Stuff & Nonsense...

Just have this weird urge to write about nothing in particular, & no one in particular that I owe a letter to at the moment. There will probably be one in the mail this afternoon from Doug or possibly Josh... maybe Will. I gave Will my cell# but no phone calls so far - it's actually kind of relieving. I hate having to tell people "Oh, uh, sorry, I can't go out for that beer after all." After the Prince concert fiasco, I am done making any commitments to a social life whatsoever. I am married to the Job & that's that.

Talking to Jeff in the early morning light, looking at the trash piled up behind Tower 1, smelling that 'old grease trap smell', talking about how much of a hole the Ex is. Yes, I understand that it's got a medieval theme & all, but does it have to smell like a midden heap as well? Jeff's complaining about how all the women on the front desk bitch & complain & want to go home (everyone except me... I am the silently long-suffering), & I told him that for us on graveyard, having to deal w/the same problem night after night, it gets so old. No clean rooms, oversold, tired angry people who've driven 8 hrs. from California expecting to be able to go to their rooms & go to bed - instead they get harried, harrassed desk clerks telling them, "Sorry, your room is still dirty. While you wait the additional 2 hours for it to be cleaned, how about a dinner comp to our illustrious coffee shop?" It gets old. If it wasn't for night audit, I would have quit a year ago. It's nice to have some kind of goal to work towards, though, and for the first time in a long time I am seeing concrete results.

Rob found a tiny scorpion in his room last night - he put it in a jar. Why he didn't just kill the thing I don't know, he'd rather let it suffocate to death on instant-coffee fumes I suppose. So we have a small, angry scorpion in a coffee jar waiting for garbage day. Even though they're deadly I still find them fascinating, but I love the pretty deadly things in life.

Looked at pictures of a mass burial in S. America on rotten.com. Thought to myself that, in death, these men looked like badly preserved gorillas. Finally got around to making that tortellini & roast chicken - I would have preferred the three-cheese tortellini, but Rob wanted to try the pepperoni. I have yet to find a decent jarred alfredo sauce - the Buotini stuff in a plastic tub was no different in that respect. Too artificial - it had a metallic bitterness underlying the bland savor. Processed, dehydrated garlic, ugh. I just don't have time to cook anything, really. Packaged tortellini, canned sauces, canned Parmesan cheese. I'd love to be able to do that much extra, not so much for Rob but for myself. The excess salt is killing me.

Someone on tribe asked 'how do you get Pagans together'? I think the answer comes down to 'you don't.' It isn't humanly possible. Free booze used to be a pat answer, but not so much anymore. We've all grown up, gotten jobs, had kids, moved, died... no one can get together anymore because the scheduling is beyond the power of any mere mortal to figure out.

I can tell I've been tainted by society. I read an article in the Sunday paper about people who are 'childfree', meaning childless-by-choice. (Apparently, 'childless' is supposed to be reserved for people who want kids but can't have them for whatever reason, & it's derogatory for someone who is actually 'childfree'). I was sort of irked at the article - it seems like people have to justify being childfree to society, suffer pressure & subtle discrimination from those who aren't childfree or childless. I myself work w/someone who insists on telling me, "Oh, you're still young. You'll change your mind. It's different when they're yours'. No matter what I tell her, she just knows I'm gonna be spitting out bratlings. It's just like having to justify being fat & not dieting, or being a smoker, or being GLBT. Only 6.6% of American women are voluntarily childfree, so that puts me in a definite minority (the article didn't have stats for American men) but I don't really feel the need to justify my desires - people ask, I tell: "I freakin' hate kids.". I just wish some people would let it drop. It's weird how people, especially women, have a hard time dealing w/explanations that run under 10 words or so. The same coworker who thinks I'm gonna be a breeder any day now can't accept things people tell her as one-sentence explanations. If someone comes up to the desk & wants to talk to a CPS worker, I ask, "Do you want to file a report for abuse or neglect?" They tell me yes, I call Hotline & that's the end of it. I don't need to hear the rest of the story. Kathy, on the other hand, wants to give people the fifth degree, & when I'm dealing w/someone, she gives me the fifth degree about why they came in. And she keeps grilling me, "Well, what kind of abuse, blah de blah de blah." A woman brought about 10 kids in that she wanted to abandon - I asked her, "Do you need to report abuse or neglect?" She said, "No, I want Child Haven to take them, I can't take care of them." 14 words, tells me everything I need to know - fine by me, I called Hotline. So Kathy wants to know the woman's life story. I finally snapped, "If you want to know her life story, go ask her yourself! I got all the info I needed from her!" The woman in question was huddled in a corner w/her hands over her head while her children systematically destroyed the front lobby & points beyond. (Bruce just walked by - I suspect he may be gay... he tells me he doesn't like straight lines as he systematically makes everything on the counter crooked, included the bear that sits on my monitor). Kathy drives me bonkers. Debbie at the night job is another one - ends every sentence with "You know what I mean?" It's like talking to a mobster.And Bill, the security guard here at the day job, likes to brag about how much money he used to make, & how much experience he has working w/Cisco Systems. So if he's got all this experience setting up these big fancy networks, making over $100 an hour, why is he a contracted security guard? I do know he's got a gambling problem. My coworker now, Joann, she's cool - she is an old mobster.

Me & Rob got into this discussion about the location of the soul. He thinks it's got something to do w/the brain, I vote for the solar plexus. I don't even think the soul resides in the body at all - I think it's just tethered to the body. But I also don't think the soul is responsible for conscious logical thought - I think that all takes place in the synapses of the brain. Automatic & autonomic thought processes. Brain farts. It's harder to think of the brain as the home of the soul when something like 80% of the adult brain is essentially dead tissue. Which is why when a person slips into a coma & stays there for lengths of time, the brain actually starts to rot... turns into slimy, green coma-brain goo. Rob's eventual goal is to become some sort of cybernetic robot w/a functioning consciousness - he's so dead-set on immortality that his fear of death keeps him from living. My fear of living keeps me wishing for a quick death :)

Things for my future incarnation...

Silly, I know. I feel kind of self-conscious about doing it, but what is a journal for? It's a record, right? Some kind of log of everyday events, dreams, memories, hopes. So I'm hoping maybe the 'Net will still be around & I'll have a connection across time w/the new me, whoever I may be. My biggest beef w/dying isn't the death itself, it's the forgetting.

Fer instance, I think something bad happened to me in an old prison. I've been to Alcatraz, I've seen photos & old b/w movies of old prisons, places like Leavenworth & recently there was one in Florida they were showing on the History Channel or CourtTV. To me, all prisons pretty much look the same - institutional, w/bare concrete floors & solid bars. But older prisons creep me out. Looking at that one from Florida on t.v. gave me chills - and it was on the television. And when I was very little...

My dad was an o.t.r. truck driver. He went everywhere. And in the Summers when I was out of school, my mom & I went everywhere w/him. One Summer he had a run to Arizona. Why, I don't know. What he was carrying, I have no clue. But I do remember it was hot. Damn hot. I remember, vaguely, whining about "I'll never be cool again." I remember, also, how in the middle of a desert night, clearest stars anyone could ever hope to see, the sky deepened to a bizarre green & the world's nastiest hail storm commenced to fall on us. Desert weather - you either love it or keep away from deserts. So my dad had a layover in Yuma, AZ for a day or two, & there was the ever-exciting prospect of a historical monument to visit. The AZ State Yuma Prison. Yuma Prison At first, I was not afraid. Fascinated, maybe a little bored, hot. It felt good just to be out exploring w/my parents. Listening to the tour guide, wandering here & there. But there was a cell. It was basically chipped into the side of the hill, made of solid stone. It was designed for solitary confinement or confinement, & called the 'dark cell'. No lights. In a huge vault in the side of a mountain, a cage w/in a cage was built w/a raised concrete platform in the middle, w/shackles at each corner. The unruly prisoner would be shackled to that slab, all by themselves. Except of course, for the rats. The cockroaches. The scorpions & spiders. Maybe a random rattlesnake looking for food or to escape the elements. At least during the day, because the cell was in the hill, the heat wouldn't be too bad, but the temperature at night can drop to below freezing.

The attraction of that particular day in my life was to stand behind the door of the dark cell, looking out, & getting your picture taken. I was ok all day right up until then. I flipped the hell out. Had a hysterical screaming fit. Because when I walked into the cell & they shut the door, it was so dark. A smell like old sweat & fear & defeat washed over me, a rank, old animal smell, and I could almost hear someone behind me, on that slab, the shuffle of an arm or leg sweeping across it, maybe to flinch away a fly, the rattle of a shackle, and I knew, even at 4 or 5 years old, that the prisoners were left for days at a time w/out food or water, subsisting on the roaches & fighting off rats. Later that afternoon, getting ready to get back on the road, listening to my mom & dad bicker in the heat, we stopped at a truckstop & I got a barbecued beef sandwich. A couple of bites into it, I found that I couldn't stop thinking about the long-gone prisoner in the dark cell, that odor & the sounds, & I was sick to my stomach. To this day, whenever I smell a certain type of barbecue sauce in food, it still turns my belly. But I can't say exactly why I had those feelings, what set them off, the imagery, the sounds... these are the things one should be able to remember. Why do old prisons bother me so much? Was I actually so traumatized that day in Yuma that I can't shake it off, or did something really bad actually happen to me in a long-ago life?