Fast "Food"

 I had a McCrispy Spicy Deluxe and a medium order of fries from McDonalds tonight. Before picking it up, I was actually looking forward to it. About a week or two ago, there had been a chat with the kids about fast food that stirred up fond memories of Happy Meals and birthday parties. I go years between orders of fast food these days. But as I started into my cold, limp fries (it wasn’t even a long drive home!), those fond memories started to feel far away. Maybe the fries were the last dregs of a batch that had sat too long under the heat lamp? The kids seemed to be enjoying their first Happy Meals, even if the toys had fallen far short of their pent-up anticipation, so I was disappointed, but not really put out.

 I picked up the McCrispy, and immediately my fingers could tell that the object they were cradling was something… other. It was awfully light for a piece of chicken. But I persisted, took a bite. My mind recoiled gently, as if puzzled. The substance I was chewing tasted vaguely of chicken, but it reminded me of astronaut ice cream, as if the meat had been dehydrated partially. It was like eating a piece of spongy, faux-meat cardboard, something not quite bereft of flavor, but lacking in the essential substance of what I would call food. As I continued to eat the dissociative chicken sandwich, I encountered the “spicy” sauce that, like the tomatoes, was more of a texture than a flavor.

 A little while after I finished, while I was still disoriented, I felt an uncomfortable fullness settle into my belly. It’s surreal. I ate a soulless husk of chicken that had been sucked dry of the essence of what food should be. I’m sure it is technically sustenance inasmuch as it is calories my body will process, but what I am left with is regret. I could have eaten leftover smoked salmon salad (I thought I didn’t really care for it last night, but what did I know of desire?), but I chose to eat blandness incarnate. And it was $9.18 for the sandwich and fries! I could have gotten something real for that, somewhere – anywhere – else.

Rest in Peace

 Life is so, so hard. Tragic. Beautiful, horrific, oppressive, overwhelming. Intrinsically unfair. Infuriating.

 It doesn’t fit neatly into boxes with labels. A good man with a family is ravaged by cancer and ultimately loses the battle, aged 44. Still others are seemingly immortal, 99, still going, until just recently fighting for folks who have nothing – that impossible battle – now in hospice with his wife of 77 years. There is no rhythm to it. Certainly no karmic justice coming to even things up.

 And none of that even touches the grand scale suffering that is a given every day somewhere in the world.

 I can hear a little voice petulantly resisting bedtime, so intent is its owner on squeezing every second out of the day. How does this sweet vignette exist among the atrocities of today?

AI Singularity

 Just a quick note about some wild dreams I had last night. It had something to do with the AI singularity. The dreams were a technicolor wilderness of blues and whites. I don’t remember a lot about the actual AI stuff other than that it was ubiquitous and had a dampening effect on our humanity as we were collectively enmeshed in the broader intelligence. I ended up waking up at about 3:30 with my brain stuck on thoughts of resistance that weren’t about resistance so much as a pattern of thinking that was resistance. I had to fight with myself to recognize that I could relax, it was just a dream, and my brain strain slowly eased enough for me to fall back to sleep, after which there were no more dreams.

 Here's something I painted recently.

Smooth Fingers

 My fingers are smooth with Gorilla Glue, the result of terrain building. They are nice set pieces, those ruins of Gondor, one of the trophies of my recent re-read of The Lord of the Rings. I haven’t yet figured out what comes next, though hopefully it doesn’t take me too long.

 My reading pipeline is narrow with harsh joints. It didn’t used to be, though I don’t recall how I kept things flowing. It probably helped that I worked in libraries and saw books come and go on a daily basis. You start to intuit which ones are good to read and scoop them up. Now I resort to “editor’s picks” or best-seller lists, the top recommendations of the New York Times, Amazon, random Google searches. My recent selections have left me wanting something more. Tolkien’s story excluded, of course.

 I’ll figure something out. Until I do, there’s always my stack of Games Workshop rulebooks to peruse.

Not a Year

 Hello. It hasn't quite been a year since my last post. A lot of nothing has come between, I think. Plenty of time to ... what?

 That's not to say I haven't been busy. I keep busy the way many Good Americans keep busy: working, doing family stuff, working some more. I'm no workaholic, mind you -- I believe firmly in maintaining a balance with life. It's just that life is a somewhat nebulous word for me.

 Life slips away a bit at a time, with every breath, every drink from the glass, every creaking step through this old house. As a pulsing organic unit with limited interactions with other pulsing organic units, it's perhaps easy to see the slip happen in the negative spaces I occupy. Another day like a drop of water into the ocean, and already I'm feeling the tiredness creeping on the edge of my eyes, soon to start beading another drop on the rim of my cup.

 It's not as meditative as it might sound. The bustle of children laughing, screaming, bickering keeps my nerve up even when I'm in a state of otherwise thoughtless existence. There are days here and there where I am alone in the house, and the quiet is almost eerie. On those days I might sit on the couch, trying to think about anything at all but ultimately stuck thinking about thinking, as I am now, coming to no enlightenment. I ask myself what it is to be alive, or what should I be doing instead of nothing, or what do other people do with their time. Always the same absence of answers in silence.

 Maybe I'd be depressed if I were anything at all, but I'm not, really, I'm not.

Echo

 Today the family went to Kennywood. There’s a ride called the Old Mill that I have a bit of history with, and my four year old daughter was eager to give it a go because it had spooky skeletons and she likes spooky things like her daddy does. Except when I was roughly her age, I spent half the ride hiding in my mom’s lap, afraid of the cheesy animatronic vignettes of old times skeletons. Well today was an echo of that long ago ride; while my girl didn’t hide (she’s certainly bolder in some ways than I am/was), she was clearly spooked by the end, confessing she didn’t care for the ride. We’ll see if she wants to give it another go next time like her daddy always did. 

Locked Out

 Last night my elderly neighbor accidentally locked herself out of her house. It seemed the options were to call an emergency locksmith for $95 or to attempt to climb a ladder to the second story where an open window could be crawled through. My wife called me to ask for help brainstorming and I immediately thought of a lockpicking set I had bought years ago to ostensibly start a new hobby, but which never really amounted to anything. 

 I managed to find my picks quickly enough to give it a whirl and the locksmith was put on standby. In the end, it only took a minute or two to get the cylinder to turn, despite being completely out of practice, thus renewing my lack of faith in conventional locks. But it was a good feeling to help out, and I’m glad I was able to save her a hundred bucks.