Thursday, March 12, 2009

Sing God Damn!

Awrhhyahh! I've got to make some changes fast! Last night, bouncing back into old patterns for just a minute, I pulled from the freezer "what's for dinner", because it was fast. An entire day's worth of pounding heads along with colleagues and against them over frustratingly new technology, got me home late and exhausted. It's the head work wears me out, and battling cynicisms, second guessings, interference from the earnest clueless. It's almost shocking how tired it can make you.

Then home so late, and the entire bottle of wine makes it down along with the evil red meat steak. I don't know which will pop first, the literal or metaphorical heart, or if, like Bob, the floor will just drop out. I do know it's a race to some finish. And it snowed again this morning!

When I try to explain, as I did again over another two-faced lunch yesterday, what we do and why, we IT guys, people need to make fun about the terminology, whose negotiation consumes almost all of every conversation. Speaking the same language is so often the first barrier to communication, since these words can have so many connotations, from so many different contexts. 

What, after all, is a "token" or a domain or a telephony front, and what is coming down it? Is an electronic signature a picture you take of it? And why do people always laugh while trying to explain virtual to people who want to know what's coming next? (Because it's funny to think of one's work up in the clouds, and nothing actually, within ones grasp. In religulous contexts, the pranks on soul cast themselves. Out.)

I simply cannot do it any more, this two-faced, many tongued living. My impending departure remains unannounced. And so I must yet again promote the thing I want so desperately to leave behind. It would make so much more sense to folks if I were moving on to cash in these navigational skills for making my way along the treacherous and shallow chop of technology's waters. 

Though I only want to walk the earth, and learn to make more sense for and of myself, I guess. Hell, even among the technorati in our meetings, I find people shamelessly shifting terms to cloak political about face in pursuit of what they demand. (microcosmically, this feels so damned familiar) It's way more tiring even than to pound ones head against all the surprising interactions among things so virtually new under the sun. I'll trade you my standard scientific practices against your accommodation to the mistaken power of position over knowledge if you'll please just shut up. We can't even agree on the basics most of the time.

I do it myself, and forget which truth I'm pursuing. Drink up, please, it's time . . . (I learned that the old fashioned way, by actually tending bar in London, lest you think it's another literary allusion, which I think it actually is, like the title of this post certainly is, to some fascist or elitist or other. But I'm, honestly, not nearly literate enough to really know these things I accidentally remember, though I'm still bragging shamelessly, so there!)

I guess what makes it such a losing war is that I'm working in a structure which embodies this confusion of authority and expertise; the Church. Where regal authority still gets conferred and truth must be standardized before it's uttered. At least many priests are literate, but I'll still trade dyslexic bombast for patriarchal arbiters and call it even. Tear it down already, whether by priestly concupiscence or covetousness or flip the terms around and call it what you will. They dress all silly, and rehearse pageantry which belongs, if at all, in some other opera already.

We all belong in each other's jail, because we're all such sinners. But I don't wish to sell my soul to work, nor can I abide being someone other than me there. I surely don't want my friends confused with colleagues (though I sure may want my friends as colleagues), nor motives attributed to my likings. 

I cannot endure this prisonhouse for my being very much longer. I will not google my soul (which is a new verb, defined as reducing the value of any intellectual production to precisely what gets represented by the proprietary algorithm for determining the cost and share value for others promoting their intellectual property, via advertizing links, which get paid for, ultimately, by the selling of products, likely made in China, which have no intrinsic value, because they're now so fully abstracted as to represent only want and no need). You may just have to read the book (now that's a really funny line right there, but I'm still and always the only one laughing. A vaguely insane laughter, you no doubt already heard.).

Though of course I am precisely googling my soul. What a hoot! Here trying to find that sense to speak out in plain English which doesn't sound Chinese what's up. 

Can it or must it be that the only posts which get read in this overcrowded world of words now are those which pander wit, good career tips, or technical savvy? There is no Google private algorithm for true words to float up top. There is no true marketplace for ideas, but that they have their proper context, and actually do get read. There is no way, but that wise readers point it out, for one to find what one's looking for. And reading takes so very much time which is that very thing this piling on of words takes away.

I do know that I suffer the pressures of too much time in cars, and paying for them. So I will move to some city where it will make no sense to spend all that money to own one (you can even get around 365 days a year in Blizzard City by bicycle without that much suffering, though so many people haven't figured that out yet,  A friend of mine who learned the trick in China does it. Cars can be rented for a lot less than owned, for when you need them, and there's synergy for various hearts to be had as well!).

I suffer the two faced accomodations to making a living, but now the kids are grown, I think I can be myself and say out loud what I think in any context. So I do tell my friends that I was hospitalized for losing my mind. I'll tell the folks at work too, on my way out the door, since I don't want them to think they caused it. 

But these diagnoses themselves lack all context. I know I should take Lipitor to save my clogging heart. But wouldn't a bicycle work just as well? I know I could take Abilify, but writing seems to drain that manic pressure just as effectively, and it leaves me mind for reading. I can only mourn for those whose endocrinal pressures build and have only the clinical take of latinate pure taxonomies for relief. I just don't feel all that terribly embarrassed that I skate that boundary between sense and raving. It beats the dull alternative. And I do dread the dullness of learning to fit in.

I seek, in writing, that meridian of qi which would make as if fated those moves my keyboard makes. I listen to my words to know what I think. I lack all discipline to train those moves; it's way too late for that black belt. But there's nothing yet having taken full shape, idealized, as it were, in my brain. That nonsense of intention is what makes all words fall short of their mark. I have to write to know.

In the Beginning was NOT the WORD, nor was it ever made FLESH. I think it's a little more yin/yang than that. The path which can be followed is never the one which will outlast those masses who followed the charts. Names which can be pinned down in taxonomies will only last there, in those dusty catalogs. There is no poetry to them, while for those written in some earthbound first person, there may yet be eternity. A Name is just a Name, full stop, but that it was some Person.

But I paraphrase. These interpersonal translations wear me out. These groping negotiations past tech support which likely knows less than you do, but will be happy to tell you what you want to hear, so that you may depend upon it and go down another blind alley toward confusion. These doubting colleagues who must challenge your calls because they too need recognition for those victories achieved through accident as much as by design. Your own internal exhaustion letting go of what you know for sure because it is no mystery, so that the people who need your tech support can get just what they want.

I got a late start reading in life. There was way too much pressure in my family for doing well at school. And so, of course, I spent my time outdoors, tinkering with contraptions, bombs and rockets, and generally keeping hidden all the trouble I was getting into. Racing away on wooden go-carts from police called by jealous brats whose gifted brandname machines wouldn't go so fast. Or watching helpless as one I'd wanted to like me took mine off for a destructive joy ride. And some bombs went off way too loud and way too high for comfort. I didn't do those again.

So, my reading has been all haphazard. Utterly without design or program or any real degree of accomplishment. There has been no trueing against any standards, though apart from skimming over the math, I think I actually can and do read. In discussion, more than in memory, I can make the proper sense of what I've read. But it's all over the map for sure.

Still, just like that one fine student of mine who never could get on board with the Chinese language, but whose kung-fu (skills) with martial arts allowed him to demonstrate the very limits of what you'd ever imagined physically possible. I watched him run across the ceiling while waiting for the classroom door to get unlocked, so long as I promised never to say so (I deny it happened! He never was quite willing to expose himself that way, since it would break the ethic by which he'd learned actually to do it.).

These artists, I think, master letting go. Their moves as if fated, since there's way too much mystery to understand how they could ever align with something so unmeasured as qi. And yet that is what these repeated drills can do. Like walking the earth when your feet get moved by what's rotating underneath them. Like those treadmills we run at work which keep us panting standing still. Eventually, some body knowledge takes over and moves your mind away so that you don't really know what you're doing until you just did it because there are senses other than those your mind can control a reaction to. In time.

These meridians of qi got mapped well back before written words dulled these senses, and there will never be any time, I can assure you, when Western Science can master their meaning. Because by that time it will no longer be Western Science, silly! 

Even reading and writing, the mind is far too slow to react and to respond. It takes some kind of blow to the head before the adrenalin for survival really kicks in, and then the body knowledge is something you're really glad for. I pull myself back to sanity by reading well crafted books, dear soul, and so should you.

Sometimes it's best to retreat from the field, so as to live to fight another day. To practice more. To learn to be better in touch with those fine pathways linking mind with heart to make them one, the better to respond to life's ever catastrophic up-endings.

There have been many masters along the way for me. Most pointing to the library stacks to master some defined set of moves in some particular discipline, and I cannot tell you other than to delineate my deficiencies why I have, as if by instinct, kept my distance always. I'd like to say I can sense a trap when I feel it closing, but I've been caught so very many times. I guess that's how we learn. I guess I'll never learn.

Damn again, another work day commences! (f*ck this sh*t, George Carlin style)


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