From the Comments: Interregnum A to D

Sorry it took me so long to get back to this– current events got in the way.   Neuro made some points on a previous From the Comments, Inshallah, that I had to struggle to address in any logically coherent manner:

There are several ideas in your post that seem independent: a) an outdated website, b) one’s personal mythology, c) paradigms for how to take on life, d) a sub-optimal life or at least feeling it is.

Seems to me that the Interregnum is just about (d).

…I think you explained it well, I just don’t yet see the necessary connections between a-d. For example, it seems to me that one can have a personal mythology without having any “paradigms on how to judge and achieve…personal success and fulfillment.” And one can have both of those without happiness. I might be confused because, as I read it, a-d are mixed in your discussion as if they are all interchangeable, and that is not how I am thinking of them.

I view them not so much interchangeable as interrelated, and only independent of each other in the strictest sense of the term: that yes, it is possible (and sometimes appropriate, I suppose) to consider my problems in the light of only any given one.

The website, since its inception, has tended to be the truest expression of whatever’s going on with me at any given moment in time. That’s what it was designed to do. Everything that matters to me outs here eventually, one way or another– often in ways I’m not aware of until later. As such, it not only acts as an archival record of Where I Was At, but serves as a sort of crucible. The process of creating content for it does two things: it helps me clarify my thoughts and feelings and experiences, and it helps me place those thoughts and feelings and experiences into a structure where I can make sense of them, and not feel like they’re all ultimately pointless. That structure is what I refer to when I say “mythology”. Is that semantically accurate? Maybe not. But it always seems to wind up involving or invoking gods and angels and kings and demons and faeries and muses and archetypes and a lot of other things that are dear to my heart, things that occupy places in what people traditionally call Mythologies. So that’s what I call it.

Similarly, my personal mythology and my paradigms for how to take on life have always seemed to evolve together and inform each other. I suppose it’s possible to have one without the other. I never seem to. Some kind of storytelling always springs out of the ground where I step; if that’s not happening, it usually (if not always) turns out I’m stepping in a bad direction for me, or failing to accomplish anything meaningful.  And things feel wrong.

Also, a personal mythology that doesn’t involve or at least influence your paradigms for how to take on life doesn’t seem to me to be much of a mythology.

So, to make it clearer for me, if tomorrow you woke up with a new mythology and new paradigms and your life was still suboptimal, would the Interregnum be over?

Yes, I think so. Because then even though things sucked, I wouldn’t feel like the whole Earth was a wash and that I was just kicking around in the ruins waiting for the Sun to go out. I’d have a path, a way to move forward. At the best that would end it; at the worst that would number its days.

Or, alternately, if your life suddenly became optimal though you had no new paradigms or mythology, would the Interregnum still be in effect?

Yes– but in line with what I said above, I can all but guarantee that if my life did become optimal, something new would evolve in my mythology to parallel it, somewhere in the process of that happening– because that’s the way my mind and imagination work. (Some people would say that’s the way the World and the Universe work; I would love to say that, but I don’t dare claim the authority. :) ) And whatever that new evolution would be would also probably kill or displace the Interregnum.

I hope that answers more questions than it raises.

from the Comments: Inshallah

The sole extant comment on Year 4, from Nickykaa:

What defines the Interregnum? What has to happen for it to end?

Good questions. I had a hunch somebody was gonna ask me that. Given that I did, one would think I’d have some nice, solid answers ready to go… (Nope.)

Semantically?– all that defines the Interregnum is me saying, “This is the Interregnum.” And all that has to happen for it to end is for me to say, “It’s over.” (<laughs> A certain eye-patched knight in a Jim Henson movie comes to mind…) But whether or not I choose to say those things isn’t arbitrary. That label, and any others I use, are just shorthand ways of summarizing the gestalt of my various internal and external conditions: acknowledgments of What Is, made on my part when the truth of What Is has become sufficiently apparent or impossible to ignore. The labels themselves don’t create the internal and external conditions they describe, or propagate them. (You might be inclined to debate that, of course.)

The HOC era was a good example of that. It started in response to my divorce from Weaver (and a generous gift from Nickykaa), evolved swiftly and organically as I resolved the divorce and began a relationship with Faye, trickled out for a while, rebooted with the ascendance of Myst Online: URU Live, and then terminated in the combined firestorm of Faye leaving me, Uru tanking, my job being over and the stress of it all making me sick. Simple as that. I remember the moment sitting there at the computer when I realized it was done: I had been looking at other people’s sites and seeing how involved and contemporary they felt compared to my own, how much they felt as if they were part of a wider continuum of life and relationships; had read over all my old content, then sat there shaking my head at how ossified and irrelevant the way of thinking that informed it seemed with respect to… everything. Wow, I thought. This is soooo finished. I could have made that same judgment during the drought period right before Uru, and canned the site then; renamed and retooled instead of rebooting. But I didn’t-  because the underpinnings were still in place, and the mythology was still resonating. The true House had yet to fall.

Qualitatively? I would say the Interregnum is defined by the destruction of that former mythology- by the collapse of my previously held paradigms on how to judge and achieve my own personal success and fulfillment, and my failure to establish any new, enduring paradigms to replace those old ones. I don’t expect to be happy all the time (or even a lot of the time), or not to have to struggle periodically. That would be silly. And my life is not without joys and bright moments: I have (for instance) excellent relationships with both my son and my girlfriend, both of which provide me with lots positive value. I do not, however, feel like things overall are pretty good. Or like the long downward fall which began either three or eight years ago, depending on when you want to start counting, is over and behind me, forever, and I’m not still playing it out. Or that I have a Path I’m on, whatever that is, and that it is the correct path for me: a good one, that won’t ultimately end in disaster. Or that the successes I can achieve are meaningful and sustainable in some reasonable sense, as far as anything can be considered meaningful and/or sustainable. I’d certainly like to feel as if all those things are true. (Again, it’s arguable that some or all of them are true.) But day to day, I don’t really feel that way. I just… don’t.

When I do, the Interregnum is over.

from the Comments: Compound Interest

From the comments on Two Cents With Interest, Neuro writes:

I’m not sure I agree with you. If I sub in your definitions for work, one gets:

“You can make any relationship continue and be useful/pleasant/satisfying (u/p/s) to the people in that relationship, regardless of the relative age of the participants (or anything else) as long as your goals are the same. And if your goals are somewhat divergent, then you can still make it u/p/s, as long as you have other things in common, like similar past experiences, or a shared cultural background, or that both parties are open-minded to the past experiences and cultural background that each brings to the relationship.”

Is it just that you are assuming that attraction, chemistry, spark, respect, “getting” each other, personal admiration, trust–  in a word, love–  is there from the beginning to the end, too? Because my point here is that the way all this is written it almost reads like an arranged marriage. I submit that one cannot make any romantic relationship work, despite having common goals, background, and open-mindedness to one’s cultural differences. I’m sure there are many women who I could tick off these items with CHECK, CHECK, CHECK and although I might be great friends with them or collaborate with them harmoniously I would never want to be with them romantically in 1,000 years.

I could have all the common goals and life background and cultural openness in the world and if she laughs the wrong way, well, game over.

My point is, I feel that although what you are both saying is certainly of value and ought to be taken seriously within a relationship, the dominant factor in a relationship is the much harder to quantify “certain something”. It’s so dominant, in fact, that it almost makes a mockery of all our machinations toward making a relationship work.

(And the “dominant certain something” is itself at the whim of biology, timing, imprinting, belief, etc. E.g, one study showed that fertile women prefer more masculine looking men when they are ovulating.)

Yoko responds:

[Attraction, chemistry, etc.] are all different things. The attraction, chemistry, and spark fade in time. What takes its place is the admiration, trust, and “getting each other”– but these qualities don’t happen right away, but develop over time. What helps them to develop is to be aware of where someone is coming from, which helps when there some commonality or “work” towards understanding.

[re “I could have all the common goals and life background and cultural openness in the world and if she laughs the wrong way, well, game over.”]  I think we’re coming from different angles here. I think to *start* a relationship, that “certain something” (spark, chemistry, etc.) definitely is what brings people together. But for me, at least, that “certain something” doesn’t keep the relationship going for more than a few months. What does is the understanding, the common direction, what have you. The more you get to know a person, the more you get to know his/her quirks, and maybe those outweigh that spark. But also, the more you get to know a person, the more you come to realize that there are more aspects to being with him/her that “net positive” and thus makes it worth staying instead of ditching because of something like the wrong laugh.

I like it when intelligent and articulate people discuss the different facets of a topic politely and rationally. It’s a lot easier than having to come up with coherent debate points myself. ;)  I wish the two of them and few other people I know had SL avis, so I could host that virtual dinner salon I keep threatening to.  :D

Sadly, I don’t feel like I have much to add by way of clarification.  I was going to make the observation that in my own experience, I’ve never had a relationship get easier.  All the relationships I’ve ever had have always started out seeming very intuitive and unencumbered, providing whatever benefits they provided without the need for “work” or maintenance or complex thought, and then gotten progressively more and more difficult, requiring more work and more maintenance and more complex thought as they went on.  (And then, err…  failed.  <shifts uncomfortably>)  Whose point that reinforces, or whether that’s just a by-product of my particular maladjustments, I’m not totally sure.

From the Comments: Derivative Work and the Purpose of Art

Gosh, I’ve been meaning to get to some of this forever:

Yoko:  On the subject of derivative works: I’ve attempted to make peace with that in the field where I work. Part of me feels like I have no talent because I’m not creating anything original, but what I create are new interpretations of other people’s work. I enjoy doing it, people seem to like it enough to want to pay for it. So it goes. I have a post about it in my (newer) blog somewhere, if you care to look at it.

Not that you emphasized this point in your comment, but I was reminded how in an extensive series of discussions with Neuro, I pointed out that whether or not other people like your work and are willing to pay for it has nothing to do with whether or not YOU, the artist, like your work:

I will never forget having the guy in charge rip the project I worked so hard on– a piece that was just as good as or better than any other one I’d ever done for him– to shreds, because he’d just returned to the City of Mists and had a shitty flight and then got stuck in traffic. Nor that the week I submitted the work on which neither of my two supervisors had any notes– a feat widely considered to be impossible– was also the same week that my divorce became final, when I was an utter vacant shell, totally on autopilot. Or that I’ve watched my associates win awards for their contributions, while the work I’ve slaved over and been intimately involved with on every level doesn’t even get nominated. I don’t know exactly what that means in aggregate, but it certainly points out some kind of fundamental disconnect if the goal of my artwork is to communicate with others, or gain recognition, or if I’m viewing my art as in any way representative of my Self. Read the rest of this entry »

from the Comments: Ace’s Axiom #2

The previous From the Comments contained this assertion by me:

Let me just take a moment at this juncture to refer you to Ace’s Axiom #2, which is: If it seems obvious to you that something should be done, and yet it hasn’t already been done, there’s probably a reason why. Which is closely related to Ace’s Axiom #3: Nothing is ever simple or easy.  Anything that seems simple or easy will turn out to be ineffectual or have to be changed later on.

… resulting in the following counterpoint by Neuro:

Noted, but have you heard of Neuro’s Counteraxiom #2? That thing that you have been putting off for months or years because of being daunted by it will turn out to be fairly easy and would have made your life so much better all this time had you just done it when you should have. I’ve been stung by that one so many times with finances, health, comfort, aesthetics, etc. I’m trying to get better about it.

Well…  yeah.  On paper (and in practice), much better attitude with which to live your life.  It’s just that it doesn’t reflect my experience!  For every sink-fixing success (if you can call that a success), I get two air-conditioner failures, plus an instance of gluing things to the windshield of my car backwards.  My health is a story of things that were supposed to be simple turning out to be complex, often decades-long complex.  And my job (my current job anyway) consists of riding herd on a team of people I’ve never met who don’t quite speak my language, making sure that the “simple” things they’re supposed to do don’t go off on bizarre tangents or turn into nightmares.  Kinda colors my thinking…

I think my seminal experience in this regard had to be the grass at my house in Ivory Grove:  a 1910 three story Victorian surrounded by normal landscaping, including some very tall, very old pine trees, and having just enough property around it to make it feel, err…  not like Sealand.  The front of the property, to the west, had a tiny lawn;  the back, to the east, a very cute patio and a sort of secret garden with holly trees and grapevines.  The north, by constrast, where there was  a small strip of land between the side of the house and the fence marking the neighbor’s property, contained nothing but dirt.  Bare empty dirt.  I found that confusing.   Flushed with the short-lived enthusiasm of the new homeowner, however, I assumed that it was just something the previous owner had never gotten around to addressing, and set about analyzing how best to fix the problem.  The conclusion I came to was that since the north side of the house was in shade for almost the entire day, on account of all the tall trees, whatever grass had been there had probably ceased to get enough sunlight and died out.  So I did a little research, found a shade grass used on golf courses that needed almost no sunlight, got myself a hoe and set to.  How hard could it be, right?

The first thing I discovered, immediately, was that the soil was not what it appeared.  Only the top eighth of an inch could properly be called soil;  the rest was apparently some sort of construction backfill, containing (among other things) huge stones, chunks of glass of every color and three-inch wide hunks of concrete with hexagonal bathroom tiles attached.  It was, shall we say, not ideal for hoeing.  But I persevered.  I used a shovel to pry out all the really ridiculous stuff, and worked everything else over like a pioneer until I had a useable plot.  Then I seeded and watered and watched.  And in a relatively short period of time–  about a week–  I had brand new, green, growing grass.  It looked lovely.  One of my neighbors, who had never said anything to me before, saw it over his back fence and commented about how nice it was, and gave me the thumbs up.

Then we had our first good rainstorm.

It turned out that the grading of my property and the grading of the adjacent, much larger property, all led imperceptibly downhill, all to that northern strip.  So as soon as the rain started in any earnest, the whole thing became a freshet of running water.  Furthermore, that water contained the runoff from everything around it–  and what was around it, by and large, was pine trees.  So after the rain stopped, and the water went away, the whole expanse was covered in a quarter-inch thick layer of pine needles, sterilizing it as neatly as if I had taken a flamethrower to it and then salted the earth.  The grass died.  Quickly.  It persevered only in a little pocket over by the very corner of the property, where we had filled in the hole left by the stump of a mulberry tree we’d ground out, and there was a tiny hump that the pine needles tended to flow around.  It was…  educational.

Plus I sold the house, of course, later, when I got divorced.  So it all wound up being moot anyway.  Except in the sense that I have a fun story to tell, and I now spout axioms about the limitations of my own ability to affect my environment in positive ways.

I do wonder sometimes if it’s still bare dirt, now, at least two owners later.  But I’ve never had the opportunity to go back and check.

from the Comments: Damping

From Neuro, regarding Moving IV:  Epic Fail—

As you know, I’m Mr. Annoyed By Noise, particularly low frequency noise, so I would do all I could to fix that low hum (I had that once in a house from the electric hum from the furnace’s electric parts, and simply freely suspending the solenoid instead of having it mounted to the side saved me six months of a constant hum).

It sounds like the key here is vibration damping with soft material. If the closet being open matters, you could wedge a rag between the door and its jamb, so it is still closed but it can’t vibrate as easily (maybe the door itself is serving as a resonator). You could also buy foam from a hardware store and cushion where the AC meets the window frame with it.

That is all very good advice.  Whether any of it will make any difference, I’m not sure yet;  it’s going to take some experimentation.  I have determined, for instance, through a bit of direct observation that in addition to the Resonant Hum Occurring From No Known Source Except the Operation, there is also the Thermally-Conditional Intermittent Rattle of the Front Plastic Air Vents, and the Vibration-Induced Overhead Rattle of the Plastic Venetian Blind Mechanism.  And a noticeable lack of Noises Created by Direct Contact Between the Unit and the Window Frame, which one would expect to be a pretty large, inclusive classification on the Great Classification List of Air Conditioner Noises.

Instead of the sheet, consider installing a real door if you’re going to be there a year or more. Maybe the landlord would knock the price off your rent if you do the labor. Home Depot sells slab doors for $21, and then there’s some hardware, so maybe under $50. (How hard could it be to install it?)

How hard can it be?!  Oh, my friend…   let me just take a moment at this juncture to refer you to Ace’s Axiom #2, which is:  In a world where absolute moral values are hard to come by, Cheese is Good.

No, wait–  that’s Ace’s Axiom #1.   Let me just take a moment at this juncture to refer you to Ace’s Axiom #2, which is:  If it seems obvious to you that something should be done, and yet it hasn’t already been done, there’s probably a reason why. Which is closely related to Ace’s Axiom #3:  Nothing is ever simple or easy.  Anything that seems simple or easy will turn out to be ineffectual or have to be changed later on. The doorway may not be square.  Or the places where the hinges have to go may be totally rotted out and patched with spit and tape.  Or the opening may be a totally irregular, non-standard size that will require a custom door to be made at high expense.  Or there might be nowhere for a door to effectively open to when it is hung (which there isn’t, the way my furniture and the hallway are arranged.)  And I’m not even trying hard here.

That having been said, yes, I have to put a door up.  One of those split-type closet doors that runs on a track and bends in the middle.

Also, at the risk of seeming sarcastic:  if you’d like to jump in the car and roar over here and give me the benefit of your expertise and ATP, feel free.  I got all kinds of people who are willing to give me advice on what they think I oughta do.  I’m a little short on people who are willing to actually help me DO it…

Car Jewelry

Pigbristles’ comment on Tainted:

I don’t know about Gloria, but my bike always responded well to bling. To make up for pinching her #2 carb boot, I replaced the the boring black ABS side panels with carbon-fiber. She’s been lovey-dovey ever since!  But maybe Gloria’s more of a “spa type” – you might go for the full detail, that might get you back in her good graces.  You can’t put it off though – otherwise, the next thing you know you’ll be into her for a new set of alloy rims or something!  (Oh, and get the O2 sensor fixed, too!)

I’d totally go for the detailing if I knew a place around here I thought I could trust to do a good job and not fleece me.  She’s overdue for just a wash, after toughing it out through her first Sealand winter.  Back in the fall I was washing her by hand, with Jack’s help;  then Flora’s freaking son-in-law ripped the hose off the side of the house and turned off the water to the spigot.  New landlord hasn’t replaced it, or turned it back on.

The Empress did get her those Union Jack valve stems for my birthday (kinda like earrings).  That went a long way.  And I’ve been threatening to take her back in to the dealer and have white bonnet stripes put on her since the day I got her.  (She came with alloy rims.)  Gotta spread the love around, though.  Dragonia needs bling, too!  ;)

As for the O2 sensor:  the diagnosis was “277x”:  “high pressure fuel pump fault, causing misfires across all cylinders & engine stall out”.  The techs removed and reinstalled the intake ducts, and replaced the pump, and she was good to go–  all for free, since she’s still under warranty.  That was particularly delicious, as D’s car had just stalled out the night before, and she feared a malfunction in the fuel pump, and a costly repair.  But it was actually just out of gas, and there was nothing mechanically wrong with it.  So it’s kinda like I got to take the bullet for her.

(You know, I’m a “spa-type”…)

No-Brainer

Yoko’s comment on While Angels Check the Treads:

Wow. What happened to your other car? (sorry if you’ve already explained this– I’ve been offline for a while.)

No worries;  it was the first time I’ve mentioned anything about it.  Nothing happened to it, if by “happened to it” you mean something calamitous like I got into an accident, or it threw a piston rod or the like.  But the venerable Nightshade is 16 years old and has over 91,000 miles on it;  the suspension goes kktung when you drive around corners, the horn is mute, the lock cylinder in the rear tailgate has fallen inside the door, sealing it closed, the tinting in the back windows is peeling off in sheets and the driver’s side door is staved in from the night I had one snort too many and ground it into an iron support pillar in a parking garage.  Plus it’s about 7,000 miles overdue for service-  and due for inspection in November.  Under the much discussed Cash for Clunkers program, I get $3500 for trading it in, which is far more than it would be worth were I able to sell it (which I can’t;  it was declared a Total Loss by my insurance company after that five-car accident I was involved in a couple years ago, at the top of Route 33.  How were they supposed to know my parents were life-long friends with an auto body repairman who would agree to reassemble it?)  In return for the trade (and an admittedly scary financial commitment), I get a cool, new vehicle with vastly improved gas mileage that’s safe, mechanically reliable, and doesn’t have to be re-registered or inspected for another 4 years.  Total no-brainer.

Gotta clean all the junk out of Nightshade this morning.

The Perils of Impatience

Put a bottle of Chardonnay in the freezer, and forgot about it for so long that it froze solid and blew the cork through the foil.

I lose Gourmet Points for that on so many levels.

Color Commentary

Yoko shared her thoughts at some length about Memory (and has been the only one to do so to date, at least here.  The Empress herself read the entry, but limited herself to commenting, “And yes, you should buy a yearbook,” across the Easter dinner table, while doing things she forbade me to write about.)

—

Yoko: I also have a very regrettable senior yearbook picture- I have a mullet. Somehow, in my mind, I thought this would make me look cool, but I too winced when I got the proofs back, even then.

I saved the mullet for college.  It looked particularly great on ID photos.  My personal favorite was Read the rest of this entry »

Googleplex

From the comments for “Who’s Trackin’ Who?”:

Church: Interesting…  so– did you look? [at the package tracking link that G-Mail called up unbidden, when it noticed a tracking number in the text of my outgoing e-mail]

Well…  yeah.  It didn’t say “Link to the FedEx tracking site”;  it just said “track package # (xxx)”.  I was curious to see whether or not it had any idea what it was talking about (so to speak.) Are you suggesting that I justified its inclusion by pressing it?  ;)

Actually, I probably shouldn’t have been surprised.  Anyone who uses G-Mail already knows that it searches the body text of all your incoming and outgoing e-mails for keywords, and then puts up targeted advertising links in the sidebar based upon what it finds (although I don’t see them, thanks to the Firefox modding package Greasemonkey;  props to my good friend Neuro for pushing me over that barrier.)  And Google itself does the same thing if you type the tracking number of any package into it manually-  at least for FedEx, UPS and the US Postal Service.  Along with quite a few other tricks, most of which I was happily oblivious to…

You can find a quick list of some of them provided by Google itself here, or search the Web with a term like “things you can do with Google” to find plenty of articles about it.

(Do it with the Yahoo search engine.  They love that.)

Vehicular Abstinence

From the comments for Sacrifice:

Yoko:  Nick, weren’t you trying to learn how to drive several years back?

Nickykaa:  Yeah, I started the process of learning. Had about five or six lessons. Dragon Lady really wanted me to be able to drive, and I figured it wouldn’t hurt to know how (though I made it clear to her that even if I learned how, I reserved the right to abstain from putting the skill to use). As it turns out, the lessons confirmed what I’d long suspected – I’m just not neurologically wired to be able to learn that particular skill, at least not easily or well (I function so well in the neurotypical world that even people who know me well have trouble fathoming how much I struggle with abilities that they take for granted – abilities that are important when driving, such as the ability to distinguish between color and sound). Read the rest of this entry »

Interlude, with Pomegranates

This wonderful piece was forwarded to me from Orchidwile, who placed it (having no other recourse) in the comments for Fruit:

The Mad Pomegranate Tree

In these bright courtyards where the south wind blows
Whistling through vaulted arches, tell me is it the mad pomegranate tree
Who leaps in light scattering her fruitful laugh
With wind’s stubbornness and whispering, tell me is it the mad pomegranate tree
Who quivers the dawn with foliage newborn
Opening all her colors aloft with a shiver of triumph?

When in awakening fields naked girls
Harvest clover with blond hands
Roaming the ends of their sleep, tell me is it the mad pomegranate tree
Who unsuspecting places lights in their verdant baskets
Who overflows their names with birdsong, tell me
Is it the mad pomegranate tree who fights the world’s cloudy skies?

On the day that jealousy adorns herself with seven kinds of feathers
Girding the eternal sun with thousands of blinding
Prisms, tell me is it the mad pomegranate tree
Who running seizes a man with a hundred lashes
Never sad and never grumbling, tell me is it the mad pomegranate tree
Who shouts the new hope now dawning?

Tell me, is it the mad pomegranate tree who greets the expanse
Fluttering a leaf handkerchief of cool fire
A sea about to give birth to a thousand ships
With waves that a thousand times move and go
To unscented shores, tell me is it the mad pomegranate tree
Who creaks the rigging aloft in pellucid aether?

Very high with the glaucous skycluster that lights and celebrates
Proud, full of danger, tell me is it the mad pomegranate tree
Who mid-world breaks the demon’s storms with light
Who spreads from end to end the saffron bib of day
Richly embroidered with sown songs, tell me is it the mad pomegranate tree
Who hastily unhooks the silks of the day?

In petticoats of April first and cicadas of August fifteenth
Tell me, she who plays, she who rages, she who seduces
Casting off from threat its evil black glooms
Pouring intoxicating birds on the sun’s bosom
Tell me, she who opens her wings on the breast of things
On the breast of our deep dreams, is it the mad pomegranate tree?

— Odysseus Elytis, Orientations 1939