Signs of Life

How much longer can we expect to hold out? Why do we even put up a fight? Maybe we don’t and I’m just making mountains out of mole hills, but riddle me this. What does a 4th dimensional being look like? And I don’t care about its appearance, I don’t care what its rules are, I want to know what it means. What’s this all about, and there’s only one question we’re all asking, what’s on the other side. Perhaps we spend our lives strengthening ourselves so that someday we’ll be able to look. Some people venture off before they’re prepared and get carried off. Is a human being raised by wolves our natural state? Pets help us stay grounded, we’re animals and can learn good lessons from them. A cat doesn’t know anything about how to behave at a cocktail party though. You’d need a master of ceremonies to teach a cat the Macarena.

Not much else is going on these days, just counting down the days till vacation, OH! I booked my flight to Philly and I’m going to be renting a convertible while I’m there. I’m hoping to have a fun day with my sister and nephew and I think a convertible is the perfect touch. Plus I don’t think I’ve ever driven one, if that’s true it’s gonna be an awesome trip. I’ll spend the whole time on the highway with the wind in my hair. Too bad it’s all gone, but I’m hoping to dye it blonde before then so there will be some fun images. As I was saying, waiting to board the plane. There’s a possibility we’ll have the plane to ourselves apparently. I also wrote my second painting letter today. I do paintings on a sheet of canvas and then write a letter on the back. The guy I’m sending it to is doing a couples vacation with us this year, so I’m sending him some other stuff for that. He was the one who asked if I was worried about that disease with traveling. It does make me think there will be an annoying level of costumes coming back, I’m sure they’ll ask some medical questions. Hopefully Mary’s background as a healer will get us through.

Buoyant Air

Boyish Heir

Sorry I left you hanging there morning pages. I told you I was going to see my Army bois and there was just no telling what could have happened. First I have some house cleaning to do. I like writing this as if I’m speaking to a person so I said morning pages, that’s awkward so I think to say MP, at that point I say I should just pick a name, so Mary Poppins. Mary will be my morning pages, my wife, my spirituality. I hereby dedicate these writings to Mary. 

Moving backward to move on: my bois. Man I don’t even know where to begin, it’s honestly one of the craziest experiences I’ve ever had. It was a dream, that’s the only way I could explain it. I hope they’re doing ok. I think they think they’re doing ok and that’s all that matters. It was sort of a theme, saying, “You alright bro?” and responding, “Yeah, this is how I do, that cool?” and everyone was cool. It was great to talk to them about war, and Johnston has deployed since our time in Iraq, so he had a comparison. There is no way I could have understood the situation I was in when I was in Iraq, I still work to process it, but now that we have some distance and to be able to ask what they thought about a situation in Iraq was some of the best medicine I could have thought up. That’s the situation with everyone on Earth though, you gotta be honest with yourself and those you interact with, if they don’t want you around, don’t take it personal because trying to make them like you will only be worse. Great weekend, great guys, I wish them all the best and hope they reach out to me whenever they want for the rest of our lives.

My half full glass overfloweth

Pup and I jamming out

Another day, another plate of eggs. For record keeping, my scheduled breakfast is 85g of brussel sprouts, three eggs with four slices of ham and 28g of cheese, then a banana for dessert. I might be hanging out with some Army buddies tomorrow. In Iraq Johnston slept on the right side of me and Kent on the other side of him. I’m sure it’ll be a lot of fun because that experience makes it so we can’t really have any secrets from each other. We were living on top each other and it’s not like we had anything besides our G.I. gear and each other. It’d be a bad sign if someone was keeping secrets, so it’s nice that I will be free around them, but I’m scared because I haven’t seen either of them in years. This anxiety is so weird because they’re people that I could not be more comfortable around, but there is an unknown until I see them I suppose. After the first insult is slung, I’ll know we’re good. My wife said something this morning about how we have friends in a variety of economic levels and I was watching this interview with Mike Tyson where he was saying that he came from so little and basically didn’t belong in the level he rose to. That not belonging is something I think everyone feels, but what I’ve felt with socioeconomic differences is that rules change. I hope I’ve adapted well because I don’t believe in rules, that allows me to do whatever I’m told. It’s those different rules that can make people around us feel like a different species. I’m not articulating this well, but your level is a habitat and your habitat is a part of the world that you live in. That means the rest of the world is one you visit less frequently, the very rich may never visit what it’s like to live with no money and vice versa. That means a limited view of the world and we make assumptions based on incomplete data.

Experiment with Merriment

Front lawn flowers

I’ve been duped, someone said I could double my dumping by deliberately delivering discriminating discord. In other words my wife got to sleep in this morning, so I did too. Now I naturally woke up at 7:00 but what I’ve been learning about myself these past months is how dependent on habit I am. If I wake up at the same time everyday and usually do the same thing, I’m living in this sphere of protection; I feel happier. I’m unable to answer the question “Why?” for anything so if the question is, “Why am I going for a run at 7AM?” the answer is, “because that’s what it says on the schedule.” That disconnect from the judgement process helps me to get things done. My next big problem is the one that held me up today. Currently I can only follow the schedule from start to finish, which means if I don’t start off on the right foot, I’ll basically write off the entire day. What I need to work on doing is accepting when something doesn’t go the way I want it to, then be willing to jump back into doing what I know to be the right and wrong things for me. I’m not too distraught about today because I’ve been pushing myself in some sense the last couple days and if I kept up that pace I’d probably be on my way to a crash, so having some recovery today is good. I hope it rains today to really justify things. I’m still riding the high of the sunny day we had a couple of days ago, so the current cold feels more like passing weather than winter. Next week we’ll be at the beach, that’ll drive me to put up with anything for now.

Texans Attack Taxes

The thermometer in my greenhouse isn’t having fun

Good morning pages, I’ve got a big plate of eggs and am ready to do some self exploration. I think yesterday I mentioned I was reading The Invention of Peace and I’ve been continuing along with that. My ultimate question in life is, “Who am I?” that way I can figure out what I am supposed to be doing on this Earth, and for a guy who is interested in his past I am woefully undereducated in History. Maybe I didn’t have ears for it when I was younger or I had poor teachers. In my experience school focused around Math, Science, History, and Language Arts, but only Math and Science were seen as pathways to a job; unless you wanted to teach. It’s a shame because History and L.A. are basically teaching our culture. Children are basically taught they will only have value if can think like a machine and the only good answers are the ones with a clear distinction between right and wrong. All this is made worse by “teaching for the test”. The people are taught to think like machines and then they invented computers to replace themselves. What is a person’s value after they’ve been replaced by A.I.? That’s why I mostly care about art, and I extend art into everything: war, writing, accounting. I think that’s a mirroring of people finding God in everything and I’d say art offers us the transcendent feeling that God offers to humanity. I know life is hard, but I want people to believe there is a divine being inside of them so they know they can overcome any adversity and have the capability to create new worlds that no one has ever thought of. There isn’t a loftier goal for me than standing at the edge where no human has gone past.

A Watery Palace Wells with Platitudes

A moss ball I started

I’m trying a new thing as part of my perfect schedule, to write my morning pages while eatings breakfast. I’ve often felt while eating I’m wasting precious time I could do some sort of work. I think Thomas Jefferson would read during breakfast and I suppose ideally I’ll read during lunch if I’ve already gotten this written down. Today is another rainy day and tomorrow is my haircut, so I don’t expect any huge changes from myself, but I keep saying to myself that I should try to do the healthy things today because that means they’ll be easier in the future. Making things easier in the future is a pretty good deal to me. I was already reading this morning, not as part of my perfect schedule but rather because it can be nice to curl up under a blanket with a book next to a lightning storm. I should have had some Poe, but I’ve been reading this book called The Invention of Peace by Michael Howard. It was recommended to me recently when I asked my old lieutenant for good history books, he’s always been a history buff. It’s relieving that I’m enjoying the book because I can talk to him about it when I finish. I’m sure he’ll want to talk about it because when you read obscure books, the number of people who discuss them dwindles. I find it super interesting to think of peace as an invention and a relatively new one at that, only being thought up about 200 years ago and to some extent accomplished in the last 50. Howard starts from around 800 AD to explain how war was accepted as a part of the natural order, it makes sense from a logical perspective. Then with the enlightenment and the big boi himself Kant, ideas for a secular peace come about. Of course a lot happens to lead to the enlightenment, but a lot of modern ideas on violence are based off of 50 years experience, not all of humanity’s. 

We will be warm soon

Brought this indoors to insure survival of the species

Big thing for me today was writing down my ideal schedule for a day on my white board. My hope is to work on making that my actual daily schedule through habit. I don’t know how to talk about having the ability to make my day exactly as I want it to be and still not doing it. I suppose it’s the same feeling as someone who wants to quit smoking, but doesn’t. Old habits die hard, but I’m a much different person than who I was five years ago as a result of committing to certain activities that I thought would have a wider effect on my life. Today is another step on that path of figuring out what I like and who I’d like to be. With who I want to be, there is the danger of an ill defined goal because as Forrest Gump said, “Aren’t I going to be me?” I have a fear that if I don’t set my goal, then I will relax and be nothing. I know two things for sure, I will someday be nothing and I will never relax. That’s liberating to hear myself say, I feel like it lets me off the hook for a lot of self hatred I have. 

I’m very excited for this Spring. I’m building a lot of plant projects, so I hope I’m not making unreachable dreams only to be broken when it’s time to go to work. The plant stuff has become fairly easy now, I mean there isn’t much work tougher in this world than swinging a pickaxe. I’ve got a lot of new additions to my garden this year, trying some real crops, taking cutting from trees to farm future generations, and whatever else this crazy brain thinks of. Hopefully I can do it with relative internal peace.

I’m a few words short, but I’ll pay you back

My dog 5 years ago

Pup and my wife are next to me fighting over a sock. I guess the dog just got something in his mouth, maybe a hair poked the inside of his mouth. Life is going well today. We had the land lord(LL aka James) come over to help with our oven. Yesterday it stopped working and the display said “SAb”. Come to find out it was switched into Sabbath mode where the oven turns off for 72 hours. I don’t even know why ovens would be built with that. James also said it was ok for me to trim back a tree in my yard to provide more sun for my farm. This was done in conjunction with ordering more plants, so that’s exciting. I’m supposed to be decreasing my plant collection! Well there’s always a strong chance that most of the plants will die and that’s plant life when you’re too lazy to properly research and take care of your plants. Secondly I mostly want to push my plants into a more eclectic collection. I’ve finally ordered the bleeding heart plant, I know it’s been on my radar for awhile as an oddity, hopefully it survives.

This was just a really lovely weekend of relaxing and spending time with my wife. She even went on a picnic with her mom while I was able to catch some sun rays in the back yard. We were laying in bed tonight looking at pictures of one of our first vacations from five years ago. Five seems like a small number, but so much happens in that time span. Still it’s nice to look back on our time together. Pretty much none of what we planed happened, what did happen came out of no where, and I couldn’t be happier it did.

No one told me there’d be paperwork

Found some fungus among us

I’m getting an urgent message from the presses write now. Wait, hold on, it’s coming through morse code so it’ll be awhile and we’ll have to send it over to the boys who are blue. That sad bois are always the best cryptographers. Today is a leap day! This is madness, and to only find out at 10 pm, what should I do with myself. I’ll have to throw a party, but I’ll never fit into my dress in time. I should settle for an amazing leap day, my wife showed me a picture from last leap day, so maybe in four years I’ll be reading this. Hello future Chris, today you wrestled with the fiery dragons and even your wife joined in on the action. Afterwards she needed to recover with a nap. You woke her up with a foot massage shared your love for each other. Later you went to the liquor store to restocked the bar cart. The two of you watched an episode of the Netflix series Greatest Events in WWII in Colour on D-Day and then watched The Three Caballeros. For lunch you drove to pick up Panera where you finally had one of their bread bowls with french onion soup. At dinner the two of you made tacos and drinks. Something happened with the oven and it may be dead, but the land lord will be coming by tomorrow to see what he can do. With all of that going on, today was a pretty perfect day, who could imagine having a better leap day? I even reached out to Leap Dave Williams and he replied, “Real life is for March!” He’s always been so wise. I would really like to go on a run tomorrow and generally am hoping I can get some exercise in because we’ll be on a beach in a couple weeks and I’m not going to complain if I looked a little tighter.

Cloning Clowns for Cool Coal

Puppy jowl

We made it, the last day of February, boi it felt like this month dragged on. For a little while I thought the month was going to go on forever, but we can put this one in the books, “February 2020: Complete” Now on to bigger and brighter futures. I drew today. I drew a little yesterday, but it wasn’t up to my standards. I like to make impossible standards, so I can have something “factual” to point to and say, “See, you’re a failure, you failed at this thing”. Today I competed slightly less impossible standards than I had previously set for myself. I do a certain amount of time of drawing and I changed the way in which I’m tracking time to be more realistic for how people time work. If you worked a job where you had to clock out every time you went to the bathroom, you’d quit. I knew that was a silly thing for awhile and didn’t tell people because I was embarrassed by acting that silly. Anyway, the daily drawing was complete, so my heart can sleep easy. This weekend I hope to work on a self portrait that I’m wanting to send home. I’m not making any promises to myself, it’s just something that I would like to do with long hair and I’m cutting it next week. If I’m going to do it, it’s got to be now. Things are going really well, been feeding my mind with all sorts of new ideas. Mostly through books, read a little Shakespeare, Don Quixote, Kierkegaard, and always Nietzsche. I’m going to try listening to more music. I’ve got a book 1,000 Recordings to Hear Before You Die that I’d like to work through. There’s a music theory class on Stanford’s YouTube channel that I’d recommend to everyone.