Category: general

Flew today.

Short flight but early in the morning the fog sticks low in the hollows, looks like bowls of clouds from above.  It looked so amazing from above I wanted to turn on my phone and tag the location with my GPS so I could come back one day.  I imagine camping right in the dead middle of it.  Trekking across the furrowed earth until I hunker down right on those coordinates so I can wake up in the morning amidst the thick of it.

It really was in the middle of nowhere; I could see some meandering fire roads and foot trails but there was nothing else for miles.  I so wanted to be down inside those puddles of cloud, waking up dead-alone, all sound muffled and muted and the air thick with moisture.  I thought about cooking myself some breakfast while the sun tried to reach me, about maybe hiking to the rim of the surrounding hills before the fog lifted so I could look down and not see my own campsite.  Maybe eat lunch up there, look for planes flying over.

Then I got to work.  No clouds at work.  Just work at work.  Goodnight.

I guess things are OK down here.

I have food (these mushrooms are edible and I get a fish or two a week); I have water (I didn’t think freshwaters had tides but the stream in the crevasse comes and goes).  I’ve always fancied a firm place to sleep, and so far it’s stayed warm.  I wish I had a better solution for my waste, but I’m too scared to venture far from this spot so I keep all things close (I’m going to have to do something about it soon).  I pass the time singing old Dylan songs and reciting the snatches of Psalms I committed to memory and things really aren’t that bad at all.  You probably don’t envy me, in your LeBaron with your wingtips, but it’s not so bad a life to live.

Once, when I thought I knew the way out, I tried to leave.  It was a mistake, obviously; it’s not hard now to see that.  Maybe this is why I was digging the hole to begin with, some subconscious knowledge that I’d one day be sustained by this darkness.  The thing that worries me most is my sanity.  I fear losing it because of the isolation, CO2 saturation, and low-contrast environs.  I guess even if it was brighter it’d only be all grays and browns and maybe some stray flecking of white; stone is low-contrast by definition down here.  But it’s a worry, that’s for certain.  The fear is ever-present, but always around some corner so for the most part abstracted.

To keep sharp, I try and test myself often.  Challenge my own logic and mental faculties.  I prove I’m sane by acknowledging the manna I’m granted daily (you can hear it form!), by realizing that having extra fingers would actually be a curse, and in my confidence that there’s no way I’m really losing my bones.  I can hold to these things, like the rocks around me, to prove that I’m still here and I’m still me and no one is watching me or judging me or hearing me cry.  Without these anchors buoying (the phase works, despite it’s oxymoronic nature) my reality I’d be lost.  But I’m not lost, I’m right here in the cleft of this rock at the bottom of this hole I dug.

I think it’s time to sleep (hard to tell these days).  Goodnight.

Sometime last week our sole credit card was compromised, and was used to make illicit purchases via the internet.  Despite being what I’d call an extremely “heavy” credit card user, this is the first time this has happened to me.  Luckily the credit card companies seem to be super on top of this type of fraud these days, and they noticed the aberrant charges immediately and notified me.

I got the call, in fact, while my phone was rolling through the x-ray machine at PDX this past Monday.  Post-security, after donning my clothes and wiping away the excess petroleum jelly, I checked my voicemail and called the fraud detection department.  The nice woman who answered the phone noted that they had detected some recent charges on my account which they considered “suspicious,” and asked if she could review them with me to verify we’d made the charges.  Now, I can only assume that the credit card company uses some fancy statistic-crunching learning algorithm to analyze my purchases and come up with what is “normal” spending for us.  When any charges that appear as outliers to these patters appear, they must be flagged as “atypical” and alert the fraud crew.  I find this awesome.

In my case, the crooks had also fit a pattern on their own by first trying to “authorize” a small charge with some online retailer.  Not actually spend anything, but allocate dollars to check if the card was functional.  After they got the thumbs-up from the authorized pre-charge, they spent successively larger amounts at some online health food store – and when totaled had dumped near $1,000 at that same place before the fraud folks preemptively shut down the card and called me.  In fact, earlier that morning I’d tried to use the card to purchase our rail tickets to the airport and received an error message at the automated kiosk.  However, from experience I knew those kiosks are broken about 35% of the time and I’d just used a different card and chalked it up to the crappiness of the card reader or machine.  In reality, our card had already been disabled – and the charge really had been declined.

The agent walked me through the charges: A $12 authorization only from Online Florist X?  I wasn’t familiar with the charge, but Sharaun had left for the restroom and I supposed there was an outside chance she’d ordered flowers for someone.  I asked to take a “maybe” on that one and hear what was next.  $240 at healthfood.net?  Followed by another $475 and then an immediate $390, both also at healthfood.net?  Now, I know me, and I know I’m not going to ever spend close to a grand at healthfood.net.  Chilidogs.net, maybe; pizzarolls.com, perhaps; healthfood.net – that junk is clear fraud.  I told the fraud lady as much and she’d heard all she needed.  She then pleasantly surprised me by telling me they’d killed the cards and that we should have brand new ones overnighted to us that day.

In the end it was a really painless happening.  I know it’s nothing like the frustration one might experience with a true or more widespread identity theft, but considering how “violating” it could be it really was a non-event.  Good on the card companies for being on top of it, I suppose.  I wonder what their annualized fraud “expected losses” are?

Goodnight.

And this is just how the weeks go… one week I’ll go all five days and the next I’ll hit less than 50%.  It’s still a habit and I don’t think I could ever abandon it, but some days are more conducive than others.

This morning I was getting ready to go to work.  As I’ve been out of both my gym-going habit and my eating-better habit, I’ve put back on a shameful percentage of what I once lost and I was looking sadly at my overhanging gut in the after-pants-before-shirt phase of dressing.

I walked into the living room and gave my belly a halfhearted two-handed lift for emphasis as I said aloud to Sharaun, “Man, I’m fat.”  Keaton jumped on that, replying strongly, “Dad, you are definitely not fat.”  I loved the sincerity in her voice; such affirmation!  I told her, “Thanks babe, that’s a nice thing to say.”

“You just have a really mooshy belly,” she finished.

Good to know.  Not fat – check; really mooshy belly – check.

Time to get back to the gym.

Something’s happened to me lately. After spending all of my adult life as a person who never ate breakfast, I’m all the sudden hungry in the early morning.

This is new to me. Breakfast has never been part of my morning routine. At least, not in any substantial way. A few years ago, when the sawmill started giving away fruit, I began eating a banana or apple with my morning coffee. I did this more for fruit-intake reasons than any three-squares-a-day thing. Maybe this small expected intake worked to change my metabolism to some degree, training me, as it were, to desire food in the morning. I don’t know, but there’s no denying that I’m now looking for a (more substantial than fruit) meal to start my day.

So far, I’ve handled this poorly. I’ve been purchasing this meal at work and eating it at the desk as I read my morning news. That costs money and likely means I’m eating something in which tater tots have been integrated, not the healthiest options (Father in Heaven, please help me overcome this penchant for tots). To adapt, however, I need to change my whole morning.

In fact, I’ve always thought it might be nice to do the kind of 1950s sitcom breakfast table thing. You know, coffee and paper while I eat half a grapefruit and smoke my pipe or something. OK I hate grapefruit and even though I do enjoy smoking a pipe Sharaun surely won’t let me do so inside. I’d settle, however, for my laptop, coffee, and some toast and jam or an egg or two over easy. If the family is up during this time, which they most often are, it would even be some bonus time with them beyond the typical morning kiss goodbyes.

I have a friend who tells me he does this. Has a morning breakfast sit-down at the table with an old-fashioned analog newspaper and something his wife makes. I don’t expect whatever routine I land on to be quite that anachronistic, but whatever it ends up being it will feel old fashioned to me. I mean, who still takes the physical paper? Tree-haters, Amish, papier-mâcheurs, perhaps. Oh great now I’ve romanticized it, turned it into a mental “quaint” happening like the breakfasts Sharaun and I enjoyed outdoors on Martha’s Vineyard where we honeymooned. It won’t be like that, though. It’ll be a rushed bowl of Honey Nut Cheerios and a bagel with the Today Show on in the other room. It’s cool y’all… it’s still breakfast at home.

Now to set my alarm clock twenty minutes earlier than usual. Wonder if it’ll be worth it? Goodnight.

The other day Sharaun texted me at work to ask if I would stop by the grocery store on the way home and pick up a fresh loaf of bread for dinner.

I used to hate these sort of requests, and it was rather unfair of me (I never voiced my dislike, but instead just went about the task in a huff… I’m sure it was totally discrete).  It’s just that I’m very much a creature of expectations, and by that I mean that once I’ve set my mind on a series of events playing out in a certain way it frustrates me when something causes those plans to change.

There is no logic to this, for the things I have mapped-out in my brain are almost always of no importance at all, and executing them out of order or not according to some arbitrary plan almost always brings with it zero consequences.  Still, when I have to go get gas and stop at Home Depot before work, my OCD brain creates an instant order-of-operations “plan” to achieve these things.  No sooner than this plan is formed does my brain christen it gospel and accept it almost as fact; I now have an expected sequence of happenings and I react negatively to any deviation.

I’ve found this trait to be the genesis of much of my impatience, random frustration, and, oddly enough, the reason I so value spontaneity.  I’m always perceiving the little non-occurrences of life as somehow “getting in the way” of my “plan.”    So you can see then, that when I’ve been sitting at my desk at work all day thinking about how I’m going to leave and go directly home after 5pm, that I’ve built up about eight hours of ludicrous expectation things will actually happen in the way I’ve been planning they will.  The out-of-plan bread interrupt, then, throws a seemingly frustrating wrench in the works.  Silly, right?

Yeah, silly.  And some years ago when I realized I have this brain-curse I strove to overcome it.  I am constantly internally asking myself, “Does this matter?  How does this change anything?” and then reminding myself, “Why worry or bother over it then; just let it happen.”  I want my plans to be ultimately malleable, changeable, adaptable – I feel like if they aren’t I might miss out on something truly random and unintentional.  When we go on vacations, when we travel, when we’re at Disneyland… in all these places I have to take a breath before I let my brain react with, “No!  This isn’t how I envisioned this!”  People call it “going with the flow,” for me I just have to surrender to the flow.  I think I’m better at it for acknowledging it.

But this isn’t what I came here to write about.

The other day Sharaun texted me at work to ask if I would stop by the grocery store on the way home and pick up a fresh loaf of bread for dinner.

Since I’m a better man and this kind of tasking no longer irks me, I replied with a simple, “Sure.”  As luck would have it I was able to leave work about fifteen minutes early that day, and thus found myself alone at the grocery store with some perceived time to kill (a notion which also owes its existence to my forever mental scheduling).  In no particular hurry, I found myself ambling about the aisles a bit.  Suddenly, a thought came to me: “I’m here, alone.  In the grocery store alone.  With all the buying power my Capital One Venture card endows me.  I am the decision-maker!  I can buy anything I desire!”  For the non-husbands in my audience, this translates roughly into something like, “Sharaun cannot tell me that this is too expensive, or too bad for me, or that I’m the only one who likes it so why buy it?”  In other words, I was free to do my own shopping.

I relished the moment.  I strode the aisles with a sense of power and domination, evaluating everything I saw by my standards alone.  Some $9 Hoisin sauce?, might be interesting.  A jackfruit?, sure, why not?  Bread made from potatoes?, dear God yes someone finally invented it!!  Now where’s the pasta made from the potato bread?  It would be like the Godhead of a foodstuff!  In the end, I didn’t go quite as crazy as I thought I might have, but I did manage to score some very “me” purchases.  Here’s what I came home with:

• A hunk of exotic veined cheese & “water crackers” to eat it on (probably the most luxurious purchase, in terms of dollars)
• 90 pack of “combination” flavor Pizza Rolls
• One of each flavor Ramen, and three each of the super-spicy seafood ones that are all in Korean
• Grape Nuts (Sharaun refuses to get them for me)
• A bag of barbecue kettle chips, the ones that looked the hardest and crunchiest
• Butter & vegetable oil (what?, we needed them)

And yes when I got home Sharaun looked on my spoils with skepticism, tsking the chips and cheese.  Perhaps it was my subconscious playing passive-aggressive; we’ll see if I get asked to pick up bread again anytime soon.

Gotta run, the Pizza Rolls are ready.  Goodnight.