As we used to say in Risk, the attack continues!

Spam, glorious spam.

This picture actually does no real justice to the sheer volume of spam comments that have been incoming. Assuming this started at midnight (pretty sure it was later), the rate is about a spam comment a minute. After receiving maybe 300-500 spam comments in the six months of this blog prior, that’s slightly unnerving.

In other news, the APDA Forum was restored to full glory exactly 24 hours after crashing. Bandwidth can be bought, and fortunately this seemed like a priority to people. So if you have an APDAweb login and want to follow along at home, the action is here.

If you don’t have an APDAweb login, you should know that the future leaders of America have become suddenly very secretive about their summer activities, especially when they make reference to some of them being insurgents in Iraq. Suffice it to say that many of them hope to have political careers and that really might not be in their precise best interest.

At the rate things are going, though, you never know.

May Day?

This blog is under attack!

As I speak (write), a few different URL’s have joined together to launch a coordinated effort to overwhelm this blog with spam comments. The comments function is disabled, so these comments are automatically coded to hit the moderation queue. While they’ll never hit the mean streets of the mainline Internet, they have flooded my Inbox with notifications and the queue is seeming pretty taxed. There were 334 this morning, then I cleared another 25 that I watched pile up in the following 15 minutes. 50 more have come in since.

Good thing my bandwidth limit for the BP is almost incalculably high. Thank you HostMonster!

Not so much luck for the APDA Forum. As discussed yesterday, it was taken down by another of my efforts, my now becoming annual summer game of Werewolf/Mafia, this time with 45 APDAites. The theme is the Iraq War. This is roughly the last thing I’ve had time for with the rest of my schedule, yet I’ve somehow managed to clear the decks for this and be very attentive. This is sort of how I operate. Flashes of manic motivation that push everything else to the side. Projects are best when they come like a tidal wave, leaving behind an equal portion of devastation and creative water. Of course, I’m still feeling the effects of tens of tidal waves before, many of which never saw FEMA come in and condemn the awkward structures left behind. Nothing ever gets condemned in my little world, except for in brief moments of wise severance that seem too far, too few, and too late.

Humans are so adaptable and I’m really self-aware. This combination has made me positively stellar at doing just exactly what is necessary to keep me afloat with the status quo. I don’t think I’m unique in this - most of us are breaking our necks to do everything we can to stay exactly in place. The world’s nature is to spin and change and twirl and tumble and the way most of us adjust to this is by getting whiplash by planting ourselves and hanging on for the ensuing torque of the changes around us. It’s devastatingly sad to watch so many people get so rigid and not just give in to the winds. We build our institutions as a society around resistance to the wind - we label things as passive or flaky or impractical. But I have my inspirations and my confirmations. There are people even braver than I, and I salute them for being windier than I.

Today I’m giving a culminative and momentous presentation on what I’ve been working on for the past month. I’ve been working with a consultant who is returning to Germany, carrying knowledge of America and a firm understanding that it’s not the best place (my interpretation of her perspective). We both deal in metaphor and illustration, getting along quite well to craft a story of what the last 40 years have brought to today. Our final analogy is a collective group of over a hundred people all frozen on thin ice, not daring to breathe (let alone move), hoping that not everything cracks through. Of course the only way to survive is to run across the ice as fast as possible before it breaks. The ice can’t handle the weight of the pressures already there - it is destined to fall through. There’s nothing anyone can do to prop up that ice. The only chance, the only solution is to run, to outrun the collapse, to forge a better solution on the other side after changing far, hard, fast.

But it’s scary. And people wonder if they have the capacity to do it. The “bandwidth,” as he who shall not be named might say. It’s his second-favorite phrase, right behind “proceed until apprehended.” That’s a fine philosophy for those who believe fundamentally that accountability will never come. That no one will ever have to take ownership of the decisions that they made. That no one is watching. But another person, one worthy of respect, said “I’m old fashioned - I believe in God’s judgment. And not in the next life, but right here on Earth. Right now.”

Today, I’m inclined to agree. People are throwing stuff at the wall and seeing what sticks. The capacity is taxed, the tubes are being jammed to a shut. Everyone’s scrambling, but when the lanes are full, everyone’s stuck. Everyone feels an undercurrent of the need to move, but it’s too scary and there’s nowhere to go.

We need to unplug, to free up the bandwidth, to clear the decks. More tidal waves. More Drain-o. More flushing of the whole system.

Night before last, the cable went down without explanation. Every time a button was pressed on any of the remotes, the cable would go up or down by one channel at a time, stopping on channel 96 if up or 963 if down. It was like a bad horror movie. It still hasn’t come back and I haven’t had the time or energy to call. Am I being passive by letting it go? Or am I listening?

I wanted to close this post with this quote from Jackie Greene, who Fish finally hooked me on in Chicago:

And I see through the windows like I see through the lies
like I see through every useless disguise that
everyone wears but everyone swears that they don’’t.
Ah but don’t mind me baby, I’m only dying slow.

There is an uncanny resonance to just this time, just this month, just this season. But we ought not be dying slow. We ought be living fast. Dying is a slow process. Even when one dies fast, that’s truly living.

Bandwidth is no excuse. There are no excuses. We will not be forgiven. What we do here counts.

Cold water is coming - either over the top or from ‘neath the cracking ice. How you get drenched makes all the difference.

52 more comments while I wrote this post.

Read Duck and Cover at the Blue Pyramid.

So I haven’t updated in a while in part because I’ve been crafting and then moderating a Werewolf/Mafia game with a whopping 45 players online on the APDA Forum.

And just now, the Forum exceeded its bandwidth.

This is just a note to the players in this game that we are pausing the game and I would like to do anything possible to get the APDA Forum back up and running ASAP. I can’t imagine it taking longer than the first of the month, since I think these limits are monthly. Maybe we can then figure out how to expand the bandwidth, if not do that before.

The game will continue! Even if I have to find another forum to revive it in, we are not going to stop the game like at least one past game was halted by a Forum crash. So do not despair and do not stop thinking about the game! It will be revived.

And now, I must away to baseball. Hopefully it will be restored as early as tonight.

Read Duck and Cover at the Blue Pyramid.

Read Duck and Cover at the Blue Pyramid.

Read Duck and Cover at the Blue Pyramid.

Read Duck and Cover at the Blue Pyramid.

Read Duck and Cover at the Blue Pyramid.

Read Duck and Cover at the Blue Pyramid.

Portrait of the blogger as a left hand.

One of these five is not like the other. One of these five just isn’t the same. And if you said “it has a wedding ring,” you’re not quite telling the whole story.

I already discussed how this happened from Chicago shortly after the incident. Believe it or not, it looked much worse at the time, a couple days ago, being predominantly swollen and even greener-purple throughout the whole finger. At this point, it’s really just sore and vaguely annoying - something to avoid bumping into things and to tread lightly on the letters s, w, and x. It’s great it’s healing so rapidly, because I don’t know what a day at work without being able to type quickly would look like.

It’s hard to argue with the idea that this was the best trip to Chicago ever, despite the depiction above. After last post, Fish & I hosted an old-style Nuevo enchilada night with plenty of his student-friend posse and introduced them all to Mafia to cap the evening. We then went to Shedd Aquarium the next day in what may have been the first time I’ve hung out with both Fish and fish in over a decade. Put it this way, though… if I’m feeling okay about going to an aquarium in April in Chicago, you know there’s a certain level of comfort I’m feeling with my destiny. You might say I’m giving fate the finger. Of course, you might’ve also said I was asking for it.

There was an earthquake in Chicago, or at least somewhere in Illinois. That night, both Fish’s girlfriend and I had dreams about earthquakes, though mine ultimately morphed into some sort of nuclear attack. Chicago thus joined New York City on the list of places where I have experienced earthquakes that conventionally never get earthquakes. As the old way of looking at these things goes, I brought them in from California. Funny that Homeland Security can’t pick those up on the scanners.

I don’t reckon I’ll be back there for a spell, though the eight-year gap just past is a pretty wide swath to repeat. At this point, it may have even passed Glasgow on the all-time list of places in the world. Maybe next time, Chicago, we don’t have to shake hands.

Read Duck and Cover at the Blue Pyramid.

Been nearly two days in Chicago with a day to go. Have seen a full game in Wrigley Field (Cubs 3, Pirates 2), seen both of the previously unseen campuses I passed up as possible collegiate choices, and managed to smash up my wedding ring finger into a purple pulp. You didn’t think this town was gonna let me off easy, did you?

This post will likely be short, in large part because typing with nine fingers is a task I’ve never had to learn. Rather than being 10% slower, it really seems about 98% slower given how long it takes for me to decide which finger to sub in for the S finger. Luckily, this finger is only responsible for three letters (and two of them are w and x), but unluckily s is pretty common. I don’t know if the finger’s broken or not, but I’m leaning towards not at this point given that it’s pretty much stopped hurting. Last night when I willingly took two painkiller pills, was talked into a third, and never refused ice, the signs were pointing to badness.

The method of the smashing was picking up a bowling ball. Just nanoseconds before lifting, I was wrapping my left hand around the ball as support and the old-school see-saw ball-returner shot a ball into the row at breakneck (or break-finger) speed. The entire stopping point of the chain-reaction impact was my hand, primarily focused on one finger with peripheral contact on the two neighbors. Sandwiched between a 14 and a 12, this did not lead to warm fuzzy feelings. Somehow, in about 20 years of bowling, this had never once happened to me. And it really bugged me because it was entirely preventable. And because it hurt.

This is hardly the focal point of the trip, though, and shouldn’t be where I put so much emphasis. The trip has been about an old friend and his new friends. Fish has been the consummate host, as always, and given me a glimpse of both Chicago and alternate pasts that I have turned away from. His group is what I remember of groups assembled at schools - smart, funny, interested, and interesting. Everything about school except for school was always great. If everyone could self-select and come together for such things in the interest of some sort of club or life commitment (or even society?), things would be really cooking. But sadly school seems to be the only thing deemed worthy of bringing like-mindeds together from such distant places in a socially comfortable setting. And thus my path is barred, by my own volition.

Nevertheless, it’s good to see a friend doing well, to immerse in his world, and to talk through all the things it seems go unsaid these days. Examining one’s own life is often so difficult without the full-length mirror that is someone who has known you across a multitude of years and situations.

Debate and discussion. The caterpillar story. A coat forgotten and regained. Misty walks on paths not taken. Cheez-its and carrots, coffee and Cheerios. Once more unto the grocery store. Everything’s different and nothing’s changed. Everything’s perfect and Fish is god. Ow.

It is still too early to be too late.

Oh, Chicago.

It’s been eight full years since my last visit to the Windy City (outside of one of the worst airport stopovers in modern history). The city of my almost absolutely ideal weather (could stand to be a little drier in the summer, but otherwise perfect) and almost absolutely horrible everything else. Past visits to Chicago have been almost universally bad, marked by high turmoil and tension, argument, and almost unending apprehension. Something about the length of time spent seems to correspond to the extent of the badness, or at least the fallout. The one decent visit was in late ‘97, where my Dad and I flew to a debate tournament in Florida via Chicago, with a few hour layover. We didn’t really have time to check out either of the city’s colleges I’d applied to and they put massive amounts of milk in my coffee without asking and it was bitterly cold and we were both a little grumpy toward the end. But nobody got hurt.

And that was by far the best visit. Maybe it’s no wonder that I didn’t give much consideration to either of those colleges when I’d gotten in.

But still to come was the last visit, eight years ago and change, which still stands out as one of the worst trips of all-time. It didn’t help that I’d been anticipating the trip with a wildly inexplicable sense of foreboding that proved as prophetic (though not as seriously so) as I’d feared. I was going into a Model UN conference that I’d been guilted into attending, nearing complete exhaustion with the politics and format of collegiate Model UN. This trip, which proved to be my last lifetime MUN conference, cemented my feelings while just seeming to waste my time. From the 20th day of Introspection ever: “Never been so bored in a MUN committee in my life. That’s 6 years of effort there.”

The trip was not without upside. Chicago is not only a place of bad feeling for me, but of incredibly intense feeling. The severity of emotional spurring gives it a vague potential that I would be more inclined to pursue if the downside tendencies of my state in the city didn’t just scare me. I spent the first night of the trip wandering around the city by myself, lost in reverie that culminated in me literally yelling at myself as March was about to cross over into April…

Sometimes I think I should walk around with a tape recorder. Walking back from that convenience store, I swear I figured everything out. Well, not everything, but more than I’ve had a handle on for a long time. Talking out loud works so much better, especially in cold night air. If I could maintain that focus for days on end, life would almost feel easy. Instead, I end up blinding myself to clarity & getting crowded by my frustrations. I don’t wear my heart on my sleeve, I wear it on my tongue. & I don’t consider that a problem, if only I could express myself as well to others as I can to myself. Seems like they’d be easier to convince anyway.

After the conference concluded, there were then plane delays trying to get out of the city and it felt like that place just had me in its clutches. Note to self: Plane delays where one has incredibly impatience and anxiety about getting out in time are usually a warning sign. Proceed with caution. Or, as I told myself at the time (day 21 of Introspection): “I’ve got to learn to start trusting my instincts. I might hate my intuition, but it’s always right.”

In my memory, I think I’d folded the two days that followed my return into nothing, or transplanted them as being prior to the trip. But that’s only how it seemed in retrospect, because the trip was so awful and everything crashed to pieces 48 hours after my return. But those were a pivotal 48 hours. A very good 48 hours. Until Ben Brandzel caught me reveling in the downstairs portion of the Usdan cafeteria and uttered the worst joke I’ve ever heard in my life:

“So, has she told you about her book yet?”

Though I felt like he’d just winded me with a sucker punch, I refused to be fazed at the time. In less than 36 hours, though, it was all over. With less warning but as much seeming foreknowledge, I had been felled by this comment just as Lisha’s “Doomsday” Prophecy of ‘93 had unwittingly unraveled that situation. Of course the comment had nothing to do with anything, but it sure made it feel like the events had more to do with fate than anything I could control.

I went into freefall. A good bit of this is discussed in my recent post about April. There’s no need to hash out more details and I really should wrap this up anyway. In the swirl of retrospect, the trip and everything that followed were inextricably bound with each other and a sense of powerful, living destiny.

Was there destiny? I don’t really believe in destiny, but it’s hard to argue with what transpired. The wake of the events of March and April 2000 convinced me to start “The Streak” and I never missed an APDA debate weekend thereafter. I decided that I might as well continue with my resolution at the advent of the millennium that I would devote myself to the one thing that was going well in college. The relationship that ended in such a crushing fashion turned out to feel more and more like a dodged bullet than a sincere loss. All of these things led directly to fuel everything that happened in the next two years: staying at Brandeis, debate success, and Emily.

This time around, I don’t feel any sense of foreboding at all. It’s almost uncanny how calm I feel despite the history, despite it being April. Another rejection of destiny, perhaps, or just an openness to change. It’s certain that even the slightest inkling of bad feeling would get blown up in my perception given the context, so it’s really all good. I can’t wait to see Fish, meet his new girlfriend and other friends, see Wrigley, give this city a fourth or fifth or sixth chance.

Forty years after “something very extraordinary died there, which was America,” I’ll be heading back toward the city named for wild leeks once again. My baseball streak is at 3 games, after a beautiful complete game by Felix Hernandez last night. I have a busy day at work, made somewhat more challenging by a mild migraine. I’m getting on a vessel of one of the plane companies that has still managed to stay solvent. Life is mixed, but life is good.

We’ve come too far to leave it all behind.

Read Duck and Cover at the Blue Pyramid.

Read Duck and Cover at the Blue Pyramid.

Read Duck and Cover at the Blue Pyramid.

So, barring unforeseeable alterations or difficulties, here is a big chunk of my schedule for this calendar week:

Sunday, 4/13: Cardinals @ Giants, AT&T Park
Monday, 4/14: Diamondbacks @ Giants, AT&T Park
Wednesday, 4/16: Mariners @ A’s, McAfee Coliseum
Friday, 4/18: Pirates @ Cubs, Wrigley Field

7 teams, 4 games, 3 cities. That’s a good week. Makes it a little easier to deal with working and all that in the meantime.

But tack on things like an unexpected free trip to a luxury suite yesterday (apparent face value: ~$400/seat), Randy Johnson’s first start of the ‘08 campaign today, my beloved Mariners on Wednesday, and my first trip to Wrigley on Friday? It’s downright amazing.

I’m also hoping that the streak (currently a 1-game streak) of teams I’m rooting for this week winning can keep up. Even though my loyalties are somewhat torn tonight (my favorite pitcher vs. my favorite NL team) and are not strong on Friday (though they lean pretty discernibly toward the Pirates, which I just can’t say that the Cubs bleachers fans will be excited about), I’m looking to go 4-0. Or at least 2-2, with the second win being the M’s. Because really, that’s all that matters in the end.

April may be terrible - and it is - but it at least bestows the blessing of baseball. I’m not sure how I’d survive this month without it.

Read Duck and Cover at the Blue Pyramid.

Had some profoundly vivid dreams last night, after a good long while of vagueness and reprieve from the dreamworld. It’s no surprise, given that I slept for a significant amount of time for the first time in recent memory. Probably the first night over 6.5 hours in weeks. And that, not surprisingly, was due to a major migraine, also the first in quite a while. And that, in turn, was due to insufficient coffee intake in the morning because I was running late.

The world, in short, makes sense.

But dreams themselves do not often make sense, as was the case last night. Or at least they cover the bizarre and fanciful, even when they might be able to be linked or traced to larger themes of relevance. In the first dream, earlier in the night, I was somehow trying to juggle seven or eight part-time jobs. Most of them were jobs I wouldn’t consider in real life - sales jobs and store reception - as well as a couple jobs that resembled actual work I’ve done, such as library positions. And it was all somehow mixed with me leaving Glide or cutting down hours and keeping my options open. Somehow in the dream, showing up to any one of these jobs once a week would clinch the employer’s interest in me in carrying over for the next week or month or so. But it was very difficult to track the schedule of all of these disparate jobs, which ended up boiling down into feeling like any number of school schedule stress dreams. These are a common theme in my dream repertoire, wherein I don’t know when and where my classes are, and I’m usually on the verge of being automatically failed if I miss any more classes. These can be high school or college and fill a truly disproportionate amount of my dreamlife. And compared to a lot of my nightmares, especially more historically, they’re not so bad at all.

The second dream felt better moment-to-moment at the time, but was holistically much more disturbing in retrospect. In this one, I was apparently a baker of all manner of pastries and breads. And the world was about to go to war. It was definitely 2008, and all of my bakery’s machinery reflected this fact. But most of the combatants were historical figures, mostly circa World War II. Each of the combatants came to visit my bakery and arrange indefinably large shipments of my goods to their soldiers who were about to be fighting in this war. The impracticality of shipping huge quantities of perishable food across the world to troops in conflict seemed not to faze anyone, let alone really occur to them (though it was in the back of my mind). Two themes needled me in the back of my mind profoundly - one that I was selling to soldiers, who would clearly be committing violence that I disagree with. The other was that I was unabashedly (though not openly to any given buyer) selling to both sides of the war, to soon-to-be-declared enemies. It was clear that Japan and Germany were going to be opposing each other in the war, and shortly after the anonymous Japanese diplomat left, in walked Hitler.

Hitler was not only the first actual personage I could recognize and name in the dream, but he entered the full-color world and mainframe of the dream in a sepia-tone. He was fully illustrated and visible, but he was completely sepia-tone, as though stepping from a faded newsreel and into my 2008 full-color life. He was officious but not unfriendly and ordered a million cinnamon rolls and a million items that I called muffins. He insisted that they weren’t muffins, however, and began to argue. I suggested that they might be a little more akin to biscuits, if he preferred that word. He said clearly that they were “bread” as though this word had just occurred to him. I conceded that they were a type of bread, but this was unsatisfactory to him. At this point, he began to extrapolate on how long the war would last and that if I played my cards right, there would be orders of far more than just a million cinnamon rolls and a million pieces of bread, but that could all be jeopardized by me insisting on calling bread a biscuit or a muffin. Okay, Mr. Hitler.

At this point, it was clearly disturbing me greatly that I was doing business with Hitler, but at the same time, I didn’t really see a great distinction between this and selling to other armies and other combatants. Indeed, the fact that I was selling perishable items to them and to both sides of the conflict gave me a small secret satisfaction that I was somehow thwarting their efforts and diverting money away from weaponry and into my ability to do some good. Beating swords into rotten bread, and in turn perhaps into plowshares.

The dream ended shortly thereafter - I signed to the deal after convincing Hitler to buy two million cinnamon rolls to go with the original order of “bread”. He went on his way and I distinctly remember a little bell ringing over the top of the glass door as he exited the building. The smell of fresh baked bread filled my nostrils as I sighed heavily and wondered what I was doing with my life.

Is there a message for me in all this? Clearly the compromises and the deferring of my time expenditure I’m making now in no way compare to signing pastry deals with Hitler. But was my subconscious trying to use some extreme illustration to wake me up? I clearly am starting to feel a good deal of guilt about my use of time, somewhere. Especially given that so many of my dreams tend to revolve on me doing unthinkable things in my dreams and wrestling with myself about why I don’t feel enough remorse to stop. The classic among these is, of course, eating meat - I’ve had thousands of dreams in the last 11 years where I eat meat and feel awful, and lately mostly disappointed, with myself. Generally there’s something in these dreams about realizing that I haven’t actually been a vegetarian for the last 11 years, yet haven’t realized it till just now. Waking up to reality is always reassuring in these situations, though it often takes some time to recall that the dream-bacon wasn’t real.

Waking up this morning was less reassuring. Again, I stress that I have no misgivings about my actual job or work or use of time on an absolute scale. It’s only on a relative scale, that in comparison to writing full-time, that I have questions or doubts. Especially since that was going to be the plan for a while, before the latest promotion swooped in and convinced me to stay.

Dreams derive most often, they say, from one’s own hopes and fears. (In my case, pretty much universally fears.) I can’t rule out that there are sometimes larger messages or warnings in dreams, but even they may be from one’s own internal sense of impending doom or difficulty. And clearly this issue has been bothering me lately. The only thing that really shakes me, deep down, is what was happening exactly three years ago around this time. The same misgivings, the same warnings were creeping in all around. And those proved dangerously unheeded. I pledged to not make the same mistake again. And while personal safety was clearly more abundant an issue at Seneca, making the stakes higher, I have a quality backup plan here and now, which I didn’t then. Call it a draw, I guess, which doesn’t make me feel much better.

Muffin?