When I was probably 14, my trumpet instructor, a hilariously theatrical and overtly masculine man named Bill who I did not take anywhere as seriously as I should have, told me a story he probably shouldn't have:

"So Jim and I are getting up on stage and getting ready to play a gig, right? And Jim plays stand-up bass, you know, those huge violin looking things you see in the back of jazz bands, and I look over at his case and he's got three bottles of beer lined up one next to another, just sitting in the case. And this surprised me. For a couple of reasons, actually. For one, despite bein' fuckin' huge, those bass cases don't have that much room in them. Two, you don't put beer bottles in bass cases. They're all felt on the inside and the condensation fucks up the lining. But Jim wouldn't have known that. And he wouldn't have known that for the third reason those bottles surprised me. Jim didn't drink beer. Jim smoked weed. And I mean Jim smoked weed. Jim smoked weed professionally and by professionally, I mean he got bass gigs so that he could get money so that he could buy weed to smoke during bass gigs. You get me? Jim's not waiting for you folks to legalize it, because that means there's going to be less weed for Jim.

So I turn to Jim and I ask what the beer is about and he says: 'You remember that show we had in Davis last friday? Well, I got really super fuckin' baked right at the end and I was still high as shit when we got finished packing up and I figured, well look it's just a short drive across the bridge to get back home and so I got in the car and I started driving over the bridge. And driving over the bridge. And fuckin' driving over that bridge. Like all of a sudden the fuckin' Yolo causeway is ninety miles long or some shit. I was driving over that bridge for like 3 fuckin' hours and by the end of it, I'm back at home in my apartment lying in bed gripping my bedsheets like it's a steering wheel because I was still driving over that goddamn bridge. So it's just beer at gigs from now on.'

Now, I'm not telling you this story because weed is bad or anything. I'm just saying don't put drinks in your trumpet case. It fucks up the lining."

Even before the accident, I thought about this story a lot. One, because it's great, frankly. I laughed at the image of Jim driving his bedsheets over that bridge for years. Two, I always wondered how an experience like that would feel, not being able to trust your newly battered senses. It's less entertaining than you might think. I can empathize why Jim switched to beer.


I had a moment like this coming home from work on Friday, in fact. The Caltrain between San Francisco and Redwood city only takes about 45 minutes, but at some point my eyes rose from reading a friend's novel on my Kindle, lost focus and some critical element of my brain clicked off. Hours and hours spun by between the carefully scheduled stops and honestly, for one of the first times, I didn't panic. Despite an immense weight pinning me to the seat, my heart kept a steady pace. My ocular shutterspeed dropped, street lamps drew long contrails against my vision and cars etched rails of light in the way that we all think they might if they were accelerating off into the future.

And the same feeling occurred to me as when this all started. What if I'm still there? What if I'm back on that couch, reciting the names I didn't want to leave behind? What if I'm still in my tiny apartment in Berkeley, my fever spiking and my memory not able to push back more than five minutes? What if I'm still on that train, having reached the end of the line, the conductors staring at my unfocused eyes, wondering who they have to call to have me shipped off to some hospital or asylum? And for the first time, I just couldn't be bothered to care? What if I am? Trapped in my own mind while my body rots, what difference does it make? Has this experience made me any less a prisoner of flesh? Am I not more free, now given a mental playground where everything is working out as well as it has been these last four years? What if it all catches up to me and I wake up twenty, thirty, forty years on, my real parents long dead and pushed into bankruptcy trying to keep their idiot son alive? Would that have been any less plausible otherwise?

I overcame the condition with just enough time to get off at my stop, the adrenaline of hearing the name of it called out over the PA enough to jump start my eternal clock, but I know part of me is still on that train, still in that apartment, tears rolling down my cheeks and soaking into that couch. And those parts of me will be there forever. But they would have been anyway. And that's quickly starting to become okay.

Besides, I'm not telling you this story because weed is bad or anything. I'm just saying listen to the theatrical people around you because the stories they tell will make for great inspiration later.

This morning, I watched the sun rise.

This is significant to me because, despite it being one of the most regular occurrences the human race is privy to, I continue to find it one of the most beautiful sights I've had the privilege to enjoy. I vividly remember watching one in high school the night after an especially persistant rain. The house I grew up in sits in a dip in the road and I had to go out in the middle of the night to clear leaves from the drainage ditch so that the lawn, and potentially the house itself, didn't flood. The next morning, in sluggish transit to an early morning class, I watched as the light of the sun triumphantly stabbed through the last few clouds that had dominated its territory for days, splaying crepuscular rays about my entire field of vision. The purples and oranges, the clouds twisting about the beams of light as if in vaporous death throes, the sting of cold and moisture in the air vanishing from my skin. I felt like I stood in place and let it burn into my memory for a half and hour.

I was late to class.



This is also significant since, despite getting up pre-dawn each day, I never see it happen. It's always snuck up while I've fallen asleep on the train or while I'm engrossed in the set of articles that have been provided to me for the morning's perusal. By the time it occurs to me to look, it's already several degrees above the horizon, having somehow transformed itself from magnificent cosmic rotational display into that annoying beam of light that's navigated itself right into my fucking eye, jesus christ, that's bright.

Lastly, it's significant because I used to watch it happen almost every single day. Working the night shift fifty miles from where I lived, driving an hour each morning meant that, close to the end of my commute, I watched the sun drag itself up over the hills 5 days a week, becoming less beautiful and important to me each time. It slowly began to embody how useless I felt in my work, how alone I felt for the 10 hours I sat in an empty disheveled office complex or trudged around an equally empty and disheveled datacenter. That massive disc became a bead on an abacus, its path on a curved rail rather than a straight one, but the message still the same.

And then one day, it changed back. As if taking a damp rag to a dusty table, all of that was wiped away and I watched the sun reclaim its position as one of hope and promise. A beacon for what's ahead.

Five minutes and thirty two seconds before that moment, I finished writing this entry.

Three years later, that's the last sunrise I can remember before this morning. There may have been others, but honestly, it's difficult for them to compete. This was the moment I attribute to the true start of my career, the end of a long depression brought on both my work and by struggles with my memory, rejoining the rest of society in the daylight. Literally stepping out of the dark.

I still worry about all the things I mentioned in the entry, of course. Probably more now than I did then. This past week has been one of the most trying in recent memory and while the present crises seem to have been resolved, when asked if all is well, our oft-shaken 8-ball still insists: "Don't count on it".

Nevertheless, it is important for me to remember the distance between the last sunrise and this one. An immense amount of ground has been covered and accomplishments I never expected to be able to claim my own stand proudly in my arsenal. It is with a mix of humility and persistant self-deprecation that I generally ignore these things. And, for my own sake, that should change. At least a little bit.

So for today, the sun now proudly ascending skyscrapers, approaching its seat of power, I will accept what it has to offer. I will allow its wealth to pour into me and I will acknowledge that it has risen.

The past few months have been something of a challenge for my skills as a self-justifier. I've moved somewhere new and had to justify that I feel comfortable and that I belong there. I've changed jobs and had to justify that I'm upholding some sort of moral guideline working for a parent company that I find reprehensible.

Tonight is different though. Tonight, when I got home from work, from an almost 2 hour commute, I fell asleep from exhaustion. I woke up three hours later, put on pajamas, talked briefly with Inna. I took my Scott Pilgrim comics off the bookshelf and picked up where I left off probably more than a year prior. It was unreasonably quiet; it still is, as if the ambient sound is drawn in by the gravity of this moment of self-consideration.

And then I got my computer out and in the face of all of that frankly compelling evidence, I begin trying to justify why I believe I'm an adult.

To a man, and when I say a man, I mean most men, and when I say most men, I mean me, he himself is not the measure of all things, as the axiom says. It is true that he measures all things against himself, but it doesn't end there. He still must measure himself. And when he does so, and by he, I mean I, he does it against his father. To a man, the measure of all things is against his father. And when my father was my age, he was already married and had been for several years. When my father was my age, I was walking.

The things my father wanted are not the things I want though. The world is different now, though it remains a struggle to separate ourselves from the accomplishments that have essentially always defined us as a civilized race. So great a struggle it begins to worry me that it borders on delusional. I feel like there's a dangerous chance that I'm pulling a Don Quixote on this, blindly rushing at the windmill that is my eventual marriage or future child. That, until these things are done, to my peers I'll just be a glorified teenager in shiny armor demanding that I'm a grown-up.

Intentionally left incomplete.

I fit very nicely on the couch that I'm on right now. It's black, made of some rough knit fabric with plump pillows that I have propped up under my legs. The couch isn't mine, but it lives in the house that I live in, so that makes us some sort of odd kin. I have fallen asleep on this couch many times now and honestly, I haven't lived here very long.

My new roommate is in the kitchen, washing the dishes. I suppose if I wanted to be exact, I should clarify that he lived here first. Technically, I'm the new roommate. I don't feel new though. I feel like this is a place I've been waiting to get to for a very long time. I don't mean lying on this couch, in this apartment on the side of the hill, listening to Crosby, Stills, Nash & Young and peering over the balcony rails. I mean where I am now. All of me. Right now.

Mother earth will swallow you

Lay your body down...

It never stays too far out of my thoughts, of course. It waits there at the end of my calculable foresight, as it always has, even before I could see it. Even now, it's a matter of faith that it's there. My vision isn't sharp enough to see how far away. If it's smiling or dissatisfied.

But for today, I can stare back at it from a very comfortable couch and wait for it. Today, it can wait for me.

Last night, I was subject to perhaps the most long and elaborate dream I've had yet in my life. While it is fading, it is doing so remarkably slowly and because some stupid part of me still believes in the significance of dreams, I feel I need to document it.

*Kristen and Karen came back down from Canada, dressed in matching white button up short sleeve tops and deep blue skirts which seemed disconcerting, though because it was heavily snowing I have no idea where we were all located. My home was in a mountainous region and was much more cramped, though by design.
*Matt, for some reason, had bought a gun. What looked very much like a Desert Eagle, gold plated and ornate and nothing he would ever buy. I believe it to be the gun used to kill a major figure in COD4:MW, the game I was playing the night previous, so that may be where it stems from.

We (and by we I mean myself, Inna, Kristen, Karen, Matt and several other unnamed friends) were all desperately trying to leave the house and for some reason I couldn't organize things so that we could properly go. I kept talking to my parents occasionally, my mother talking about how television stations no longer existed and that you picked your own content now. Eventually I was able to get out the door, but long after my companions had already left.

Our destination, oddly as the crow flies over hilly snow covered terrain, was a hot spring hotel I remember leaping off the side of a small cliff face and breaking through a ridge of ice suspended above the surface of the steaming water. As I was heavily dressed, I was forced to quickly swim to shore, I remember a HUD showing that I was taking damage to both heath and armor, displayed in a manner similar to Minecraft. I remember I was taking extra heat damage as a result of having so much clothing on, so I struggled to quickly remove it.

My eyes quickly found the shape of a woman sliding through the waters just under the surface. They found another, lying with her back to a man embracing her on the floor, looking through a Japanese shōji style door. Both these girls where both heavily tattooed and also heavily scaled and the one lying down had a mermaid's tail. The one in the water and I struck up a conversation and it became clear that the spring was also a brothel attended by mermen and women of various forms. The girl who then slid from the water before me had a slightly green scales like a cod's running down the sides of her body and very nuanced scales under her jawline. It was unsettling to admit that she was stunningly gorgeous.

Through a detached viewpoint, it was revealed that a construction company using heavy demolitions was disrupting both the business and the ability for these creatures to actively live there (as the spring was quickly becoming polluted through these activities). I watched a short meeting between the owner of the construction company and the elegant owner of the hotel, a woman who was mostly human, except for pronounced scales and large brightly colored fins just before her ears. When the arbitration did not go well and it was apparent the demolitions would continue, she quietly threatened the small man, bringing her opium pipe up against his throat and closing his carotid artery and causing his knees to go weak. When he collapsed onto the floor, she proposed a less violent solution and two of her attendants entered the room and slowly disrobed before his shocked visage. My vision dimmed here, but the implication was unmistakable. I believed, as I'm sure did anyone else, that the construction would cease.

I returned to my body out in the springs again, having a conversation made mostly of veiled threats with an merman obviously less human than the others. His head was mostly that of a sharks, and his body was unreasonably muscular. He looked at me with considerable disdain when he told me to stop talking to the woman I whom I had met swimming, as she and he, while not romantically entangled, were fucking regularly. He went on in considerable detail about how he had to show significant restraint when they did, as that if he got to involved in it, he would become overtaken by his more animal instincts and frenzy, likely decapitating her immediately. He also expressed that she was incredibly aroused by this possibility. I was, and am, unsurprised that this kind of thing show up in my dreams.

Some other, less important scenes included:

*The group being trapped in an aquarium and while this was independent of the people we had met at the hotel, the creatures were becoming incredibly violent. I watched as an attendant tried to fire a bow and arrow at a massive unidentified creature that had lifted itself from its glass chamber. While he struck it well, the beast knocked him back into an uncovered piranha tank. He was only lightly bleeding and so it took some time before the fish noticed him in the large enclosure. He pleaded with an obviously terrified coworker to help him out. It took an unreasonably long time for him to be eviscerated and he continued asking for help in the same sarcastic and increasingly desperate tone, as his blood, leaving his body into the water in thick jets, slowly obscured most of him from view.

*I sat in on some sort of odd jazz fusion yoga class, where the postures were provided by a grizzled man with a thick beard who looked to large to have been doing yoga regularly. The jazz piano was provided by a woman in a long green evening dress with her unproportionally large breasts exposed. She was frustrated at her performance, constantly trying to laugh off her mistakes to a confused audience, explaining her errors as if they were obvious, all of us just becoming increasingly unnerved by it.

*I watched the boss I like apparently assisting a high school class on low level system hardware. Also in attendance was a director from a previous job, whom I also liked significantly, though I haven't spoken to him in years. Both treat, and did treat me as a sort of neophyte, not just in IT but seemingly in all aspects of life as a result of my youth, regardless of whether such a thing was appropriate (not that I've minded). Here however, we seemed to all have an equal amount of knowledge on the subjects discussed and were all able to share concept and experiences with each other that the other two didn't know. It felt good, though I left the experienced concerned, in a moment of lucidity, that because I derived such satisfaction from it, that such respect is an element I may be lacking in my life.

*I attended an unruly baptist sermon and spoke with a group of cheery, traditionally dressed women about the drinking and celebration habits of the people of New Orleans (The city we currently resided in) at the turn of the century. They seemed genuinely entertained by my crazy random trivia; another thing that may be lacking, though the much more convenient solution is to just shut the hell up.

The dream ended with the party, who has been absent for the previous scenes, all having gathered together on two small steamships (oddly named the Britannia and the... Titanic) in the Sacramento Delta, taking part in some sort of historical recanting, as I remember a theatrical hole being blown into the sides of the Britannia. I remember we came to a stop in a dock on an island, though there's no place like this in the Delta, land could not be seen all around. I stood on the prow as we navigated to a halt and while we nearly crushed a chatty Mark Twain impersonator (or maybe not), I remarked to him that 'While it was certainly due to his being brought here on Halley's Comet that fueled his daredevilish streak, if he kept up these kinds of antics, I wouldn't expect the good fortune that he might last long enough for it to catch him on the return trip.

I remember regaining consciousness, in the dream, on the back of a Model TT, still on the island, but with no one around. A note sat nearby, from Kristen and explained that with the sharing of a lunch at a Straw Hat Pizza and an adventure as memorable as this one, that our friendship had come to its end. She thanked me for our time together and that she regretted leaving me on the island I was currently on, with no projected way of
ever returning. I stood up and heard the soft pulse of the ocean surf, saw nothing but plains of young patchy wheat. My heart sank and I began to feel my body being taken by a flood of anxiety like I'd never experienced when suddenly

I woke up.

The result is that I feel absolutely terrible. Abandoned, and more alone than I ever have. And because I am still plagued by False Memory Syndrome often enough to halfheartedly believe that dreams that feel this real (admittedly more real than I feel typing this right now) could potentially be memories of future events, bringing myself from that dream failed to grant me the escape I expected.

After all, the island might be much larger, but I am nonetheless trapped.

 

The numbers were an attempt to get myself to design an actual blog of some sort, but abandoning one project is better than abandoning two.

Things are in a greater state of flux that usual, which is uplifting, I suppose. My brain has settled into a state wherein I've map enough of it's quirks that I can begin to be productive again. I've still no substantive indicator that I am any more productive, but even the appearance of progress can sometimes be just as good.





...right?

There have been little examples of the coming concept that haven't bothered me in recent past; things much more significant than the one I'm about to tell. I don't know what makes this one important, other than the fact that I'm inherently weak to symbolism.

This morning, I'm staying at my parents house for Thanksgiving and I'm leaving to go hold a workshop for hopefully future tech employees so that they can put certain skills on their resume to make them more viable for entry level IT jobs. A nice button down shirt, blue jeans; it's business casual.

But I can't find my sneakers.

Last night is hazy, the usual seven hour blaze of slow release tryptophan, so I have no idea where I put them, but I've already found my keys, wallet and phone, so they can't be far. I spy a shoelace peeking out from under the coffee table. Aha, I think, I can now be off. Doing my shoelaces, I'm checking my inbox on my phone at this point and seeing if I need to email my partner about the lesson plan for today, and when I finish and stand up, an errant color grabs my eye.

These shoes are blue, and mine are white. These are not my shoes.

These are, in fact, my father's tennis shoes, and not my own.

But they fit me perfectly.

And now, I'm sitting here, quietly documenting this and irrationally losing my shit.

In twenty-one minutes and forty-five seconds, the sun will rise.

It has been just over eleven months that I've found myself spending an hour, usually two, waiting in the dark with my hands on a steering wheel, directing myself into a source of income. I have found some satisfaction and I have found personal development, but I have rarely found sunlight. Save for the deafening roar of datacenter fans and keyboard clacks, I have found almost universal silence.

It is inarguable that I have found progress here, but what is debatable is if that progress has been sufficient.

In the past six months, my interest in financial global proceedings has come to a head (it takes little imagination to deduce why this might be). At the same time, I have invested capital, I have gained and lost, all of it measured in percentages. In the year that I have withdrawn from the rest of the bright colorful world, it grows more and more difficult to remember (as everything is) that life isn't a simple exchange of time and money and it is difficult to deny that the idea has had rampantly negative effects on my thinking. It drives me to think of myself as widespread and likely overextended, forcibly pressing the physical remnants of spent life into volatile markets, stretching dead crystalline tendrils of my former self desperately into fallow earth, trying to take hold, trying to remain permanent.

In effect, trying to gain back ground. Measured in objective percentile.

Tonight is my last night here, and I find myself scurrying to find value and opinion to yield positive judgment. Was this a success or a failure? By what margin? Did I beat the spread? Perhaps obvious to others, none of this is plainly self-evident and it is likely to remain out of reach.

Tonight, while my terminal quietly self-formats, I will take the wheel and attempt to pilot myself into the sun, leaving the margin behind, its gains and losses to be fruitlessly sought by other men. It no longer matters to me by what quantifiable amount my formerly sunless and silent life has extended itself in a frayed circumference into the unpredictable world about me and truly, thoughts like these have likely been the chief causes of stagnation. Tonight, soon to be today, is what matters.

In five minutes and thirty two seconds, the sun will rise.

I don't own a television, which is why none of it was shipped here. I bought a 8800GTS over a month ago and just installed yesterday evening, so I have the joys of PC gaming to keep me warm (despite the fact that what I'm playing most on it is X-Com, a game authored in over fifteen years ago). As I reviewed my spending and placed these values into the 'entertainment' section of my personal budget, the passing of a thought allowed a chill down my spine. Over the past year, I've been significantly more responsible with my pay, attempting to make the jump from 'disposable income' to 'adult decisions' with what I considered to be great success. In fact, this month marks the only time I've been the least relaxed with my earnings, and it occurred to me in a mix of amusement and terror, that I've amassed a small army of entertaining objects that might bring me some temporary distraction should I for some reason lose my job and be forced from my home in Berkeley and back into the near suicidal personal shame of, at the age of twenty-five, needing to move back in with my parents.

Some time ago, a person I genuinely respected violently ended our relationship with the words "Every time I've spoken with you, I've felt your tongue slithering up my asshole." In retrospect, I admired his work greatly and apparently expressed it far beyond his tolerance, but it's only been within the past few weeks that I've come to realize a critical part of the meaning of his words.

Given the interactions I have with my workers and friends, I feel I've built a mix of people who do and do not deserve a certain level of praise. One would think it would save me quite a bit of personal energy to reduce this sample size to just the former characteristic, but it's no small rarity that we, as people, keep acquaintances that don't entirely live up to our expectations of them; People who we know have much greater potential than they are personally willing to express.

If we were to be unkind, we would call these people 'disappointments'.

We keep them because if we were to only gather superior people around us, it would be impossible to deny the realization that the weakest member of such a group is ourselves, and from that sickening realization would grow self-doubt and anger, of which we would have no outlet, its escape prevented by the desire to not further become a disappointment of our peers.

And as a result, I have tried to reward the people whom I consider my betters, both as a conduit of the expression of my self-hatred and through that exhaust, its conversion into a bolstering gift to someone whom I did indeed respect. It was often reminded to me as a child, by my family, that the people who are most deserving of praise rarely hear it, as sometimes what should earnestly be rewarded is sometimes overlooked as an expectation of the status quo. At some point in my formative years, I learned this lesson painfully and felt my bloodthirsty efforts for approval go unnoticed, and was left wanting in the kind of shock and sorrow that should never befall an otherwise joyful childhood.

It was my hope that through this willingness to reward and praise my superiors, I would gather favor and not be considered quite the disappointment I might otherwise be. This is an element of diplomacy, a characteristic by which I am, apparently, very often associated.

I'm sure that you can understand the disappointment in the realization that this is not really the case.

In some attempt to provide an example, I find that the modern society is paralyzed by the concept of social correctness. Gifts sometime go unsent or forgotten based solely on the reservations of the gifter, that their offerings might be labeled 'patronizing' or 'inappropriate' and thus are bows and ribbons left to rot for the sake of offending society. So too are pleasant words unable to find voice, simply because we might offend those who are otherwise deserving of our praise in the eyes of others.

This, on the other hand, is not the diplomacy for which I wished to be known. This is petty, callous bullshit, and if it were to find itself stricken from our morays, I would instantly be so much more the sane and relaxed man, as it would mean I would have saved myself considerable time typing. What the aforementioned activity does require, as does genuine diplomacy, is calculated patience, not just for those above us, but also for those who we would otherwise prefer not to associate, if we did not find them so amicable or charming or eager to find use and approval.

And it is of this patience that I have found myself unceremoniously drained.

Certain individuals, in the past months, have served as exercises not just of social futility, but a considerable expense on my ability to maintain personal civility and sanity. While it is by personal admission that I am far from myself, now that it has almost been a year, it is perhaps this new mental detriment that has allowed me to understand what considerable suffering I endure as a result of the actions of these acquaintances on both personal and professional levels. It has finally become apparent to me that, despite a person's ability, whether you place them above or below you, regardless of your desire to reward, people can still find a way to become complete disappointments.

Diplomacy is about carefully deflecting confrontation. However, if confrontation insists, there is no reason I should not also be good at that as well.

Came off the highway tonight on the way to work and was hit by an unlicensed, uninsured gentleman who couldn't speak English. This individual not only lacked the decency to admit to the police that he had run the red that allowed him to collide into my passenger-side front body panel at well over 50+ mph, but also apparently failed to replace any of the seat belts in his vehicle, as they had gone missing upon inspection. Luckily, neither he or his fucking ~8 year-old son were harmed. It was also pretty classy that he tried to drive away from the accident, but the damage that he had incurred to his own left front wheel prevented him from doing so.

I was annoyed at myself that I discovered that, when the awkward and cliched phrase 'I no speak English' fell out of his mouth, I immediately questioned whether or not he was insured, had a license, or even a valid citizenship. I do not often jump to conclusions, but his stature, dress and demeanor did not reflect favorably on him. Nevertheless, I thought, I'm sure this will turn out fine. His insurance will cover the frankly undeniable damage to my front-end, and in six months, I'll have forgotten all about this.

The cops arrived as my assailant was dialing 'friend who talk English to you', since you can't go about 16 feet in San Jose without running into a police cruiser. I have to admit, when the first words out of the officer's mouth were 'What, this guy have no license?', my heart sank considerably. After a report was taken, after I had my cards, registration and insurance information all return to me, he continued. "This is 95% of my job, you know, for 10 years. Take information for a report on the guy, tow his car. Undocumented, Uninsured... All of San Jose is like this."

I've long been satisfied by the stereotypes foisted on me by government and corporation; I wonder why I continue to allow myself to believe that the same expectations as applied to the individual are unacceptable.

The condition my life and mind are in right now... I'm getting pretty sick of it. A construction can only be manipulated to such an extent before you destroy it, bent so far before it breaks. The changes I've made and will make soon are dramatic ones; The only risk now is how far I'm able to bend with them.

This journal might a go a bit more off the rails than usual in the foreseeable future, so if you'd like to check out, I've appreciated your stay. Comments on future entries will be screened or disallowed based on how I happen to feel about the content when it arrives. Frankly, I'm don't know and am not sure I care how that pans out. To be honest, it's getting a bit difficult to pay the required amount of attention anymore.

---

The walls of the cage on the 16th floor aren't. They're floor to ceiling glass looking out into the surrounding valley in much they way it might look if you stood on a stepladder at the bottom of an empty swimming pool. The MPT building is 15 stories high, but it's far from the tallest building in the area, so the horizon is constantly interrupted by huge rectangular structures at odd intervals. The arid surfaces of the surrounding hills certainly aren't the prettiest thing to look at, but at least their design is consistent.

A new one is going up just to the right of the San Jose Marriott. I've never claimed to know much about skyscraper construction beyond having beaten SimTower, but I've always been confused by the method the crews take in assembling them. The bottom floors look all but complete now, but the skeletal structure of the complex still rises up into the sky, obscenely unfinished, as if the thing was dissolving upwards. At the angle I'm standing, the giant steel girders look very much like an outstretched hand, painfully contorted into a claw, trying to dig its way into the surface of the sky, pulling itself as if out of the earth.

These days, I am constantly engrossed in internal debate about whether or not to support the belief that this generation is the one that achieves cognitive immortality through machines. I very much believe that if it is not ours that attains it, it will be that of our direct progeny, but, of course, that matter very little to us, doesn't it? It's a hard realization to swallow that the first immortal species will have sprouted forth from a painfully mortal one. At this point, I have become fairly resigned to the idea either way. If, in my fifty-fifth year, I'm presented the opportunity to sidestep the inconvenience of my passing, that's an endless bridge I'll choose to cross then and there.

These three paragraphs are interconnected by the idea that, as I stare out at this vile claw, tearing a giant hole in the fabric of morning, it occurred to me that even if I do live forever, I never wish to live in a time when it becomes a rare commodity to afford a sight of the natural sky from the surface of the earth.