Pleasant Manteo
Last weekend my girlfriend and I took a trip down to the beach where my grandparents used to live. We felt that this was justified, even required, as we’ve both been under a lot of stress for quite awhile now. Things have been ever-so-slowly looking up for us the past few weeks so we wanted to celebrate and give ourselves some much needed rest. That’s exactly what we got.
We packed up last Thursday night and left around 13:00 Friday afternoon. This put us down there at about 20:00 which allowed us ample time to enjoy the sounds of the ocean and the opportunity to wade around looking for shells. A wonderful way to wind down after the trip and get ready for bed.
All times are GMT-5 and posted in a 24-hour format purely to annoy anyone who reads this entry. I love you, too.
We spent Saturday driving around and visiting the places I knew, and stuff sure has changed in the past almost-a-decade. It’s kind of heartbreaking to see that the building where I had my first job isn’t even there anymore, but a ton of stuff was almost exactly as I remember it. The Elizabethan Gardens were gorgeous, albeit a bit hot. The nature trail was fun and secluded. We did get mobbed a tribe of mosquitoes, but a helpful staff member saved the day with some bug repellent. Woot. We even went shopping for awhile, then headed home after dinner for some drinks and a movie (Pretty Woman). More time in the ocean and then a long relaxing night of “us” time. Screw you, society!
After spending some more time just soaking up the environment on Sunday (Bodie lighthouse, etc.) we headed home, our heads full of wonderful memories and that wonderfully intoxicating feeling of being with the person you love. It really helped us feel closer and took some of the strain out of our minds, and that’s why we’re going back tonight! We won’t be alone all weekend, but it’ll still be fine.
And because I can’t write anything here without ranting, whoever decided it was a good idea to have a $20 breakfast is fucking insane. And deserves to be shot. With knives. Dull ones.
One in a hundred
So the list of blog topics I was excited about wasn’t as fun as I thought it’d be. Some of them were decent ideas, but none of them really up my ally. But in the spirit of adventure, I made myself pick at least one out.
Number 51. “The Art of Chaos”. Keep in mind that I’m giving this the ol’ “college try”. It’s very likely that I won’t pick a single other item from the list.
I like this topic at least a little because it can be broken down in an interesting manner. Using Ubiquity to define it, I’m drawn to the first two definitions in particular:
1: a state of extreme confusion and disorder [syn: {pandemonium}, {bedlam}, {topsy-turvydom}, {topsy-turvyness}]
2: the formless and disordered state of matter before the creation of the cosmos
Chaos. I like chaos. Pandemonium, bedlam, etc. Alrighty, bring it on. Confusion, disorder, formless state of matter… I really like this! In the sense that a constantly shifting amorphous mass is a thing of beauty, a raw and primeval force, I can see it as “artsy” in and of itself.
But wait a minute, “The Art” of Chaos? Turning something that is the definition of defying definition into a coin-fed entity? No, it’s contradicting. I don’t buy into it. That’s if you take the phrase quite literally and consider chaos as a noun, a thing tangible enough to be drawn, described or sculpted.
But what if you take it more like song and dance, a performance art? These things are extremely structured nearly universally, which is a polar opposite to what chaos is. A structured performance of the lack of structure or form… But you can perform chaotic actions. More accurately you can promote chaos through actions, as any action we take is still going to have structure or form, regardless of why or how these actions were performed.
So I think that if you were to look at it seriously, that phrase is stupendously silly. It’s impossible to look at it and not consider it ludicrous. It doesn’t even make a good oxymoron like “the thunderous silence” (I imagine it said by Danny Devito, because that pleases me).
Making something from nothing
So a problem I have a lot is picking a topic to actually write about. I mean, there’s a TON of stuff that pisses me off, and you’d think a blog that I use to generally rant would be a good place to vent on those things. Right? Right? Not really.
See, I’m an asshole in the purest sense of the word, and a lot of things bother me to my very core. And I can go on and on about them, and sometimes do. But that’s really not how I am. I detest people who bitch a lot, and wouldn’t it be a little wrong for me to do something I hate from others? So as a person I tend to rage quietly about things, let it burn out, then move on. But sometimes there are things that just need to be said. Those things make it on here or the few friends I have are forced to listen to a tirade.
But I don’t always want to bitch, sometimes I just want to share my thoughts on things. But how do I decide what is important enough to talk about at length AND is something that people would want to read? Well, I can only base my perception of other people on myself, so I tend to assume that people don’t really want to hear anything. Puts me at a bit of a standstill, it does.
Yeah, that’s my convoluted excuse for not posting as much as I could.
Well I found a list of blog topic ideas, and I may go through some of them in the very near future (maybe later today, UH OH!). The list was found here, in case anyone wanted to look it over themselves. We’ll see how it goes, it could be an interesting change of pace.
Oh yeah, and anyone else who has ANY ideas for topics, feel free to let me know. Comment here if you want, that’s fine.
I present FRANKENCOOLER
Being the awesome guy that I am (see image below) it’s pretty common for awesome things to… spring to life around me, much like tears from a deity creating life.
My goal? To take the following collection of odds and ends (48 quart cooler, bilge pump and a dream) and turn them into something earth-shatteringly awesome.
The basics:
Not shown are what I plan to be two 120mm case fans and a salvaged heater core. I couldn’t resist trying out some science, so I wired up the pump to make sure it works. 500 GPH feels like a lot more than it sounds.
Stay tuned. I’ll have a full rundown soon.
I had the strangest dream
I tend to have pretty vivid/horrendous/wild dreams, and thankfully I don’t remember them for too long. This one, however, has stuck out and I’ve been turning it over in my head quite a bit lately. It’s really made me do some heavy thinking, and changed my view of things at least slightly.
So in this dream my girlfriend is diagnosed with a brain tumor, and I have some form of rupture (like a stroke) from constantly keeping my anger in check. I don’t know what this by itself means, but I’m not a pansy so I’m going to say that these preliminary facts mean exactly nothing. The point is that we’re both given 6 months to live.
We spend the next 5 months in a montage, apparently, but we’re obviously trying to wring every drop out of the time we’ve got left that we can. It’s all very somber, but very peaceful in a way. We know what’s coming, we know what we have, and we’re just determined to enjoy the bit we’ve got left.
So after these 5 months are up, we do something that I’d have never imagined in a million years. We go skydiving. From a plane. Without parachutes.
Let me say that again. We jump from a plane tens of thousands of feet above the ground, and we don’t take parachutes. We hold each other the entire time down, surrounded by rushing wind and nothing else. This is amazingly sweet and sad at the same time, because there’s literally nothing else for us but each other, and we’re forced to bask fully in the presence of the other person. But we know it’s going to end.
But we know exactly how it’s going to end, when it’s going to end, no surprises. There are no weeks of torture. There is no lingering sadness. And most of all there is no loneliness. Neither of us has to live, even for a short time, without the other.
That was the dream.
Anyone who knows me will tell you that I’m not one for sappy crap. I’m not the type of person who generally thinks like I apparently did in the dream, and I’m even less inclined to talk about such thoughts/feelings. But something about this dream really got my brainmeats all fired up. Obviously I care a lot about my girlfriend, I don’t have any problem saying as much. But I can’t help thinking that there’s something else there, too. Fear of being alone now that I’ve found someone I love sharing my time with? Hell if I know.
But no matter how I slice it, it was a powerful dream. I really love that woman.
