sounding the fury

I was going to write something about fire, but I can’t think of any unifying theme that would allow me to mention Prometheus, Trogdor (the burninator), and the fact that fire conducts electricty.

But those three things are equally cool.

While employment is a big part of our lives, I’ve always wondered if it’s something worth doing. Paul Graham’s essays, particularly on startups, hold a definite fascination.

I’m leaving my current job soon, taking a leap into unemployment with nothing but admission to two bars, some will-writing experience under my belt, and the hope of something better.

Or, perhaps more properly, the hope of being something better than I am now. My job is by no means difficult, and while there are some challenges, they are uninteresting enough to actually be challenging. They’re boring, and so I’ve just been shutting down (with increasing depth and rapidity of late).

I guess I need to have a word with Adam Smith, because quite frankly, I am getting tired of being divorced from my labor. I want to own it. I want to do something hard and worthwhile, and I want my days to mean something. Anybody want to help?

She dropped her shoulders, lifted her chin, and surrendered to the cold. As the heat left, so did the need to shiver, replaced instead by her resignation to hate. She pushed her shoulders back, inviting the wind in further. Fine then: let it come.

And come it did, raging over rocks and trees, swarming, dodging, an irresistable force that swept all before it, tearing her and everything else in its path from gravity’s hands. When the fury had subsided – was it even fury – can you personify something that is so obviously foreign? I don’t know, but the human power to hate even those things that are not sentient, are not even concious or even anything more than the simple flow of atoms over other atoms in a way we disprove of, is an endless, unrelenting force unto itself, driving us to strike over and over against the abtract, to try to dominate something that can never be subjegated, that will never recognize victory or defeat. Finally, the devotion to defeating that which cannot care is joining with it, letting its abnegation become yours.

When the dust finally subsided, she lay drunk. For three days, she’d had nothing but beer. Dark, foul, mossy Guinness, bought with the intent of having something else, for a change, to hate. The whiskey provided the roar that drowned out everything else.

Shaking, she rose, and plodded to the bathroom, occasionally hitting the wall and turning slightly each time, before she collapsed in the tub and turned on the water. Cold water clmibed the legs of her jeans, rousing her enough to turn on the hot tap. When it finally spilled over on to the floor, she turned it off and sat until it turned lukewarm, and then frigid. Shivering, she stripped off the clothes in the tub.

Wanting only to swim away, she floated, nowhere to go, caged by all this, surely as if she had been in an aquarium. It wasn’t the sides of the tub that held her, not the walls of the bathroom, the doors on the house, or the boundaries of the city. No place on earth would be an escape.

She drank a bottle of shampoo, and spent hours throwing up.

I don’t know what happened next, because my answering machine ran out of room.

Grace is imaginary, it does not exist. Or, if it does, it’s like Einsteinium, some rare element that only exists for moments in a tremendous collision of atoms and protons, there and then gone again, unsustainable and ephemeral but somehow elemental on the periodic table of humanity. For most of us, careening through life, stumbling over our emotions and actions, grace is not a constant state – it’s nothing more than a few moments of dignity that you muster during a fall. Hobbes descrived the human condition right – nasty, brutish and short (an apt description of me, incidentally), and yet, under the fiercest pressure, with protons smashing around us, every now and then we manage to create, for a few moments, this rare element of grace, before it evaporates, leaving us alone, our knees torn and bleeding, and packed with the more basic elements of human existence – pain, humiliation and anger. And maudlin, I suppose.

Strange pets I have wanted throughout my life:

• trained attack cat (siamese preferred)
• falcon
• german shepard trained as a seeing eye dog who made it most of the way through but then failed the final seeing eye dog tests
• domestic chore robot
• a chimp named “bobo fett”
• a tiny giraffe
• some sort of convergence device – phone/computer/music and movie player/game system which is self-aware enough to make good dinner reservation and screen out the restaurants that don’t have anything vegetarian
• jon stewart