write away

jeez, feels like ages since i have visited the ol' blogosphere. Honestly, must be at least two weeks since i have put anything of any relative worth in here, but I would say it feels like it may as well have been at least 6 months (and that's feeling extremely generous). I have to mention it gets harder to write in this thing, knowing that people actually read it - and the whole reason I write anything in a public place is to prevent myself from sort of going off the deep end with a journal (by virtue of me having this thing, this long, it would only be a matter of time!) Anyway I have certainly felt the urge to put a lot of words down lately. but for numerous reasons I have kept mum. The troubling thing is, I feel like that's my overall problem about communicating in my life in general.

In spite of that tone, things in my life are generally okay. I am always going to be haunted by whatever the hell it is that's always around me, and anybody else could always say (or feel) the same, I am sure. We all have thos things in life, our crosses to bear, the consequences of our decisions, and we make do with what we've got. In the end it's all really our own machinations which have produced whatever is going on in one's adult life, and our regular rhythmic process is just how we deal with that, whatever it means to anyone (whether it's a happy thing, or not). I guess that's how it goes in life, sometimes when you are dealing with the things in your life it's a battle, sometimes it's a cakewalk, and for different people they could be the exact same things. I am starting to sound like one of those cheesy metal songs that prides itself on fulfilling lyrics about how everything is a paradox al the time, so i will just cool it now.

Work is alright, I can feel it wearing me down lately. So funny, when I don't have a job then the one thing I want more than ANYTHING ELSE just a freakin' job, I want it so bad i can taste it. Then when I have that one thing, I clutch onto it for all I am worth, I wrap my life/personality completely around it to the point that I don't quite know where I start or end, and then I just start getting contemptuous of the whole rotten thing. I am not totally sure how that happens, if it is a circumstantial thing or more like "just another facet of getting old." I have mentioned so many times how the older I get, the longer I work, the more it just gets really tired, but to be honest I talk to everyone else who does work like I do and I feel like nearly everybody is just so damned tired of it as well. The weird part is that all that said, I still find the weird OCD-specific part of my personality that loooOOoOOooves to get wrapped up in the particular supertechnical/abstract minutiae of what I do for a living, and rather than just putting down markers on a freeway I feel like some weird heavy frog frantically hopping onto increasingly more awkward lily pads that are so close to sinking (that one was for my own benefit, pardon the weird imagery).

So back to the paradox then...

Anyway, work has always been a battle, it will continue to be that way, and the way I look at my relative "elders" for this specific gig, it's always just coming and going that way pretty perpetually. It's funny. A bonafide blueprint for having a nervous breakdown? Would I ever be capable of doing anything else anyway? Aren't we all in some crazy big race? It could be worse, I could be working in the Japanese version of the industry.

Other than work, I feel like a lot of my life has kinda shriveled up lately. I live in this weird wonderful place, endlessly interesting and happily expressing all these opportunities for good times, to the point where even traveling anywhere else in the world almost seems (a bit) redundant.. almost.. but in spite of my being firmly planted smack- in the middle of it, I feel like i have tread such a well worn path of an incredibly defined space. I feel like i have memorized all the little nuts and bolts of every tiny little aspect of the area in which I traverse, to the point where I just wind myself up and go through all the motions as the time goes by. Fortunately, there's a failsafe in there somewhere that yanks me out and occasionally throws me into some weird madness here and there, just to keep it interesting, but it really feels like a decidedly double-sided coin now. To the point where even the aberrations feel almost as well planned and forethought.

All these things I go on about make me think about my (no-so-recent) flirting with picking it all up and starting over, and the over-under on that is that somehow that might not have been the great savior I was hoping it might be. Getting back to where (and when, and how) I live now, all the tools I need are pretty damned well spelled-out in front of me, and have been for awhile.

I think one of the reasons I am losing my mind is the fact that I sit in a desk making videogames all day long. Especially considering the nonsensical nature of that, compared to the "real" things that happen in the world (and are quite newsworthy) pretty regularly. The thing that makes me nuts is that so much of our society is steadily drowning in that very ridiculousness, just worshipping all this pointless bullshit that does not seem to matter. Attaching all this importance to things that are terribly irrelevant (I am staring straight at all the pop culture BS right now). And the great part of it all, is that by paying so much attention (and capital) to this unimportance, it actually DOES become important, it becomes the MOST important! That's one of the weird things which I am struggling to get my head around. Honestly, Care Bears and Thundercats are more important/influential than I will ever be! Well not just me, but actual smart-smart talented people. And this has been proven over so many times that it's not really leaving any room for argument.

I can't dwell on it too much, culture has it's place and it's really one of the most grandiose of contributions that we as a species can make back to the otherwise blank-slate nature that spawned us. Every weird little abstraction and market-researched bullshit idea (and all of their knockoffs) are all so deeply important and alive, at least conceptually, that we'll never really truly fathom any of what we have created, or it's implications (see: the Internet. Or, the Book). As I type that, a few hairs raise on the back of my neck thinking "ahhh, nature begets nature!" Yeah, nothing is more unsatisfying than an unintentional god, right?

These themes have certainly been explored several times before, in several forms.. and I am sure with much more clarity than I do them the disjustice of lacking (hell, it's pushing on 3am, give me a break!) As I ponder it, I realize people smarter than me have spent their lives pondering it before, and others before them, it's got it's own well-worn culture already as well (but such is the nature of human thought, to be curious, analytical). The stupifying part for me is the ultimate dead-end I always reach, and the fact that that is the only logical result anyway. "So what, who cares!"

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I have developed this strange new fascination with space stations lately. As usual I am too dumb to understand some of the deeper complexities of how such things work (and have happened), but I can at least sensibly work out why they happened and what led us to where we are today. Remarkable to me how no one else seems to even give a thought to such things, the notion of existing in a tiny wiry tube over the planet we were born for months at a time is one of the absolute nightmare craziest things I believe I have ever heard (another one being that "anyone with money can own and drive a car!") I guess it's just my inner caveman freakin' out again, but not for nothing, come on! It's late and my eyes are already bleary with sleep as I type this, but there's so much I would love to get into about the strangeness of how the space program (space race) developed, how it wasn't so long ago that it's primary purpose was honestly so that people could be able to kill each other, in all that's happened in technical marvels over the past century we've got nothing more impressive to show from it than how completely superior we are over any other organism bred of this Earth as far as being able to kill them all, and ourselves, nearly effortlessly and easily. Will we be able to beat out program in time? Will we kill ourselves with junk food and junk thought and junk love more meaningfully than we could only physically, with just mere stockpiles of nuclear weapons?

When I was young, I grew up in a time where I sensed that - even at a young age - a lot had happened in society at large, very recently, and it had spun the world up pretty good, but now it was "over" and things were settled and business, as usual, was transpiring from that point on. Everything was under control, by virtue of an establishment having occurred and enough systems already were in place (in society) to sort of follow through in expected fashion. Hey, the United States were already pretty well-figured out for like a couple hundred years already, right? Languages were all good to go, we had people to translate between enough of them.. anybody could get anywhere by car, plane, or if necessary, boat (and hey, can still walk to, for the short distances). TV in every home, computers were boxy and nerdy and mysterious but everything of a higher need utilized them all quite well for some time now and there didn't seem to be any need to worry about a deviation from the path. yeah, there were 3rd world countries, and yeah there was a cold war, and people on the other size of the world still seemed kind of poor and barbaric, but they were coming along and it was only a matter of time until everyone caught up and we'd all be on the same page and "it would just all be done, " all that building, renovating, adjusting.

Well, now I am like 15 years wiser since thinking such things, I have had enough time to go over it in my head after sort of subliminally hearing that all preached into my deeper consciousness for so long. I have seen thins with my own eyes, of course (always comes back to this) I live in a weirder cutting-edgier place where some of the raw stuff hasn't quite got filtered out and disseminated yet. College did a number on me as it opened me up to the world but also let me see how the world was opening up - MORE - to itself, in spite of it thinking (as noted above) that everything was just "all freakin' set."

As usual, it's hard for me to build up to a real point with these rants, it's sort of just a cross-section of the slutty sloppiness that sails through my thoughts as I commute back and forth to and from the office everyday, and it's not really mean to pique, so much as it is to express. In the end, I am just a simple animal like everyone else, and I want litlle else than they do.. maybe less (maybe more!)