Thanks a lot, GMail. Are there really people out there who are worried that Facebook is closer to taking over the world than Google?

As Goo Goo Dolls would put it, “Scars are souvenirs you never lose. The past is never far.”

In other news, while it wasn’t the most impressive book overall, methinks it was particularly well-timed for me to read Siddhartha this week. There’s a lot of insight in there about the particular paths that might be tempting at this juncture of life and good reminders of what roads are full of folly. Especially interesting as I play some poker and wrestle with the material reminders of my past that I want to haul out to Jersey.

Been sleeping and dreaming too much lately. The hazards of being home. Have extended my home visit a little bit and then will probably be taking about a week to cross back over the country. Leaving Saturday maybe? Still a little bit in flux. Might hike in Rocky Mountain NP, but definitely skipping Grand Canyon and LA, as were possibilities even a couple days ago. Feeling daunted enough about driving another 3k-4k miles at this point.

Next immediate stop: The Frontier!

For those without Facebook, here’s the latest album of pics: Volume 3.

…is going to be a good day.

Basically, it seemed counterproductive to report something to the landlord that evidence suggested he’d both known about and attempted to cover up, or at the absolute least heavily neglected. There were also questions of tone-setting: did I really want to be the tenant who called up with a complaint on day three in a building? He’d have every reason to assume I’d be hauling various contractors and nitpickers through the place daily. Of course, it’s also possible that he didn’t know and he wouldn’t hold an early maintenance call against me, but the drip was manageable enough that I just didn’t much care either.

Thus days passed. And soon weeks. A couple visitors came after a couple months and were sequentially freaked out by their disastrous encounters with the cold tap, no less so because every faucet turn in this place is strangely reversed from the customary rotations found in American homes. I kept forgetting to warn people before their use of the bathroom, then kept hearing a vague scream and gush from said locale when people realized that merely tapping the cold knob brought an unstaunchable flow of frigid water. In I went, repeatedly, to rescue the startled guests.

Over time, the leak slowly worsened. My little tricks for twisting and pulling at the knob so it stayed just so and only let out drops instead of a trickle started to lose effectiveness. I even resigned myself to the idea of not using cold water in the bathroom sink at all, brushing my teeth in the kitchen, but I couldn’t even restore the shut water valve from my initial arrival in Highland Park. The trickle slowly became a small steady stream. I did my best cramming of it just before I left for a month in New Mexico and hoped that the water shutoff valve just took a few hours to take hold.

Upon return, the stream was even stronger. To the point that it has greatly interfered with my getting to sleep the past two nights in a way that even the steady rhythm of periodic dripping didn’t. After forty-eight hours of just trying to put up with it, I finally took a screwdriver, pliers, and hammer to the thing. At last! The knob of extreme brokenness had met its match:

Unsurprisingly, it was remarkably easy to twist the underlying mechanism that actually controls the water flow once the loose knob was unceremoniously removed. And now, as I type, I have a drip-free bathroom sink. And an errand to run at Home Depot at some point before vacating the apartment. And a fervent hope that my landlord doesn’t read this blog.

If you’re wondering, Ol’ Drippy is also a reference to an obscure Aqua Teen Hunger Force character who prompted Fish’s first introduction of the series to me. The other day, a propos of little, he mentioned to me “I miss Ol’ Drippy.” Sadly, the phrase worked on a number of levels, none of them particularly unsad.

It’s snowing now, the foretold precipitation swirling and flying across the lamppost out my window that usually annoys me but also serves as a spotlight for every snowstorm or rainfall. I’ve considered going out to construct a fort or a snowperson or even just to play, hoping the cover of late overnight might shield me from the askance looks I could expect to garner from this very serious community and its residents. I’m not on a campus anymore no matter how much time I spend on them, not twelve or sixteen no matter how much I feel it. I’m probably expected to react to snow with the tired frustration of those who believe it’s important to live, but have already forgotten how.

I didn’t even react to snow that seriously troubled me that way, though. Coming back from the debate trip to Dartmouth, the snow was piling high and ferociously throughout New Hampshire and well into Massachusetts. It was probably the least safe driving conditions I’ve faced since the drive a week earlier, but competing with Montreal before that or another drive back from Dartmouth or the hurricane upon return from a more recent PC. Yes, all my most dangerous moments behind the wheel have been in pursuit of (or retreat from) a debate tournament. Except perhaps the one time I fell asleep on the way to the Grand Canyon and woke up in the opposite fast-lane of a 70 mph highway.

I am far from all of this tonight as I wonder how late I can stay awake to watch the flakes fall, snow that’s supposed to be gone by morning as the southern storm drives warmer weather north to melt tonight’s joy. Somewhere in all this is a series of metaphors about the way I live, the way I should, the way I get myself into trouble. Or maybe it’s a story of patience and perseverance, that putting up with a drip is a branch of unconditionality and acceptance that has served me poorly but itself patiently persists within my character. In the modern world, we have only snow to remind us to be patient, piling itself in passive opposition to the daily chore and routine, insisting that an amalgam of the softest, gentlest entities create the greatest bulwark against hasty human pursuits.

I’m back in Highland Park, in Jersey for the foreseeable as I try to make my resolve to improve this year a reality, struggling against the siren call of visits to grocery stores and other overlit places I only ventured to in pairs, or not at all. Each week is to be punctuated with the refuge of a debate tournament, the travel and camaraderie and distraction found therein, the opportunity (as especially this last weekend at Dartmouth) for truly elevated discourse and exploration of ideas. The community of college debaters is such a distillation of intellectual vigor and passion that I am frankly surprised more people do not find themselves gravitationally tied to it as I do. No doubt its periodic overcompetitive acrimony is a deterrent, as might be the distractions of normal life and its beckoning stress and responsibility. But given its unmatched ability to perpetuate thought in an exciting way, there’s no place I’d rather spend time and energy, at least for now.

I’m at a crossroads these next few days, determining how to approach what are likely to be my last few months in New Jersey. There’s a need to reintegrate a three-month novel project into my daily routine without it swallowing everything else whole. There’s a need to determine exactly how much unpacking I want to do for a temporary stint in this apartment, what the ratio of energy is between making things more livable here and making the move unbearable at its conclusion. There’s a need to place other orbital parts of my life in their respective aspects, to figure out where things are going and what good uses of time really are. Priorities, trade-offs, balance, perspective. Really, life is never any different than this – these are always the things one must weigh when looking at existence. It’s merely that most people are too busy to look at existence too often, while I have nothing but time.

I guess I look forward to a time when I feel too constrained by other priorities to examine my own priorities. Although I can see the drawbacks of that too, and I must be careful what I hope to see.

In the spirit of trying to get my engines revved, of trying to buck up and plow through the life-maintenance shlock that must be cleared away to get to the good (creative) stuff, in the theme of embracing a life that is controlled almost entirely by other people but can still be viewed from my own perspective, I will close with a video. It’s one I was sent about a week ago by my friend Michael, one that he said reminded him of me and I say reminds me of who I used to be, long before I ever met him. Who I must be again, or could be, or could take a couple pointers from. While we collect more information about life as it progresses, if we’re paying attention, we don’t always improve. Sometimes we go backwards, we lose vision, we lose touch with what is essential. Here’s hoping this can help you restore, as it does me, at least on the margins:

A couple days ago, though, I joined my parents for a trip to Bandelier National Monument. I’d thought it was my first time ever there, but upon arriving I realized I’d been there briefly with my Dad once before, though not climbed up toward any of the cliff dwellings or anything terribly detailed. This time, I took lots of pictures so I wouldn’t forget:

The remains of the dwellings at the base of the cliff.

The holes in the cliff face are all either footholds or former dwellings.

The cliff face.

Looking up the cliff.

Cool formations, with a vista beyond.

The view from the cliff.

Dad with his camera.

Reminds me of Yosemite.

The old apartments.

Lookout.

The old community below the cliffs.

High rise.

Easy access.

Hole in the wall.

Majestic.

Dwellings more conveniently located.

Cactus!

The sign between my parents says “Do not handle the bats.” We saw no bats.

Winter scene.

The remaining snow.

Red wood.

At the base of an upcoming climb! (The camera case belonged to other photographic tourists.)

Going up…

A light in the distance.

High atop the cliff.

Streaked with airplanes.

Sunset in the distance.

The highest kiva.

Sun sets on the highest kiva.

Various distances.

From within the kiva.

Twilight.

The loneliest tree.

Going down, with people I don’t know.

I climbed down the ladders facing out from the wall, since they felt a little more like steps.

Looking back at where I stood, ensconced in the cliff wall high above.

My favorite tree in the park.

When I hit the parking lot, I thought the closest car was actually my car. From a distance, it even looked like it had yellow Jersey plates. Upon closer inspection, it was clear that they were Nuevo plates. Upon even closer inspection, it was revealed that the plates read “119 PFT”. As in 119, my current address in Jersey. As in pft, the dismissive onomatopoetic statement of derision. As in, maybe the idea of staying east is laughable. Yeah. This moved me pretty significantly, though it hasn’t managed to literally follow suit. Yet.

Nifty sign near the little village of shops and ranger housing near the visitor center.

On the drive home through the Jemez Mountains, we saw this gorgeous winter horizon.

Dad got out the binoculars to look at a distant herd of elk.

Aspens in snow.

Bonus shots from my parents’ camera: it’s me, looking strangely happy.

Bonus shot 2: me climbing.

Bonus shot 3: my mother and I on an untolled bridge.

Before the year ends, it’s supposed to snow again, my friend Brandzy is supposed to show up, and I may write in this space at least once more to sum up what has almost certainly amounted to the worst year of my life, despite the successes at Rutgers debate and the completion of my third novel. As I once told Mike Galya, there’s really only one portion of one’s life that really matters. 2011, you better be better.

This year, I folded every single bag. Except David Winks “Gris” Gray folded one bag, and Matthew Randolph “Fish” McFeeley folded two bags into paper airplanes that had to be unfolded and refolded properly. Other than that, I folded, sanded, candled, and laid out every single luminaria of a display of seven-hundred and seventy-two. My Mom was a tremendous help with lighting, and my Dad was also of assistance troubleshooting a disaster with propane canisters that were either too old or too finicky or both. In the end, after a couple hiccups, everything was lit by 6:00 or so.

And then the crowds came.

It’s hard to fully contextualize luminarias for those who have never seen them, which is almost certainly most of you. The traditional minimum is to do the sidewalks and pathways leading to one’s front door. If one has a wall, one adds that if one’s making an effort. And ringing trees is also fairly basic. But the complexity and intricacy of the yard and house that my father has rebuilt makes it particularly prone to diversification of lumis, especially with this year’s roof additions. And my tenacity and unending appetite for the little bagged candles.

This year, perhaps more than any prior, the efforts were vastly appreciated by the masses of New Mexicans and visitors who mob a few neighborhoods in Albuquerque each Christmas Eve. I watched enthralled from dark interior windows as group after group came, stopped, and stared, many if not most posing for pictures in front of the expansive display. Cars stopped dead, many parked, some even opened their doors. Flashbulbs popped throughout the night. Whenever I was out amongst the display to get some air or switch out a few prematurely burned-down candles, people called compliments and accolades, culminating in a late teen’s remark late in the night: “You guys win!”

It was unseasonably warm last night, a good fifteen to twenty degrees warmer than most Christmas Eves. Perhaps more importantly, it was windless, making it feel even warmer and failing to disturb the bags and their interior flames. More perfect weather for luminarias I’ve never felt, nor may it ever come again. For it to coincide with this amount of effort and to be met with this kind of appreciation is the only thing I could ask for on this loneliest of Christmases.

Pictures, you say? Oh, yes, there are pictures…

Nearly full view of the house from across the street.

Getting closer.

From inside the side gate.

From the left.

From the far left.

Little bit softer now.

From under the arbor, on the porch, centered on the pampas.

Many angles.

A three-layered wall.

Close up.

Far out.

The front porch and front roof.

Interior porch, including table, tree, and fountain.

Up on the roof!

Look right.

Back to center.

And down.

Zoom in on the pampas and the front tree.

Rooftop rows.

Side walk.

Pampas, one more time.

Levels galore.

Two in my room’s window.

The porch revisited.

Straight on till morning.

Elevation.

So many bags!

Obligatory internal shot.

It’s bad that all I can see in this one, as a perfectionist, is the one burnt-out one.

All is what it seams.

Under the eaves.

Garage-front row.

Magic.

Blurry wallside.

Internal.

Welcome.

View from the bottom.

Follow the path.

Many paths.

The curve of the earth.

Walking back in for the last time.

Facing the side gate.

The lone window bag.

Good night.

Merry Christmas to all so inclined. May these holidays give you peace, comfort, joy, and light.

Living room in blue.

Shed a little light on the subject.

Fire in an empty theater.

Dis mantle.

Nesbitt waits patiently…

…grabs for the burrito…

…and wonders why the burrito was taken away.

The first snow sticks!

It’s pretty flaky.

Quick accumulation.

Like a real lodge.

Our work here is done.

Five times larger than the leading brand of snow, and twice as reflective.

Makin’ tracks.

Haunted tree.

The back deck.

They were pining for snow.

Gateway to another world.

A rabbit, a chicken, and a bowl walk into a snowstorm…

The tips of winter.

Almost Dickensian.

Table for four.

Not only did we wind up with less snow than predicted (it stopped only an hour or so after I was out running around taking these pictures), but it mostly melted by midday today. Albuquerque rarely stays cold enough to keep snow around for days at a time, unless we get one of those stalled-out swirls of precipitating cold air. Like so much of life, it was fun while it lasted…

Anyway, here’s some things that are all-new and might not even be depressing. A couple shots from Albuquerque, but most of these are scenes from yesterday’s trip with the parents to the Salinas National Monument, home of several old missions on the east side of the Manzano Mountains south of ABQ. They’re pretty neat, even if they do represent Catholic co-option of native religion, culture, and people. So it goes.

Abandoned apartment building in downtown ABQ – they never finished building it when the boom went bust.

I could swear that part of the Senior Project film that Gris did with Bay & Toby was filmed in this back alley. Or that we were initially going to film some of my homeless-man scenes there but then shifted to another nearby locale. It’s funny what being back in one’s hometown can do to the memory.

The iconic towers of the ABQ skyline.

Nesbitt L’Orange, my parents’ relatively new cat.

Trains!

Abo, the first of the three missions.

Big sky.

Abo meets big sky.

Ruins.

Long wall.

They don’t make contrast like that everywhere.

A tree grows in the ruin.

Light and shadow.

The horse we rode in on.

The door is ajar.

Almost like Nebraska.

Mesa with tracks.

Best sign ever.

Cactus in bloom.

Arch with parents.

This is Gran Quivira, whose color is more traditional stone than the traditional mission color.

Room with a view.

A view of the room.

My father, gesticulating wildly.

View of many rooms.

View of the basement.

Quorai, the last of the three.

Church in state.

Slice of sky.

Sunset within.

Glorious ruin.

Ground level.

Contemporary interruption.

Almost Aztec.

A little bit of sol.

Runs down the hallway…

Silhouette.

My favorite window.

The moon, incoming.

The sun, outgoing.

Anyway, another installment of my recently increasing proclivity to turn this into a photolog:

Storey is obsessed with leaves, vol. 47.

I just liked that a big van with “Press” in the window was parked so close to a funeral parlor.

The inscrutable sign on the wallside is advertising cheap and safe parking, presumably on the shell of steel beams.

Avoid.

Crisp skyline.

The trash almost made it.

Ben always did like turkeys.

Storey is obsessed with leaves, vol. 49.

Tiers.

Industrial/Waste.

Fish!

Snow!

Heavier snow.

Ariel & Michael’s new fireplace.

Before…

…and after!

First Thanksgiving as a married couple.

Boggle!

Fish =! amused.

Food, glorious food.

Happy cooks.

Risk!

The game gets intense.

As a brief postscript, Fish wants to ask you all what the odds are of getting T-Pain to help out with a cleverly written and imagined spoof of the ever-fabled “I’m On a Boat” web video phenomenon. If you’re not pretty sure he’ll go along, you’re a pessimist in his book. Fish’s, not T-Pain’s.

Highland Park today is dressed up in its Thanksgiving finest: overcast and all the leaves have faded to that brown dead crinkle that rattles above or crunches below and makes everything look like red-brown Thanksgiving print napkins. People walk quickly and wear jackets universally and seem even more hurried and annoyed than usual. Maybe it’s from this observation that I acquire the hubris to say things like it’s been a rough couple days in this part of the world. Maybe it’s from spending the better part of a subway ride and an extended period in Penn Station crying without a soul bothering to so much as ask if I was okay.

Yesterday I got home and caught up with the things online I’d missed over the weekend. One of these, among my favorites, is checking out PostSecret, reading the scattered private thoughts of countless strangers as illustrated by their innermost ravings. It’s an idea we all wish we’d thought of and one very much in line with my ideals as a person writing this blog – the exposure of normally suppressed feelings so they might live, breathe, communicate, and ultimately hearten. And then my eyes were stabbed by the flash of a stark postcard:

And the hovering over the card on the page led to the flipping of the ‘card to the back:

Now, this one would’ve caught my eye anyway for a couple reasons. A, I read all the cards anyway and usually pause to contemplate all the implications. B, this is pretty much exactly what Emily would tell you about our situation, though I can’t necessarily speak to the relationship status of the other person involved, so who knows. But the most important issue is that the handwriting on this card is identical to that of said individual. Trust me, I had almost a decade to learn that handwriting, to watch it over her shoulder on debate flows or see it on hastily scrawled notes left behind or to read it on a notebook or textbook I was carefully lifting off her sleeping torso where it had fallen on her exhausted frame.

Now there’s some realistic counterpoints to consider. For one thing, the odds of Emily sending anything to a website like PostSecret are basically nill. The second thing, the most powerful, is that the postmark faintly visible on the back says SC 290, indicating pretty clearly that it was mailed from somewhere in South Carolina, where many zip codes start with those three digits. Is it possible she concocted some obscure way to send a card to Carolina for its submission to Germantown, MD? Sure, but any sense of feasibility or reality is pretty much knocking this down to zero. I often wonder about those postmarks and whether there’s some PostSecret sharing syndicate to make sure that especially high-voltage cards aren’t traceable even to a particular state, but I think this is considered an acceptable risk by most people.

No, the far more likely explanation is that someone else with Emily’s precise handwriting found herself in an almost identical situation to hers, or more appropriately one they would describe the same way. At which point, all kinds of larger cosmic questions arise. There have long been serious subscribers to the theory that handwriting is an indication of personality. In fact, many prison programs attempt to rehab criminals by changing their handwriting first under the theory that the link between letter shape and mental frame is so significant that it can be reverse-engineered. So what does this handwriting indicate about loyalty, faithfulness, approach to marriage? And out there, somewhere, someone who is not Emily or the author of this postcard is reading this and thinking that this handwriting looks an awful lot like theirs and wondering about the role of micro-destiny in their own path.

All this would seem to carry a little less weight had I not nearly bowled into Gwen on the street again the other day, in the midst of ill-informed debaters getting us lost on the streets of New York City on the way to Fordham. (Which, by the way, went pretty well.) She’ll forgive me for reprinting from her subsequent e-mail to me: “I’m starting to feel as though we’re being a bit cosmically messed with. Like we’re tinseled cut-outs in some toy theater production that just happens to be our lives.” And she, like most everyone, hasn’t even read The Best of All Possible Worlds yet. I’m starting to feel like that book is the cork in the center of the island on “Lost” – once I released it, deep important secrets were on the loose that wound up turning my whole life upside-down. This is a ridiculous thing to think, objectively, but most empirical studies would reaffirm it anyway, especially in light of how reality-bending the work itself is. All this would feel less significant had Russ not spent ten minutes trying to explain how LA feels small compared to NYC because you can always bump into people in the former and he never once bumps into someone he knows in NYC because it’s too vast, even though he knows tons of the City’s denizens. And then I told him my experience was a little different.

My experience is always a little different, it seems. Most people don’t have the capacity for such high volumes of things, be it crying or talking or writing or marveling at the construction of the world’s interactions. It’s not very realistic or practical to spend such time on such things. It’s better to do the dishes or laundry or buy furniture or hang pictures and somehow keep it all together. But it’s not all together and rote mundane tasks rarely help keep things that way. All I can do is contemplate, try to keep everything in perspective, throw up the poisons that seem to enter my system, and try to keep the phone charged for when I myself am running out of juice. It’s a good thing I have several scheduled days with other people coming up. Russ’ll be here in 90 minutes and all my dishes are in the sink.