If I Were To Write The Truth...

...what would I say?  The truth is sometimes easy to say, this I know.  I do believe that some easy truths are best reserved for certain ears only.  These are truths that preserve their power for being known by the fewest number possible.  There are truths only to be known to doctors, lawyers and lovers.

There are truths that are harsh, so harsh that to utter them is to rend the fabric of life.  These "unavoidable facts of our existence"  can rip us apart, but they shouldn't be avoided.  Putting it off too long can mean the difference between merely being beaten and utter implosion.

There are truths, the ones we should spend more time on, that are so beautiful that they can only be shared with fewer and fewer people, perhaps obtaining utter completeness when shared only between two people.  These, too, should not be avoided.  Share them as soon as possible, with another.

As cynical and skeptical as I can be, I nurse within my heart a desire for truth.  I don't often let on that I believe that a major reason why we as human beings are on this planet is to share love, which I fancy sometimes to be the only Truth that really matters.

Shh.  Don't tell anybody...but the Truth is, this cynical heart of mine really does believe in the truth of Love.  I'm a softie that way.

And if anyone gives me any guff about it...I'll punch 'em inna head.  With love, of course.

Adventure in the Metawebs

It is a long-held belief of mine that the internet is an exercise in recursion, a collective echo chamber with infinitely overlapping inputs.  To put it another way, its a never-ending Grand Canyon with an infinite number of people surrounding it and shouting into it to hear the words reflected back, gently fading.  No doubt this creates an environment where one can never be sure if one heard what one thought one heard.  Was it your voice? was it someone else?  Was is it a synergistic hybrid of who knows how many different voices?  In effect, much of what comes back is noise.  Noise, with a tinge of signal.

It is not all like this.  There are nuggets, gems cast up on the electronic shore like pearls among the gravel.  It will always be mathematically possible, if highly improbable, that something significant we cast off into the cybervoid will slowly make its way back to the home system.  Ladies and gentlemen, this has happened to me.

I have been quoted in an online magazine with some exposure.

What makes this weird (for me, at least) is that I was quoted from a comment I left on one of the articles some weeks ago.  So it wasn't from a direct question, or an interview or sound bite.  It was from an off-the-cuff leisure time activity of mine.

I received an email notifying me that I had been quoted, and thought it was spam.  Imagine my (mild) surprise when it turned out to be legit.  Imagine, little ol' me laid down some verbiage that someone felt noteworthy enough to quote in an article.  Strange and nice at the same time.

For those who are curious, here's the link:  THE GOOD MEN PROJECT.  My two cents is the fourth one down under responses.  I'd appreciate you giving it, and TGMP, a read; they have a good thing going.

Rock and Roll Animal

New Year's Eve, 2010, I attended my first rock and roll club show in years.  Many, many years.  I wanted to see J. Roddy Walston & The Business, a group whose debut album has been in heavy rotation on my iPod since it came out earlier in the year.  I had missed them at a previous show, in a smaller venue, and reckoned now was the time.  Carpe diem, and all that.

The band went on at midnight, right after the ball dropped.  It was like opening the door into a hurricane.  A loud, raucous and just-this-side-of-controlled hurricane.

Standing there, about four people back from the stage, stomping my feet, pumping my fist and shouting choruses at the top of my lungs, I felt something wake up inside.  Something that had been asleep for a long, long time: the animal, and it felt good.  It was like watching a jaguar stretch, flex and growl.  It makes the blood run hot, and alive.

The tired, run-down me shook hands with the rock star me, and together we pushed back the great gray walls of the universe.  The volume knob on life went to eleven.

And it was good.

Stump

I used to be so big and strong

Yeah that's me alright

Straight backed beside the trail

Where hardly anyone notices

Me anymore, because I'm not pretty

I used to know my right from wrong

People pass me by swinging sticks

Or riding bikes, treading on the roots

I used to have (and that still ache)

The original phantom limbs

I used to never be afraid

They hurt, the ache ferocious

Cold steel hammers on my bones

Fucking hikers and bikers, man,

Don't care because I don't scream

(I used to be somebody!)

Silent counsel I keep, because really?

My mouth has gone missing

Fallen away, ruined by the Challenger Deep

pressure of time on the carcass

I used to have something inside

Pressure: eventually will collapse me

External shell, fissured, baked by sun,

Cracked by cold and wind, illusions

That the core is warm and molten

Now its just this hole that's open wide

Void opening up inside, ignorant eyes can't see it

Rot setting in because death creeps quietly

Causing the pocked face you can see

And I would try to hide but for lack of hands

I used to want it all

Wanting it all is a foreign country

A former cradle that made my limbs

Swell fat and strong and near perfect

Until I fell, insect-hollowed, lightning-beaten

I used to be somebody

I was.

Photo credit: Irish Gumbo
Italicized phrases: Lyrics used without permission, from "Down In It" by Nine Inch Nails

Johnny Cash and the Digital Underground Butter My Bread

“I’m thankful that God has inspired me to want to write, and that He might possibly use me to influence somebody for the good, if I can see the opportunities through the smokescreen of my own ego.”
- Johnny Cash, quoted from Cash: The Autobiography

“Well, yeah, I guess it's obvious, I also like to write.

All ya had to do was give Humpty a chance

and now I'm gonna do my dance.”
-Shock G, aka Humpty Hump, The Humpty Dance

I am an architect by profession (or rather, that is my job; big difference there!) and have been one for 19 years, not counting 5 years of larnin’ to be an architect. I wanted to be an architect ever since the seventh grade, when I decided one sunny day that is what I wanted to be when I grew up. No question about it. I decided that in part because I was convinced that architects built houses for a living, which is something I was fascinated with. With that in mind, I kept my nose to the academic grindstone as it were, and did well enough to get accepted to the only school that I wanted to attend. No names, but it was in state, in the mountains and is big. I left the Big School with my B.Arch in hand and was ready to get out there and start designing houses; I had a plan!

As a famous general once said “No plan survives contact with the enemy” (or something very much like it), and in my case Reality was the enemy. The problem was I did not realize that for a long, long time. Roughly 15 years, actually. 15 years is a long time to keep butting heads with the stubborn facts in front of you; 15 years is a LONG time to do anything. I learned in that time that architecture, as wonderful as it can be, is not an easy profession. Most architects do not design houses as their main source of income, most architects are not and never will be the next I.M. Pei or Frank Gehry (I certainly won’t), and there is generally a low compensation-to-effort ratio. In a lot of ways, you really have to love it to want to stick with it. I thought I did. I told myself I did, for many, many years. I did a pretty good job of distracting myself: by God, I was going to be an architect! It took a serious, serious tragedy to snap its fingers in my face and shout “HEY!” to get my attention.

The premature birth and subsequent early death of my twin daughter and son in 2003 was a cosmic frying pan to the face. Those events truly knocked me off my pins. I started a journal in the NICU (one of the nurses strongly suggested I do it; she blessed me!) and have kept it ever since. It was one of a very few things that offered me a rope of sanity out of a hellhole of despair. I truly believe it helped save my life. Writing gave me a grip on the world, made me feel a lot better about everything. It made me feel at home.

Thick-headed I am (why am I channeling Yoda?), and I failed to see the painfully obvious. Writing was something I really enjoyed, seemed to have some skill in it, and it fit perfectly with my temperament. People were asking me if I was a writer. How many clues did I really need to convince me that, while architecture did me some good and paid my bills, maybe what I should be doing is WRITING? The kicker came just recently when I was reading Johnny Cash’s autobiography and had been listening to “The Humpty Dance” by Digital Underground. Not at the same time, mind you. Just around the same general time frame. Hey, I sense a good mash-up in there somewhere.

Johnny Cash and Humpty Hump spoke the TRUTH to me. They opened my eyes to the possibility that was right in front of me for years and years. Architecture has been my bread for a long time now, but I want butter to go with it. The words on this page and all the others I have laid down, my friends, are the BUTTER. Mmm, Mmm, Mmm! Anyone want to dance?