of a fledgeling everything, my toes dipped in to so many pools.  Even in my career I’ve specialized in not.  In knowing a little about a lot.  It’s gotten me what I’ve got, so I suppose i should embrace that, but should is a dangerous and difficult word.  It’s tough not ever feeling good enough at anything. At seeing an eight year old kid on YouTube who is better at something than i ever will be at anything.  The explosive growth of media is incompatible with our cave brains, stamped as they are from old molds with minor revision marks.  In the sixteenth century you could easily be the best mandolin player your audience had ever seen.  Now it takes a lot more work to appear as a blip on an ever expanding global average.  But the mandolin still plays, even if the audience has grown fickle. 

Worse, children are held to increasing standards, with schoolyard games morphing into traveling leagues, and international competitions.  Not that these are wrong, per se, but I do wonder how many kids stop kicking the ball when they figure out where they are on the global rankings.  I know I’m prone to it.  Motivation is tough, and brains are cruel mistresses.  Maybe Stuart Smalley was right, and we should all have a daily affirmation.  I always thought that was goofy, and i suppose it was meant to be, but if we’re all self-programmable machines, shouldn’t we, like, do that? With intention?  More cycles. More learning. More change.  More work.

Two hours into a five hour flight. I’m getting used to the constant heat and moisture of the mask. At least it’s keeping me from drying out too much and needing to drink.  I did accept a zip lock bag with a water, a snack and a napkin in it.  I dumped that out in my little sil-nylon backpack, stuffed the zip lock in the back of the seat and sanitized my hands.  Prepared for future thirst, and trying some seemingly sensible risk reduction.  In the end we all die, but I’d like to avoid that for as long as possible.  Especially from suffocation.  RIP George, and the hundreds that will die today, alone.  All of this sucks.

It’s going to be 109 degrees-American in Vegas this week.  I hadn’t intended to be in the south in this weather. If i spontaneously burst into flames you’ll know why.  I’m not stamped from the early molds; my skin is light and it’s very hard for me to stay cool.  I’m a later model, with fewer natural survival mechanisms.  I’m probably better at something as a result, but I don’t know what it is yet.  Documentaries about African persistence hunting assure me I’m a mutant.  

Evolution is frequently represented as a straight line or a tree, seen through the modern lenses of limited information, hubris, and white supremacy.  Really though all of life was formed with a single tool: the mistake. The error in transcription that inserts and removes features each model year.  My 89 accord had the ability to blow cool vent air on my face while defrosting the windshield.  You can imagine how much i enjoyed that, suffering as i do from the transcription error accounting for my discomfort with heat.  I’ve never seen this feature on another car, and it makes me sad every time i sweat in the winter trying to de-ice my windshield.  Each of us has a unique set of features, but no manual.  We stumble around blind, never knowing we’d be a great boomeranger or pig caller, or probably some other more useful things, for people who don’t hunt wild pigs with boomerangs.  (I don’t.)

Self-knowledge then. Know thyself, said backwardsly, but famously.  Those tools are some of the hardest to master.  It’s hard to fix the machine with the machine, especially when it’s unique and broken in unknown ways.   There are so many broken machines wandering around bumping into things.  Mistakes making mistakes, and somehow surviving because sex is fun and we like to kill things and eat them and make tools to do that more efficiently.  That which makes us human makes us terrible, and that which makes us terrible makes us persist.  We’ll make great pets when the aliens come.  

The big wheel of time spins slowly and sometimes imperceptibly, feeling like it gets stuck and then suddenly clunking into place over an unseen notch.  I remember a few such times in my life, the first being the explosion of the space shuttle Challenger.  Older Americans had witnessed the loss of astronauts, but with the presence of the expected first teacher in space extra eyes were watching.  In my fifth grade class we weren’t, probably because the big AV cart was being used elsewhere.  Our teacher left us to go watch, and we anticipated lessons from space later.  She came back in tears and said simply “the space shuttle exploded” and we spent the rest of the day processing it together.  Clunk.

The next was September 11th, and i was out of work living with my in-laws, and my ex told me a plane crashed into the WTC. I’d been there a couple of years before and I assumed it was no big deal given the size of the building and my assumption that it was probably a small plane.  I was watching when the second plane hit and the world changed.  And when the tower fell and the world changed again. And when i hoped the second would at least remain as a weird post apocalyptic monument, and was wrong.  Clunk.

And now a literal apocalypse is going on and I’m in an airplane wearing a mask.  Really-slow-clunk-in-progress.  

Fuck.

After 9-11 the country really came together for a while. People were nicer to each other and we felt united as Americans. The world was with us.  And we, being Americans, wanted revenge. Past-me included.  I wanted the people who did it and everyone they knew to know they fucked with the wrong country. And i was wrong, and we were wrong, and all we did was exactly what Bin Laden wanted us to do, despite him SAYING it was what he wanted us to do.  So today i enjoyed the “privilege” of carrying an extra quantity of liquid on the plane, which i should note, is HIGHLY FLAMMABLE, because we’ve all decided to stop fighting an imaginary war from 2001 for a few months to fight a new imaginary war on an unkillable adversary.  More cycles, more mistakes, more clunk.

Meanwhile ignorance and hatred for each other are our only communal enemies.  We could have space colonies and a post-scarcity society if we could all stop being dicks to each other for like five minutes.  But that won’t happen because we’re broken and our molds are broken, and our putty will only change so much.  And then only if we try, and many of us are actively fighting that.  

We are, fortunately, a communal organism, since the advent of language.  We share a head space that transcends and shrinks meat space more even than this airplane does.  We have built in redundancy, to tolerate the broken pieces and stumble along despite them.  But as broken machines, stamped from similar molds, we are prone to similar errors.  One is that we’re bad at estimating the speed of large objects; it’s why people get hit by trains.  Fallacies wouldn’t need to be discussed if we weren’t so prone to them.  Conspiracy theories are attractive because people want simple answers to difficult problems they don’t understand. They want to believe they have control.  This is the same reason religion is attractive, because it’s easier to believe a simple story about a benevolent invisible sky wizard than it is to accept that we’re a pile of broken machines bumping into things, and that we’re separated from the other animals by nothing but transcription mistakes and hubris.  

Tribalism, too, feeds all of the above. Our molds evolved in small groups whose survival depended on defense of the tribe against the “others” whether man or beast.  Families who didn’t have these traits tended to perish, and that evolutionary pressure means we constantly seek groups, and form identities strongly around them.  And without the razor dividing the tribe from the other there can be no tribe, so we cut.  Even if we’re limning on stupid lines, like the idea that the earth is flat or that donald trump isn’t a dangerous narcissistic idiot.  

By the way, if you’ve gotten to mid 2020 and disagree with the last sentence, please don’t ever speak to me again.  I don’t have time for machines as broken as you are, there are plenty of much more interesting models to play with.

Three hours down, two to go. This is a long post.  You probably noticed that by now, and verily i say to thee “you brought this on yourself.”  But also, thanks for reading, it’s good to know that when i piss into the wind I’m not the only one who gets wet.

I reread the above and touched up a few typos, and realized I’ve reached peak hubris.  I cannot possibly say hubris again. I have plenty of hubrisses already and can fit no more hubris in my hubris quota. My hubris buckets are overfull and hubris is spilling out, getting hubris all over the ground. Hubris.

I should probably mention that you’re free to stop reading any time.  I apologise for not having one of those length estimators that Medium has, so you’ll have to judge for yourself by what fractional function a five hour and nine minute flight worth of writing translates to your own reading investment.  If it helps, I’ve just been informed by a very reliable source that there is one hour and thirty five minutes left in this flight to Furnace, i mean Vegas.

I’ve managed to only remove the mask to show my face to the TSA agent and probably the camera system doing the real work.  I’m wearing safety glasses to protect my eyes, though so far that’s been overkill since everyone has masks.  I also put a honking big Nexcare bandage on my hand to cover my pasta injury.  Right, you heard me.  See, I have a technique for snapping a whole handful of linguini (or similar-ini) in half before cooking so i don’t have to eat a baby’s head sized ball of pasta with each bite.  This technique works flawlessly, except when it doesn’t, which is twice.  The first being close to twenty years ago, and the second being Thursday, so I’m still planning to stick with it. Meanwhile though the jagged ends of said sticks scratched the back of my hand, so I’ve stuck a sterile sticker on it, because when it comes to viruses I’m ok with othering by bandage.  

We’re over eastern Colorado, which is flat, like the earth, and apparently is where food comes from, judging by the food shaped fields, or food-field shaped fields anyway.  Either that or Coloradans are really dedicated to large scale rectangular art.  I can see the mountains far ahead and am looking forward to driving back across them.  They’re covered in snow, which reminds me how tenuous our climate is, and how glad I am that i packed a jacket which I will absolutely not be wearing in Furnace, Nevada.

Someone sneezed, and i managed not to open the emergency exit door.  I like mountains but I will wait to visit them until there isn’t a 30,000 foot drop to get to them. Virus be damned.  Also i really hope that guy is covering his virus hole.
You wouldn’t think you could get from Colorado to Vegas in an hour, but then again you’re not an airplane.   And i mean the proverbial “you” and my sincere apologies to all the airplanes that read my blog.  

I might be dehydrated.

I’m looking forward to being de-high-drated, and by that i mean landed, on the ground, at the airport, on earth, the flat paved part.  

From there I’ll take a Lyft or Uber to my RV, hope it starts and get it out of storage.  I bought tires yesterday from across the country and will put them in their proper place by means of a form of sorcery which turns green paper into rubber and labor.  By that i mean actual sorcery; I’m a sorcerer.  

After that I will stock up on food and figure out where to go.   I’ve allocated two weeks to get back home, so i don’t actually have to hurry too much.  I hope to visit some more national parks and stuff, but won’t get to see the grand canyon because it’s apparently on fire.  I just checked the map and I’m on the wrong side of the plane to see that from here. I wonder if I will be able to see any buttes from up here. I do like big buttes.

One hour to go, still, because last time i rounded.  Or maybe I time traveled.  You’ll never know the truth.

Past-me left notes in the RV, but current-me doesn’t remember what they said, so I’m not actually sure if the water tank is full or not. Also i don’t know if I put sanitizer in it or if maybe it will have gone bad.  So that’ll be another task, because desert.  One s in desert, because one is enough, as opposed to dessssssssserts, because snakes like dessert and they make lots of S sounds when they talk in cartoons. 

One hour left now, because, dammit, i checked a more accurate clock.  I may snack after all, because i started thinking about desserts.  

I didn’t think there was this much Colorado west of the mountains.  

Maybe they were right about my multiple subject posts. Someone could read this and think “wow he was making some good points before he got all loony” and to that person i say, thanks for the first part of the imaginary sentence i constructed and attributed to you.

Man this is a long flight, but I’ll be glad when it’s done and I’m not on a layover in Orlando or something being coughed on by a giant mouse.

Passing by Grand Staircase Escalante National Monument, otherwise known as “one of the parts of our shared national heritage that trump sold to his billionaire-villain friends.”  I say that word, friends, loosely since it’s pretty clear people only hang around him when they’re duping him.  They probably got the land in exchange for pandering to his fragile ego at one of his tacky properties. Our country’s biggest enemies have him figured out and I’m sure they love how stupid and gullible he is.  Just like his followers. Which again, if that’s you, fuck you, and go away.

Anyway it looks nice from the air, i should visit. The park, not the tacky golf course.

Looks like the next one is Bryce Canyon, which is redder and also looks neat.  I’ll be flying right over Kanab, which is where I stayed in 2012, the last and only time i was in this region.  I won’t be able to see it because this isn’t one of those glass bottomed planes, and I’m not the pilot.

Oh i can see Zion now, the park, not the mythical place, though it’s hard to argue with that Mormon dude once you see the place.  Really stunning, but it may be hard for me to visit this time around.   Access is very limited due to its narrow configuration at the bottom of the canyon.  I’m actually recognizing features, i think. I have a pretty good memory for place.  This area was the first time I spotted a peak in the distance and was surprised when i finally got there that it was 33 miles away.  I’ve driven a lot more in the desert since then, i expect I’m better at guessing long distances now.  

26 minutes now. I know you’re really interested in the countdown and are loving how much my writing has degenerated as exhaustion and dehydration have set in.  Just wait till they open the doors and we add heat stroke to that!  Really though i expect to post this right away, since it’s plenty long enough and i will be busy for a while.  

I don’t understand people who don’t look out the window in planes.  If it’s cloudy or dark, sure, but we are FLYING IN THE AIR LIKE A GIANT METAL BIRD, how is this not amazing to you?  How is seeing the world from this angle not enthralling?  Especially with terrain like this.  What sad transcription error broke you?

Landed!  Posting this before i forget.

H