A Better World?

"Sometimes I go about in pity for myself, and all the while a great wind carries me across the sky." - - - Ojibwe saying

At this moment I am very small. I am no more than 4 inches tall, and shrinking by the minute. I am almost gone. There will be nothing left for you to see, and yet the relentless beating continues on. I stare into the face of rage, eyes aglow with vengeance.

"What you need to ask yourself is, 'do I want this job?'"

It seems like a trick question. I feel confused. I have to say yes, but my heart is beating, "No! No! No!" How did I get myself into this contradiction? I glance over to my boss who is standing in the corner looking intently at his shoes. It is not either of our finest hours for sure.

The truth is, I don't really want this job at all. I always say I do when people ask. I put the best face on it. What I really, really want is to have a job that pays me a decent living so that I may support my family as best I can. That is what I feel will make me happy. But life is no longer cheap. Maybe it never was. All I know is that the world has a way of carrying you along on a path, and it seems very difficult at times, perhaps even futile, to kick against the current.

Is this fate? Or are we all living the lives we chose?

There is a crushing weight of responsibility that I feel, and it makes it seem like I usually have no choice at all. I continue to do what I must. These are the thoughts going through my head as I stare into those burning, red eyes that make grown men cry.

Have you ever found yourself fighting a fight that you can not win?

The beating continues.

"Tell me, please, why I should keep you, because if it were up to me you would be done."

I guess I should explain myself here. It was a bad, bad day. I had an accident. A small accident in the grand scheme of the universe, but I work in a job that can not afford mistakes. I made a big mistake. I blame no one but myself. I feel plenty bad about it already, but nevertheless I must stand and bear this tongue lashing with humility and grace. I am a leaf on the wind. If it were up to me, I would rather be talking to Anton Chigur right now.

I have made a lot of mistakes in my life. I make mistakes constantly. I'm only human, but maybe I'm even more human that some others. It seems I blunder through life making the best choices I can, but every choice narrows down my future choices until I get to a point where there seems to be no more choices but to jump in the current and let it take me where it will.

Because of choices I made long ago, I now find myself working in a miserable job that gives me very little fulfillment, only because it will one day give me a decent paycheck. I'll never get rich from it, but I will be able to live comfortably with the things I need, and some things that I want. That's the lie I have been telling myself for years, that it is better than the alternatives.

What I do is I drive a truck that is packed with boxes, and I must get rid of them one at a time until there are none left. I run, and run, and run all day long. I almost never stop to take a lunch break. If I stop to pee I have to run that much faster to catch up again. It's a lot of responsibility, a lot of pressure, and one day a lot more money than I'm making now. Is it worth it? Maybe. Maybe not. I'm not sure any more. But what are my alternatives?

Truthfully, I have no idea what the alternatives might be. I have, for years, assumed that there were none. That has often been my excuse. I have a degree in photography. It is a field that people are notorious for not wanting to pay for. On the other hand, there are people who are highly successful at it without even so much as a degree to stand on. Beyond photography, I really don't have a lot of marketable skills to back me up. 11 years at the same company has provided me with nothing that would be useful to other companies. It has given me a range of talents that are very specific, like memorizing thousands of zip codes, playing a literal version of tetris at 250-600 pieces per hour, yelling at people, cursing, etc. These are things that don't necessarily look good on a resume. But I am smart. I am a hard worker. I am good at adapting to a wide range of situations. I think I work well under pressure, and with all kinds of scary people. I am not completely useless, am I?

Maybe there is something more out there waiting for me. It's also true that maybe there is not. I know that I have the power within myself to stay on this career path, and succeed. I am sure that it will get easier over time. But do I really want that? I feel that I have hit rock bottom with it now. I must move forward from here, and do the best I can to continue to ensure my own security, and the good of my family. If I'm going to stay, I need to embrace it completely because that is the way to get better. And I can't keep on feeling sorry for myself. I am living the life I chose.

But I am now more motivated than ever to look beyond my comfort zone. I want to find a way out. I want to believe that it is possible to make a decent living, and be happy. Therefore I must also open my mind to the other possibilities that maybe I have been ignoring in favor of a seemingly safer path. I know now that there is no safe path. There is nothing you can do that life can't find a way to screw with it. Life is chaos.



On a lighter note, now that I have written a bitter, and negative diatribe, I should tell you about the ways in which I have chosen wisely, and the ways in which I am fortunate. I have chosen a beautiful wife who always supports me, but also pushes me to be better. She believes that I have a choice, and that I can do better. She sees potential in me that I do not.

I have two kitties who always kiss my face and give me comfort when I am sad and lonely. They don't care what I do for a living. They would be perfectly happy if I did nothing at all but lay around with them. That's how they roll.

I have two dogs that feel like my children. They definitely keep me on my toes. But they also give me unconditional love. They are always happy to see me. So what if they sometimes eat my ice cream. It's a small price to pay.

I have great friends and family who have always accepted me for who I am, even when they thought I was wrong. Those are the people that I choose to be around. 1 true friend is worth far more than all the others.

I am even fortunate to have a job at all. Even a job you hate is better than no job at all. You can't ignore that truth in this day and age.

I feel better already.

"At the top of the mountain, we are all Snow Leopards."

Vita Ipsa Loquitur

I fear sometimes that I am becoming a boring person. I never have anything very interesting to say here these days. And I used to be so crazy and weird. But what happened. I seem to have lost a lot of my old weirdness. Not to say that I am no longer weird. I just used to be weirder.

If you wrote your own autobiography, what would it be about? I always wanted mine to be so legendary that it would be banned from high school reading in most states. It would be the kind of story that ruined people's lives forever, an epic chronicle of biblical proportions. I think it would be called "Vita Ipsa Loquitur: The Doomed Man's Travelogue In Black and White".

As you can tell from the title it would be a light-hearted, and inspirational sort of tale, a hero's quest of sorts. It would have to be filled from cover to cover with adventure, romance, and all kinds of swashbucklery in general. I imagine it as a cross between Homer's "The Odyssey", Bram Stoker's "Dracula", and the film "It's a Wonderful Life". And, of course, it will be 100% true.

Can you grasp that? I think it would start out something like this:

Prologue: The Black of Night

"Vampires?" The captain asks dubiously. "I doubt it. Not this far north. The climate wouldn't suit them at all."

"You may be right", I reply half-hearted. Nevertheless, I did meet one last night. He showed me things that would not soon be forgotten, and I knew he was not finished with me yet. I look out over that same bleak horizon where I saw Captain Sveinsson's burning ship, Urd, succumb to the fathomless deep not quite a fortnight agone. Now it is only the white-hot sun edging ever closer to it's inevitable demise. A cold wind is blowing off the Atlantic Ocean, and I sigh heavily in resignation. "It's lookin' to be a cold one."

"Yes, my friend." There is a long pause as we both consider the gravity of the situation. I look down at my grandfather's compass that hangs around my neck, long since broken. The moments pass heavily by until the captain finally breaks the silence. "This man that you spoke with, this vampire, perhaps you brought him with you. Perhaps he has troubled you for a very long time."

"Perhaps."

"And you never did tell me how you came to be here yourself?"

"That is a long story", I say, "And I don't care to tell it right now", I answer his next question before he can ask it. Truthfully, I don't know the answer to the questions. How did I get here? And why? Looking back at it, I can't make any sense of it myself.

"Very well. I understand." He shrugs it off. "It doesn't matter. We will find our way back soon."

I am not as hopeful in that regard. I still have this one problem, this great big loose end, this thing I came here to do, and I know there is no going back until it is done. Not for me anyway. I am not sure what I would be going back to, for that matter. I reflect darkly on these things as the sun begins to slip below the waves taking all remaining color with it. I am not afraid, only anxious to get to the next horrific twist of the knife.

I run my fingers through my long, thinning hair. It is falling out faster every day. I don't have much time left before I will be too weak to fight it any more. Tonight might be the night. Am I ready? The Captain shudders as though for a moment he knows my mind, and all the ugly things that lie in it. He starts to say something, but is interrupted by the sudden, atavistic booming of the drums. Every night that same terrible rhythm that will haunt my dreams for years to come.

I am certain now that the captain and I are the last civilized men, forgotten on this God-forsaken island amidst a sea of unrelenting madness, and the savages are just waking up. Things will start moving quickly now. We must cling desperately to the last vestiges of our neglected faith.

"Hafðu augun opin, vinur minn."

"Aye, Captain."

"Please, call me Snorri." He pulls out a tall bottle and offers it to me.

"Why not?" I consent. I hand the bottle back. We soon finish every last drop of it between the two of us.

"You know, my friend, one good thing about this place?"

"Tell me!" I beg. The drink is already twisting my sense of space and reason. The esoteric, animal part of my brain is beginning to take hold as we succumb to the darkness, even as the distant voices of the newly damned begin to scream in terror.

"The night lasts only four hours."

But alas, I know all too well that four hours can be a very, very long time.




So there you go. I just need an advance from a major publisher to begin for real. About half a mil would probably cover it.

Cool Camera

So, I went to Fujifilm.com today to see if they still produce the film that I wish to use for the Color Fest in March, and I discovered that they have been the first to think of something I have been wishing for for several years now.

The coolest looking digital camera yet:


Now, it isn't quite the camera I want to buy. For instance, it does not have a full frame digital sensor. This camera is obviously aimed at the pro-sumer market of retro tech-geeks, but there are good reasons why I wish that I could get something like this.

In my experience, I have found that people are super impressed when you carry around a huge, 15 pound monstrosity of a camera with all kinds of atavistic bells, whistles, attachments, and a ginormous, phallic lens. People say, "Wow! That is a nice camera. How did you afford that?" But, besides being a pain in the rear for the photographer to deal with, I also find that people get terribly intimidated when they find themselves in front of that beast.

On the other hand, if I point my humble Nikon FM at them:


They let their guard down. They don't take it quite as seriously, maybe. They say things like, "You have to know what you're doing to use a camera like that." They give you some sort of benefit of the doubt. Therefore it is a lot easier to take their picture when your ridiculous camera is not getting in the way.

Furthermore, most of that expensive camera is dedicated to doing tasks that a camera doesn't really need to do, like color balance, and creating histograms, and other esoteric nonsense that can be taken care of with computers, photoshop, etc. And that is why I have wished that Nikon would release a Nikon FM-Dslr. In a perfect world it would use the minimum necessary electronics to capture and store a Nikon Raw image file with a full frame sensor. It wouldn't even need to have a view screen on the back. I could do without that. It would have a knob on top for the shutter speed, and ISO, and would accomodate all Nikon manual lenses, therefore removing the need for aperture adjustment, and auto-focus mechanisms in the camera body.

It would have absolutely no automatic settings, except maybe a TTL flash setting. It would be the first fully manual, stripped down, professional DSLR on the market. It would sell exceptionally well to pro-sumer retro geeks, and me. It would be awesome.

Terrence Malick

Oh, Terrence Malick, has it been so long?



I think this is just what I need.

The Spirit

Being raised in the LDS faith, I was brought up to believe that the Spirit of God would manifest itself by a "burning in my bosom"; that if I was faithful, and obedient to the laws of God I would come to know the truth. But this never happened to me. In my 18 years of going to church, reading the scriptures, and praying, I never felt anything good. At best I felt bored. At worst I felt a complete emptiness, and a growing sense of inadequacy. I was told that I was not ready for the answers. I was told that I didn't want the true answers. It was always my fault, and for a long time I believed it.

But as a skeptic I find that I really do want to believe. Nothing would make me happier than for God to show up as a burning bush and tell me what I'm supposed to do. People have accused me of believing in nothing. I don't agree with that. I do believe very firmly in things. I just can not believe it anything based on absolutely nothing.

Of course, there came a time when my mind began to rebel against those notions. I came to believe that there were two obvious explanations why I could find no faith within myself:

A) It's all bullcrap

or

B) God hates me

Both of those answers are equally appealing at various times. But they mostly made me feel angry for a very long time. Particularly, I felt a deep, and burning rage for everyone who ever told me that if I would just pray more sincerely then I would find the answers I sought.

Eventually I did kind of get over it. While the beliefs I was raised by will never go away, I found a way to get enough space between me and them that I could reflect on what I believed and felt in my own heart. After all, why should a person be tied down to experience things the way that everyone else does? I began to seek experiences of a different sort. I wanted to get to know myself better.

I asked myself, why would God hide himself so completely from us if the very purpose of our existence was to believe in Him? It's not logical. I'm pretty sure that God has never spoken to me, at least in the sense that believers say he does. I'm inclined to believe that there is a God. It seems more unreasonable to me to think there is not. But he remains silent, detached, abstract. I decided it was futile to try to know God before you even know yourself. And I firmly believe that a life spent entirely on knowing yourself would be a life well spent, and a busy one at that.

As I began to be better at following my own heart, and my own desires, I have gained far more than I ever gained in church. I will risk my very soul on the truth of that statement. I know in my heart that if I had done what others wanted me to do, if I had gone on a mission for instance, it would have been a sort of spiritual death for me, because I know there was absolutely no desire in me to do that, and if I had it would not have been for me, nor would it have been for God.

In spite of my great heresy, I have often felt something that could be interpreted as "The Spirit". I often felt it while racing over high mountain-tops on my bike in those crazy years. It was a sense of being more deeply alive. It was a feeling of great power, and great weakness at the same time. It was a sort of liberation from the trappings of the mind when I could become a purely physical being.

Later I would feel it while exploring the rarely seen parts of the Buddhist Temple in Taiwan. It was a feeling of great humility, and yet a sense that I was playing a small part in everything. In one room in particular, I felt a deep connection with the entire world, and I knew that I was so small as to be almost nothing at all, but somehow I was still vitally important in spite of my obsolescence.

I have felt this Spirit when looking at great works of art, and sometimes not so great works of art. I once felt it while looking at a segment of Roman sidewalk at the UMFA. I feel it at the Spiral Jetty every time I go there, or in Moab. It manifests itself in a sense that there is something valuable in the pure experience of this life itself. It doesn't matter what you do. It's just important that whatever you do you experience it as fully as you can. It's vitally important to be open to whatever comes your way. These are some of the things I began to believe.

We spend so much of our lives trying to be somewhere else, it is rare to find yourself capable of being right here, and right now. I find I can do this more easily in bizarre, and remote places. I have felt most at peace with the world while floating down the Colorado River, staring up in wide-eyed wonder at the blood-red cliffs above. I feel something beautiful and mysterious while driving at high speeds across the empty salt flats of western Utah. I have spend hours upon hours staring at the Great Salt Lake and not even needing to ask questions about it.

In Iceland I felt the full weight of existence bearing down upon me, and for a while I even embraced it before it got too heavy. I learned on that trip that not all spiritual experiences need to be warm and fuzzy. Sometimes what your soul needs is to find the darkness for a little while. I felt things within myself that I have never spoken of, and perhaps never will, but I still wake up in the night sometimes thinking I am still there. It was a very dark time that I will always cherish. I learned more about myself in the darkness than I ever learned in the light.

On the other hand, I have walked in the light as well.

At places like the Holi festival I have been filled with the feeling that life is good, and worth living in spite of all of it. Sometimes a person just needs an excuse to let go of all the crap and party hard.

My wedding really was my happiest day. On that day, unlike any other day, I felt completely as though I was exactly where I was supposed to be, among all the right people, doing all the right things. I had absolutely no doubts in my mind, no more questions to answer for a little while.

As time goes by I get closer and closer to this spirit. I feel I understand it more and more. I would not be so arrogant to claim that it was God speaking to me. Maybe it is just a part of my own soul recognizing true beauty when it sees it in all it's light, and dark mystery. But I do know absolutely that I do have a soul. I know that I am so much more than random particles in space. I know that this life is far more than a simple test of loyalty and obedience. I feel it growing more and more every day. I feel it when I look in Rachel's eyes. I feel it when I read a great book. I sometimes now can even feel it when I'm just lying in bed on a Saturday morning, doing nothing at all.

I know it was always there, but I have only become better at knowing it when I see it. And I try to live by those beliefs that I have found. I strive to be better at living in the moment and letting the good and bad happen, and just feel alive amidst it all. We are here to experience, and anything that tries to cut you out from the experience of life is evil, and must be fought hard.

"Wild men who caught and sang the sun in flight,
And learn, too late, they grieved it on its way,
Do not go gentle into that good night."
- - - Dylan Thomas