My daughter observed the other day how weeds can grow in a crack in the concrete on a bridge and she thought it was remarkable how something can grow like that. I told her weeds grow when no one does anything. It takes effort and energy to grow good things and keep the weeds out. But weeds, they thrive in the absence of care.
Such a funny thing, time. Apparently, there is a time for everything. And a season for every activity under heaven:
A right time for birth and another for death, a right time to plant and another to harvest, a right time to kill and another to heal, a right time to destroy and another to construct, a right time to cry and another to laugh, a right time to lament and another to cheer, a right time to make love and another to abstain, a right time to embrace and another to part, a right time to search and another to count your losses, a right time to hold on and another to let go, a right time to rip out and another to mend, a right time to shut up and another to speak up, a right time to love and another to hate, a right time to wage war and another to make peace.
That’s from the Bible, in Ecclesiastes, chapter 3, and I have no clue what time it is.
So flighty and persistent and irreverent, time is. Plowing through everyone and everything in its path; leaving in its wake a mess of poor, rusted souls drowning in the ebb and flow of their own disproportionate shadows, fruitlessly triangulating their own flickering lights, akin to sleepy, hollow jack-o-lanterns long after the candy-crazed hordes have gorged themselves to the cusp of sugar-induced comas.
When time dissolves away the facade of what has or has not been done, how could it ever be undone? How would a person ever recover from such a devastating blow as realizing they’ve wasted the gift of time that time gave them?
So now what? Am I left in that place between asleep and awake desperately trying to make sense out of all that I’ve done and not done; all that I’ve said and not said — as if my life or someone else’s hangs in the balance at each fork in my road? Am I abandoned in this place where fear is god, and god is the notion that I missed an appointment… that the right times to do the right things have vaporized while I sit frozen in an ice storm trying to determine precisely when is the right time to do or say what needs to be done or said?
Gridlock. How critical it is to have a dependable clock.
Sitting here unready for the day and the weekend to end tormented by a notion. An idea. Something to feel passionate about. Something to awaken my slumbering amusement:
How dare Aspen condescend and request Willow’s eyes to lift up… to open its arms to the heavens.
One, born to reach; the other, to wear its own gravity. How cocky and self-righteous, Aspen, with all those brilliant colors and shimmering leaves. How fitting, the ashen bark and cozy cliques. “Have you, Aspen, ever stopped to ask Willow, ‘Why the weeping?’”
This weekend we watched Invictus, a story about Nelson Mandela and his insight into the hearts and minds of his nation. One phrase keeps going over and over in my mind, “You criticize without understanding.”
I didn’t realize until I actually wrote it out just how opposing those two statements are… Mandela’s astute observation and my judgment of Aspen. I wasn’t prepared for this. I just wanted to write out a succinct, powerful, emotional statement, a one-liner that held me captive today and be done with it. But as soon as I wrote it I recognized the seedling of fallacy. That statement, that ignorant, gross miscalculation was all I had in my head when I sat down to write, realizing now that my most conscious thoughts from today have culminated into an overly judgmental statement based only on my perceptions and blindness that typically adorns the notion that deep down underneath everything, life has to be fair–as if I deserve whatever it is that someone owes me. I was wholeheartedly ready to run to Willow’s defense from Aspen’s persecution. I had adequately projected my own frustrations onto Aspen, convincing myself that I have the right to defend Willow. And my defense was going to be awesome. Ready? Here it is:
How can one tell another what to do, or what the other should be doing when both are so different and the only thing they have in common is the dirt they grow in?
Yeah. I know. Awesome! Right? Not so much. I couldn’t leave it. I just couldn’t ignore the problem I just created. Trying to get to the root of this, and being curious, and with never enough time, I took to the internets* to see if my anger at Aspen was righteous or self-righteous. I read up a little on Willow and learned a few things. Things like how Willow has medicinal properties for relieving aches and fevers. Its bark contains a growth hormone, and its roots are remarkable for their toughness, size, and tenacity to life. Yeah… tenacity… Willow has this unwillingness to let go. A tirelessness. This only became fuel for my fire against Aspen. Charging Aspen with having no compassion. Then I started learning a little something about Aspen. Turns out Aspen knows about treating aches and pains too. And I learned that Aspen is much older that it looks. Buried under its glamor and shimmer–under its youthful fluttering and quaking–can be millenniums of down-to-earth wisdom and a similar sense of perseverance. On one hand, there’s Aspen, jubilant and carefree. Hope based on knowing, almost to the point of undermining the very essence of hope. And on the other hand: Willow, solemn and aware. Beyond empathy.
So… how dare Aspen not reach out for the hope of the heavens with all that it knows. And Willow… overly aware and burdened. You can’t stop weeping for those who’ve run out of tears. There’s nothing fair about this, but being fair is not what it’s about.
Eat. Sleep. Repeat. Life goes through cycles, just like the trip-hop I’m currently streaming. Repetitious. Revolutions with no sense of revolution. Loops and aural vertigo. And each new spin brings subtle changes which build upon the previous one or discontinue something else, fading it out. My current iteration brings something new for me. I think. It seems ghostly familiar, but it dissipates like a dream when I try to pin it down. Déjà vu. I feel like I’m stuck at a high RPM in a minimalist trance composition. A broken record. The droning, endless BPM is killing me from the inside out. Where is the piano kissing me with the words my soul longs to hear?
This all started a few weeks ago. Maybe it was a couple months ago. I don’t know. Maybe it was always there and I’ve just been in denial about it. Anyway, not too long ago, I casually asked a friend: Do you ever have days where you’re just not amused… by anything? “Hmph… yep, everyday.” she replied. Genuine. Smart Ass. Empathy laced with a twist of sarcasm, and a boat-load of cynicism. Somehow that seemingly insignificant question, an escaped convict of my mind now out running rampant through my soul, has not left me.
I cannot stop thinking about why my amusement is broken… I’ve no clear answers, only broad-strokes, superfluous themes and dusty stage props which, individually, don’t seem to matter; but added up they somehow account for this rift I’m falling into, or climbing out of.
I keep trying to either “fix”, or ignore this feeling. But it rapidly became the giant elephant in the middle of my room and I’m walking around pretending it’s not there while also being very well aware of its presence so as to be careful to not disturb it.
Sometimes to fix something, you have to rip it completely apart and rebuild it. I think this is one of those times. It’s messy and exhausting. I feel like I’m breaking and I need to get back to the opposite of breaking.
So for now, I’ll try leaving my amusement parked, over there, in that space on the side of this road while I step aside and try to catch my breath. A little time looking in from the outside might help. I hope so. Losing my amusement feels like burying hope under six feet of realism. Feels like dying… hmm… maybe that’s what seems familiar. Vague, I know. Melodramatic, yeah, I know.
My recollection is fuzzy. But I’ll do my best to fabricate the missing pieces such that detecting their absence would be improbable.
Fade through white.
We were working our way through the checkout line at the local * Megamart. A man was making his way upstream from the rest of us asking almost everyone something. Maybe he was asking everyone the same question, or maybe something specific to the askee. Regardless, he was getting the same answer, “No.” Some just shook their heads silently. Some answered with their faces, while others flat-out said it in an “Are you crazy?” sort of way.
It was our turn. Scruffy face. Long hair pulled back. Clothes that have seen better days. Hard to tell if he was pushing his thirties or pulling his twenties. Caucasian. Would have no trouble blending as a boardwalk regular down at Pacific Beach. Anxiously, “Do you have the device?”
The device… device? My brain tussled through all the possible things that could fit that description, trying desperately to understand what this very impatient man was talking about without risking my chance to give him an honest answer, or risking an undesired reaction for wasting his time. “Are you talking about this?” I reached into our shopping cart and pulled out a weighty silver canister (marked with various trefoil emblems) out from under some new clothes for the kids. Uranium? Plutonium? What the hell is this?!
“Yes! Yes. Shhhh…” Trying fruitlessly to contain his excitement, “How much do you want for it?”
“I don’t know. Maybe two or three hundred?” I was so perplexed about this situation. Why was this device in my cart? He gave me the cash — $300 — took the device and disappeared into the parking lot. We continued through the checkout and went back to our hotel room which, wouldn’t you guess, was also in * Megamart. The next 30 minutes or so went by as uninterestingly as possible. Then the room shook and the chaos started. All manor of city officials were suddenly everywhere, trying to get everyone out of the building, and out of the area. We packed up our things and realized our van was parked on the other side of the premises. “I’ll go get the van. Keep the kids with you. I’ll be right back.” I kissed Jen and headed out.
Half way to our van. I was stopped by some lady in a fallout suit directing me to turn around and get out of there. She held up a card with four stripes or sections on it with a stepped progression of magenta towards white. “See this? When this part turns white like this, it means the radioactivity is far beyond the tolerable level. You need to evacuate. Now.”
“Can I have one of those cards?” I asked her. She handed me one and reiterated that I need to be turning around and then her attention diverted to some other people who were also heading this way. I kept going past her, looking for our van. The air was thick and dusty… no, more like foggy. White-ish. The bottom stripe on my card was turning from deep magenta to a washed out tint and the words “Warning, radioactivity detected, level 1″ appeared in that stripe. I kept going, covering my mouth with my shirt as if the fallout coated everything with the fine drywall dust from a construction site.
I found our van. I had trekked past it and had to double-back a bit. By now the top stripe had been activated and read, “Intolerable radioactive levels detected. Life unsustainable.” It seemed difficult to breathe. There was movement near the van. It was my son just wandering about, playing with some toy waiting for me to open the van so he could climb in. “What are you doing out here? Where’s mommy? Why are you not with her?” The questions rattled out effortlessly. He just looked at me and non-chalantly replied with a non-answer. “We have to get out of here! The air is poisonous!” I barked.
A television in the window behind me was tuned to the news with aerial shots of the area and all you could see was a white cloud and some outlines of buildings. Then they cut to security camera footage of the impatient man yelling at the entrance to * Megamart saying something about things “now being fair” and “that’s what you get for…[unintelligible sounds].” He was arrested. I think I passed out.
I woke up to a doctor pointing to an area of my chest on a sheet of film baffled that my cancer disappeared.
This is nothing new… the concept and methods of using PHP inside of CSS has been gratuitously documented on the internets. So why am I posting this? Because.
At work, we use highly structured and dynamic CSS files which contain plops (yes, plops) of PHP to do things like automatically write the absurd cross-browser rules for rounded corners by only typing out <?php echo CSSFunctions::border_radius(6); ?> …among other things like reusable color variables and color blenders. CSS is powerful as it is. But without an inherent logic framework, hooking up with PHP makes CSS super. Side note: you can do browser detection with PHP and write functions that return the appropriate CSS rules for the beloved various browsers.
Okay, with that intro out of the way, onto my point: My current personal project — that I’ve been working on, on-and-off, for the last gazillion years — was using stock CSS files and I wanted to convert them to use these sup’d up CSS+PHP files (since I’m all into super CSS files now from work) but I could not get them to work!
Clarification: I could not get them to work the way I wanted them to work…
The cheap way to do it is to use an actual PHP file like this: <link rel="stylesheet" type="text/css" href="styles.php" media="screen" />
And then you give that php file a header directive that tricks the internet machines into thinking that the linked file is oh, just your average run-of-the-mill CSS file: <?php header("Content-type: text/css"); ?> But, any self-respecting coder knows (perhaps at a paranoid level) that someone will look at their code and not be fooled as easily as the machines.
So an alternative method involves some web-server finagling via a little black magic and one o’ them there .htaccess files with some rules that look like:AddType application/x-httpd-php .css This tells the web server to not send the CSS files directly to your web browser but to route them through the PHP bucket first.
But this was not working for me! So after another round of searching for some kind of a solution, and for all you inter-web architects out there, I found this: AddHandler php-cgi .css Notice the “php-cgi” bit… not all web servers are set up equally. Oh, and I also learned that the difference between the “AddType” vs. “AddHandler” directive is like the difference between “Country Crock” and “I Can’t Believe It’s Not Butter!” whatever that means. So this made it work.
Clarification: this made it work, but still not how I wanted it to work…
I didn’t want to force all my .css files to get PHP’d on. So I plugged in ‘.cssp’ into that special AddHandler line and then… cue drum roll… it didn’t work. But then…! I remembered to change the name of my CSS file to be ‘style.cssp‘ and everything was golden. :)
Clarification: It was more like silver. This is what made it golden:
<FilesMatch "\.(cssp|style)$"> Now I can add any number of file extensions that I want PHP’d to the match array without bloating my .htaccess file!
SetHandler php-cgi
</FilesMatch>
The End.
One day, about a thousand years ago, this song found me… dying, drifting away from my own life, family, love, passions and feelings one line of code at a time for way too much time floating like a ghost between work and home and back again. There’s so much in these lyrics for me about God and myself and Jen that sometimes I can’t decipher which part applies to who. Today is one of those times.
Somewhere, somehow, sometime ago
Back when the field was filled with snow
I hardly knew what I had to say
I hardly knew what I had…I was with you when you were down, down, down… see you again
I was there, I heard you say, “Hey, hey, hey… Wish you were here.”Sleep in, sleep well, sleep best alone
Don’t cry your eyes are made of stone
I hardly cared when you left me there
I almost left…Deep down, wish you were here.
Words and music by: The Stars of Track and Field
A friend of mine recently posted this status update:
I am physically incapable of becoming tired at the appropriate time at night.
And it made me think. Well, not at first. At first my reply was, “So do it then. Start it. Get it out of your head and make it happen!” Flippantly, I typed without the slightest attempt at research or even speculation into the many reasons for insomnia. I typed without thinking. Then I started thinking.
Thinking is not always the best thing to do. So many nights I lay down unwillingly at the end of my day, next to my gorgeous wife. The part about laying next to my gorgeous wife is not the unwilling part. Sometimes, “thinking” results in massive life changes. Which as we all know means that life changes. Too many nights I lay down and go to bed tired — exhausted actually — and unsatisfied; like my day and all my energies spent in all the various ways with various people was a waste of time. Like I did it all wrong. Something’s missing, but I don’t know what. And when it’s time to wake up, I’ll wake up tired and just as unsatisfied from my sleep not being remotely fruitful. What else could I be doing? What else should I be doing? If I knew, would I even want to do that? I have dreams. I have ideas and yet, from day to day, I count the lines on the faces of Father Time with none of my dreams one tick-tock mark closer to being realized.
And so, unwillingly, I put my pants on the ground and my head on my pillow. My eyes close and the monsters I try so hard to keep at bay all day (with notable success) lay in wait for this moment, when my guard is down and my mind is wandering through everything — they attack. The goblins of potential. They spin me up and my head riles with inadequacy and lethargy and so many questions. “You need to get caught up on new design blogs. Why haven’t you started that iPhone app yet? When will you organize your digital life and get rid of the cruft and duplicates and deprecated files? You know you said you were going to start drawing again… you even bought a drawing book, which is still blank with the exception of one page. And what ever happened to waking up early to spend some time reading the Bible? Not to mention writing those stories down that are clogging up your brain cells.” And so on. It’s so easy to drown in my own accusations of how lame I am.
So what now? Right? I get stuck in not-sleeping-mode when it’s too late to do anything about it and there’s no hope for time tomorrow to do anything outside of what already needs to be done. Rinse. Repeat. Then I drift away somewhere between “Yes! I’m totally going to do that!” and “Forget it. I’m never going to have time to do that.”
Of course… it can’t stay like this for long. It takes way too much energy to keep the status quo. So maybe a few more cycles and things will have to change and either the monsters will get bored of me and just go away, or maybe I’ll actually have some time to do a few things I’ve got on my mind. In hindsight it would seem that I could have done something about my dilemma instead spending two hours too long writing this. But complaining gives somewhat of a sense of accomplishment without having to really do anything.
Oh, and my apologies for wasting your time… it started out all promising. This is all I got right now.
The other night we took our kids out on a date. Kai had a rough evening, we were all hungry, and the “neighborhood grill” seemed to suit our fancies.
As parents of young children, Jen and I try hard to cultivate in them the things we value; the things we’ve learned (usually the hard way). I pray my daughters will know their worth. That they will stand up for themselves and others and not put up with being treated as objects. That they realize who their mother is and wish most to be like her. That they will seek and crave kindness and gentleness in boys and will spot the punk-ass ones a mile away and steer clear. That they compare every guy they meet to me and the way they are treated by me. That they will be empowered to fly without the chains of oppression so many women get trapped in. I want my son to grow into a man that honors people, respects them, fights for justice and knows grace — both how to extend it and receive it. That he will have respect for the world around him. That he won’t make my same mistakes. I pray he treats girls with a protective, virtuous heart, and that he will be an example of goodness for the guys he’ll spend his time with. He and I have this ongoing debate over what the most important thing is in the universe. “People are.” I tell him, “Everything you can think of will always break down either to the benefit or to the distress of people. Otherwise, nothing in this universe matters.” It’s fun to see him propose alternatives to hold that #1 Most Important spot, and then watch his eyes both sink and gleam in the same instant as he answers my questions about that thing when he realizes I’m right.
Oh, so many things I hope and pray for my kids.
So, back to the other night at the restaurant… This is a difficult story to tell. I’m still disturbed by what happened, yet so torn about feeling the way I do. Trying to work it out… So here goes:
I needed to take a detour on the way to our table. I had some “stuff” to “work out” and needed a quiet place to “sit”. Shortly thereafter, this guy walks into the restroom and chooses the urinal directly in front of the stall occupied by myself. Now, time out: I don’t make a habit of paying much, if not any, attention to people when they are indisposed, just as I was. Ok, time in: This guy’s behavior was so odd to me I couldn’t help but rack my brain trying to figure out what was going on. Lifting his head up like he was inspecting the ceiling, he kept holding his non-occupied hand up to his nose as if to either cram something way in there, or dig deep to get something out. But there were sounds. Like sharp sniffing sounds, but more like a reverse sniff, like a burst of air going out. I was baffled. I didn’t want to believe any of the options I suggested to myself for what that could be. And a facet to the disturbing-ness of this whole experience is my own predisposed acceptance of what might be happening if only he looked the part. This whole post would be naught if he looked like someone who might be inclined to perform cowboy blows in public. I hate that I think that. I hate that I was so shocked by this guy’s behavior. A stocky, tall man, older, clean-shaven with steely, short hair and semi-modern squared-off glasses. On sheer stereotypical appearances, I’d say this guy was a mid-40-something, white, Republican banker/respectable white-collar business man. Yet there was this odd disconnect. At one point during his stay, he turned around and tried to look into my stall as if it had just occurred to him that someone just saw what he did. A few minutes and a handful of those bursting noises later, he left. There was no washing of hands. So anyway, about half a minute later I realized those sounds were from him spitting loogies on the wall. I could see them dripping down! Dripping off the plexiglass covered advertisements onto the urinal’s plumbing and then onto the urinal itself. Nasty, phlegm-infected, upper-middle-class slimy spit.
One of the things we try to teach our kids is respect. Respect for other people’s property and respect for their time and work. I know there are people in the world who couldn’t care less about anyone but themselves. I know that. Read some earlier stories here if you need to be assured that I know people can be horrible. I know there are people who go out of their way to cause trouble. But seeing it happen right in front of me in such blatant display by someone who under just about any other circumstance I might actually try (or think I need) to look up to just shook me at my core.
When I got back to the table with my family I saw this guy sitting at his table with his guests, smiling and ordering food and getting served by the very establishment he completely disrespected, as if he did nothing wrong; sitting next to his wife or girlfriend or co-worker or sister, who knows. The point is that he looked so… so not like someone who would hock loogies in a restaurant bathroom like some mid-pubescent teenage boy with a drunk step dad from a broken home all angry about nothin’ and confused as all hell about everything, or like some deep southern trailer dweller in a NASCAR muscle shirt and some green Crocs, wearing a “#3″ ball cap sponsored by some trashy beer brand who couldn’t give a shit about the poor sap who has to clean the bathrooms cause that would actually be a better job than the one he’s got. And, yes, I did just write that. Because I’m so pissed at myself for thinking if he were like that, then I would have expected it and I could move on with my life boxing people up for the stereotypes they dress like, or sound like. Then I’d be able to keep my safe, clean distance from people and pretend that goodness is abundant and things will be so easy for my kids cause they’d just have to remember to avoid “people like that.”
This is where the music changes and you’re not sure if something good or bad is about to happen. If I had super-powers, one of which being telepathy, I so would have beamed my thoughts to this guy in migraine proportions. To what end though? For what reason? What good would it have done? Why was I so upset by that whole ordeal? What. Because there was no justice? Because someone will have to clean up after this pig? I think I’m so disturbed by this because I unwillingly let people shock me. Because I’m a salesman’s dream. Because I’ll almost always seek out the good in people and pretend the bad is not so bad, and if the good is not so good, I’ll pretend for that too, despite how clear the Bible is when I read these words:
There is no one righteous, not even one; there is no one who understands, no one who seeks God. All have turned away, they have together become worthless; there is no one who does good, not even one.*
You see, if I accept that… If I truly and whole-heartedly buy into the fact that us humans are pretty much doomed and our only chance at redemption is God’s grace, then my world changes. I grew up believing in God and Jesus; believing the Bible and “trying to be good” but this is different for me. This is the real life application that youth group night couldn’t touch. Accepting those words in context of this guy and my own prejudices and self-righteous judgements mean that I fall under those words too and have no place to think in my mind those thoughts I wrote just then. Then I am forced to extend grace to this guy and I have no other choice than to see him as human in need of that grace. And it forces me to consider that same grace extended to me. It forces me to put my own self under my own microscope. And it frees me up completely to be able to look my son in the eye with rectitude when I tell him “People are the most important things in the universe.”
* emphasis added.
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