Apologies, gentle Blogreader, for my lack of recent posts. I currently lack internet access at home, and the place I am working gets all frowny when we use the internet for non-work stuff. I expect to be back sometime this weekend.
Sometimes you get stuck on a bus for three months. Sometimes your blog just makes it seem like maybe that's what happened. It's a crazy world.
I feel like I'm back. From where I'm not sure.
Monday was Labor Day here in America. Congratulations to all the new mothers.
September is here, and I hunger for autumn. I miss orange, and wearing a jacket, and not sweating myself to sleep.
I feel like I'm back, so tag me with memes, leave comments. Help me find my footing again in the blogging world, if you're still there. Perhaps we can once again delight one another with tales of our exploits, strange encounters and worldly observations.
Staff Sgt. Andrew R. Pokorny was being called a hero in the press. His fellow soldiers were unstinting in their praise of him as a man and comrade-at-arms.
This was no surprise to me, but it did not make me feel better. I had already known he could be heroic.
I knew him as Andy, a friend of a friend whom I saw occasionally throughout high school until we finally cut out the middle man and became close during my junior year. He was one year ahead of me, and the more I got to know him the more I admired him. He stood out as a fully realized man in our squadron of boys: confident, thoughtful, athletic. He was both kind and funny, and seemed capable of finding things of value in almost everyone he met.
He was once a brazen non-conformist who had worn an American flag to school as a skirt, and a vegetarian to boot, so I was a little surprised when I learned he intended to enter the Army after completing high school. His family had many things mine did not, such as a nice house in the affluent suburb in which we both lived, but he saw this as his duty, and a way to pay for college. He'd be in for two years.
He sometimes spoke of it reluctantly.
I pried advice from him on how I might meet girls. He seemed to have a natural grace in this area that I lacked. Frankly, he had a natural grace in nearly all areas. He reminded me a little of the golden boy in A Separate Peace.
When school let out for the summer, we saw even more of each other. I spent many nights at his house: talking and laughing, running bizarre errands that we had decided were of crucial importance (discerning how many varieties of baby food were available at a local market, for one), tossing pebbles at the windows of friends and potential flames. Andy had a girlfriend, of course, but I think he liked the adventure of it all anyway. And I certainly didn't mind that the potential flames were mostly mine.
In the days before he shipped off, I was at his house nearly constantly. He gave me some of his t-shirts he would not be needing in the service. One I loved particularly read "Teach Peace."
We talked a lot about how hard it would be being Andy in the Army. Would he have access to vegetarian fare? Would his personality—large and easygoing—be an asset or would it cause him trouble? We spent his last night as a civilian making the rounds with our pebbles, visiting all the people he wanted to say goodbye to.
This was also a year of the cicada.
We made a tearful farewell, and I cried again when I got a letter from his some weeks later. He seemed to be miserable. All of the things he had feared seemed to be manifesting. They were striving to remove aspects of his character, or so it seemed. It is to my shame that I did not write him back. I was busy with other things, and am a terrible letter writer.
I saw him a few more times in the coming months. He checked in on my new life with what seemed like proud approval. I think I had begun to view him as an older brother. After some difficulty with boot camp, he had settled in and seemed to be enjoying himself more. My friend Nagesh joined him in service in the fall, about the time that we were suddenly hearing an awful lot about Iraq invading a smaller neighbor called Kuwait.
We were terrified for Andy and Nagy, stationed in Germany where so many of the troops being sent over were posted. Here we had been lulled into thinking the Army was a reasonably safe place for the most part—armed conflict obsolete—and now there was talk of war.
Neither of them were sent to Iraq.
When I saw Andy again the following summer, he struck me as someone I did not know. He had gotten married to a woman he met in Germany, adopted a child and was building a life. I grew uncomfortable after a few minutes and finally made my leave. I was angry with him for having changed so much.
I thought of him often through the years, how much I had learned from being his friend, wondering what his life was like. I knew he had stayed in the service, made it a career. Nagesh had done much the same, with some time off to go to college and eventually pass the bar.
The years slipped by and we were at war again, once more with Iraq. I was indignant but not as active as I had been the first time, when I had organized rallies and marches, spoken with the press. This time I simply watched it all on television and shook my head.
My friend Ian called me in June, 2003 and said the radio was listing Andy as a casualty. I hadn't even known he was there. I spent the next twelve hours in denial, scouring the internet for something that would comfirm or disprove this report. I could find nothing either way. I found another casualty with the same last name, and allowed myself to believe that it had merely been an error. People I knew couldn't possibly make the casualty list for the Iraq War. When the sun finally came up, I called Ian and told him it was a mistake.
But it wasn't.
Volunteering for a patrol on his day off, the M113 armored personnel carrier Andy was in had thrown a track and overturned. From the reports, Andy saw that another soldier was in harm's way and flung the man into his own seat, leaving himself in peril.
Illinois House Resolution HR0138 officially mourns his death, on behalf of his state and his family. The resolution mentions that he was outgoing and friendly.
It was essentially an automobile accident. It could have happened anywhere. And if Andy had not acted to save the life of the other soldier, it could have happened to someone else.
In my attempts to disprove the reports of his death, I learned that only a few months earlier he had been stationed in Colorado, about 50 miles from where I was living. I had not known this, and I had made no attempts to speak with him. I learned from the newspaper that he had three children now, and was still married to the woman I had met so briefly in 1991.
I loved Andy, that man among boys. I wish that when I saw him in 1991, I had been able to detect my friend in the man I saw. I wish I had been more curious about the new man who was there instead. I wish I had been more of a man in his presence, and a part of his life. I knew and remembered Andy, but probably never really knew Staff Sgt. Andrew R. Pokorny or his family. I wish I had. From the small quotes I read from his wife and the men with whom he served, it sounds as though Andy was still in there, too.
I miss him.
There is nothing in my head. I am workled. I think I just invented that word. Caveblogem would be so disappointed in me. I define it as "mentally numb or blank due to excessive concentration on small, repetitive tasks performed as part of workly duties."
Crap. Workly isn't a real word either.
There is a gap sometimes between the things we want and the things we need to do. I am currently occupying that gap.
I have less than three weeks left of Dayworking. I shall miss the people, but not the day or the working. I am eager to get back to writing. I have a handful of short stories and at least two novels to write. It will be nice to be able to focus on these projects. I shall use the uninterrupted time to make sure that I do not inadvertently fill my pages with words like "workled."
Turns out that I will not be coming to England in May. Finances do not allow for the trip. I may roam somewhere within my own country instead. Things are cheaper here. I could go somewhere in the U.S. for an entire month for what I was preparing to spend on a week in London.
On the plus side, not going to London means that the GBA(s)FC should return on May 1st, as I had originally intended. I hope you will consider entering, Blogreader, whether you entered last time or not. There will be a topic, oh yes, and a word count and everything.
I apologize for the lackluster post. I shall rise in the morning like the Phoenix, and perhaps then I will have joie de vivre. Perhaps, tomorrow, I shall feel buoyant and sprightly. I hope so.
Update: Wednesday morning, feeling better. Just couldn't find the decompression switch last night, I guess.
My name is maht. I am a "blogger" residing in the city of Chicago, which sits beside an enormous lake. It is a humble city, but I am permitted to tell you that it is perhaps the largest Chicago in the world. It is certainly the largest on the surface of the planet.
I am returning to "blogging" after an absence of nearly 40 years. I have been informed that I spent the first 20 years in a catatonic state, rising occasionally to dance when a good song played on the radio, but otherwise unengaged. They tell me that I then heaved (or possibly hove) a long, weighty sigh and fell asleep for another 20 years.
They tell me these things over and over again, at ear-splitting volume, because they seem to think—these doctors and nurses who come around every thirty minutes or so—that I am either deaf or stupid. I do my best to be both, as I hate to disappoint people.
When I get tetchy, I point out that although I have been living in seclusion within their walls for nearly 40 years, I am still only 33 years old. This makes one of the nurses cry. Every time. I don't want to have that kind of power over her.
In my day, I kept what would probably be called an "analog blog." Although this is already short for "analog weblog," it can be further reduced to "anablog." We kept these "anablogs" by moving an ink-filled tube across a pulverized mass of tree flesh known as paper. When we finished a thought or a page, we either ate the paper or burned it as fuel.
It was essential that no one ever know what we had written. Something about Communism, I think.
Before that, "blogs" were kept by carving symbols into clay tablets, which were then baked in a kiln for six hours, ground up, and used to make sidewalks. Some of these sidewalks still exist, and if you lower your head right down next to them you can almost feel the amateur poetry and the stories about children, pets, work, entertainment, and a host of other things from these long-gone days.
A nurse has just been in the room. She told me that it is not necessary to put quotation marks around all of the terms relating to blogs. In the stunned silence that followed (How did she know what I was writing? Do I write the same thing each day? Or are they merely watching me?), she stabbed me in the leg with a needle filled with a clear fluid. I do not mind being drowsy, even though it does not mean I will fall asleep.
I told her I am 33 years old, and she did not cry, because she is not the nurse who cries when I tell her this. Instead, she looked at me for a long moment and then spoke:
"At night, I hear two women fighting noisily in the street outside of my apartment," she said. "If I hear the sound of breaking glass, then I will also hear a police siren after an interval of seven to thirteen minutes. The darkened living room of my apartment will flash blue and red for a little while, and then it will be both quiet and dark again."
I remember a night, a summer night on a rooftop in one of the more upscale areas of the city. Summer 2001. We ended up on the rooftop.
We began in an apartment in the building. An apartment or a condo, hard to say. A very tall building with many floors of identical tiny apartments or condos. It felt like we were in a kennel.
Our hostess had mosquito netting over her bed. There on the seventeenth floor of an air conditioned high-rise: mosquito netting. I made fun of her a little for this and she did not seem to know I was making fun of her. She gazed blankly back at me as though I were speaking a language she could not understand. She blinked lanquidly as I spoke to her.
In addition to her decorating taste, our hostess had a desire that I desire her. I don't think it went any deeper than that. I think she just wanted me to burn with jealousy if she spoke to other men. I did not. It was easy for me to do, as I did not really find her appealing on any level.
It was a party of sorts, in the tiny apartment. The apartment and then the building's swimming pool. Some of the partygoers had brought swimsuits, and they cavorted in the warm air and the water until we were chased away by the building's security personnel. When they chased us from the pool was when we went to the roof.
I had brought a book with me to the party. I did not bring the book to be antisocial. I had brought the book along with me when I was under the impression that the party was merely a relaxed poolside gathering. Water holds no appeal for me. I thought I would read and sit in the sun and watch the women play in the water in their bikinis. This seemed an excellent way to pass the time.
The gathering became a party only through the virtue of people not leaving, and other people showing up. It was very organic.
I did not know most of the people at the party. I had been brought along by a former roommate. I knew her, and she knew all of the others. All of the others knew each other as well. My roommate did not stay by my side to ensure I was mingling. It would have made me feel terrible if she had.
There was a coat of coarse gravel all along the rooftop. A woman asked me why they put gravel on rooftops. People sometimes assume I will know things that are obscure. I guess I give off that vibe. I wear glasses, and I was carrying a book. Perhaps that's all it is.
I told her it was so that no one could sneak up on her, throw her off. I told her it was for her own safety, and that it gave her a fighting chance should an assassin appear here on the roof with a desire to do her in. She moved away.
I ended up on the periphery, perched on the concrete ledge of the building with my limbs wrapped around the guardrail. I was looking down at the other rooftops and the streets and the twinkly lights of the city. There were no twinkly lights above. There is far too much ambient light in Chicago for a body farther than the moon or the sun to have a hope of being visible. And yet we have a famous planetarium. Go figure.
I was looking down at the lights and thinking about a PJ Harvey song. I was thinking about the pretty woman I had failed to talk to that afternoon. I was thinking about a dream I had, and the book I was reading. I was thinking about the lights as I looked out upon them from my perch atop the city.
I could hear the laughter and muffled shouts from the others on the rooftop who seemed to me as though they might be on another rooftop entirely. It was very late at night, and each cry from a reveller brought a loud "shhh" from another.
If I leaned forward, I could easily visualize my own death. I could feel the wind of the fall.
I saw reports on overseas blogs of an eclipse which happened this evening, and was visible from Europe, Africa and parts of Australia.
I was burning with jealousy for no apparent reason. I'm sure these things happen from time to time, and yet the last time I can recall one specifically was when my class dutifully trooped outdoors with special viewing gear some time in elementary school. And that wasn't even the same sort of eclipse. The eclipse this evening was a lunar eclipse (in case the whole "evening" thing didn't give it away). You can look directly at a lunar eclipse.
It's a strange thing to witness: three celestial bodies going about their orbits and hurtling through space suddenly find themselves in a straight line. The shadow of us blocks the light of the sun from the moon, keeps it from bouncing back to us. It's a strange thing to witness, and our understanding of what takes place only helps to make it more strange and wondrous.
I wish I could have witnessed the eclipse, perhaps, because today I am feeling like I could use something poetic. I wish I could have captured images of this accident of geometry and saved them somewhere close by, for use as inspiration when I am feeling less inspired.
I could take out a picture and remember the beautiful thing that happened in space.
I think of Richard Feynman, the physicist and writer. He said:
"Poets say science takes away from the beauty of the stars — mere globs of gas atoms. Nothing is 'mere'. I too can see the stars on a desert night, and feel them. But do I see less or more? The vastness of the heavens stretches my imagination — stuck on this carousel my little eye can catch one-million-year-old light. A vast pattern — of which I am a part... What is the pattern or the meaning or the why? It does not do harm to the mystery to know a little more about it. For far more marvelous is the truth than any artists of the past imagined it. Why do the poets of the present not speak of it? What men are poets who can speak of Jupiter if he were a man, but if he is an immense spinning sphere of methane and ammonia must be silent?"
I am pleased to report that I accomplished exactly nothing today. I needed a break and I took one.
Aside from little spurts of wakefulness, I slept until I would have been leaving work. Guess I needed that.
This evening, I hauled out the new camera and played with it a little. It is astoundingly clear to me that I need to purchase a faster lens and a tripod. The sensitivity of the new camera is such that, standing on the porch to capture some similar shots to last night's, the shutter remained open sometimes for half a minute or more. There is no way for me to not shake the camera slightly and ruin the shot in that amount of time. I like nighttime and hate using a flash, so I'm gonna have to see what's out there that might help me.
I figured I might as well try to create some beautiful mistakes, and a couple samples are on my Flickr page. The two currently at the top (one of which heads this post) felt about right for me today. Dark and swirly, a little chaotic.
There are also some pictures of my cats, who had agreed to serve as models for portraits, but ultimately could not hold still long enough. They continue to disappoint me in many ways—they're incredibly lazy, for one thing—but I thought they could at least handle a simple photo session. Instead I had to follow them all over the place and make little clucking sounds to try to trick them into looking at the camera. The black and white double exposure (one-and-a-half exposure, really) to the left is kind of nice, though.
I'm feeling a bit better than I did last night, and I want to thank all those who left such friendly and supportive comments. Not feeling funny, but not feeling all that bad, either. Thanks again for your kind thoughts.
Incomparable artist, friend, and wanna-be work "supervisor" Micah (or Tiny Olive, as he is sometimes known) sent me a "maht-in-the-moon" drawing today, and I knew immediately that I would have to redesign the entire site to accommodate the wonderful work he had done. I liked it so much I actually agreed to let him be my "supervisor" for the rest of the day. Hope he didn't notice I was working from home.
Micah also did the original Moon Topples cartoon and logo.
I was thinking I was going to wait a week or so until my six month Bloggiversary to unveil the new look, but I just like it too much to wait. With any luck, it looks as good on Windows machines as it does on my Mac. The "Windows preview" in Photoshop had the blues going a little supernaturally bright, and the logo turning a sickly green.
I'm especially happy that the drawing bears more of a resemblance to me than to Fonzie from Happy Days. Since adding that caricature to the site, people were always asking me to strike jukeboxes in order to make it play "Blueberry Hill." And I suppose I'll stop having to use the Ladies' Room as my "office," which was getting on the nerves of some of the Workers anyway.
Micah was tired of all the Fonzie jokes and worked from a picture this time. I stood next to the globe on his desk to give him a "moon" to work with. I've advised him that he'll have to do a new drawing each time I get a haircut. He seems to think he won't really be doing this for me.
Let me know what you think in the comments. And don't forget to stop back to find out who won the GBA(s)FC.
