Letter Never Sent Tell me when to go.

Havelock Ellis once said, “All the art of living lies in a fine mingling of letting go and holding on.” It seems like the further you go in life the more you are faced with the decision of what to hold on to and what to let go of. It becomes more and more important to consider what you need to keep and what you need to change.

Maybe it’s part of getting older, but lately I’ve been trying to put more effort into getting along well with my family. It can be a lot of work. It’s been my experience that your family knows you in a way no one else will ever know you. In family there is an intimate knowlege born out of spending your most important and difficult years with the same small group of imperfect people. It is not a comfortable intimacy by any means. You love your family yet they are the ones who know exactly how to get to you and how to move across your boundaries. You cannot fool them with your different costumes and personas. They will not buy into your reinvention. It’s almost as if they preserve an original image of you, which you are unable to change. This is frustrating if you’d like very much to change who you are.

Your family can be an anchor, yet it can also be a smothering sea of quicksand. I’ve found this to be this case with relationships in general. What happens when you start to change who you are and the people around you do not welcome the change? What happens if you realize that you no longer want the same things as the people around you? This is a difficult realization. In the end you have to do what you need to do and hold onto the belief that everything else will fall into place. The people who love you will always stick by you, in one way or another.

I forgot to mention some of the weird themes in my dreams this morning:

• In one dream I was driving a car around with Jody spotting strange owls on the side of the roads and then later a snow white barn owl flew into the car and landed on my arm. Possibly influenced by hooting we heard while walking last night.
• Dreamt I was a mujahadeen in Afghanistan fighting quasi-American forces in some unreal/lunar mountainous landscape. Usually this just involved me hiding under hanging cliff edges while soldiers walked above me, alerted to my position.
• Strange and disgusting deformed people living in a mine. I don’t remember this one much.
• Preparing some sort of food or slop in a large bowl. I specifically remember crushing a black, thick-shelled, ostrich-sized egg with my hands so that my hands went into the viscous yolk and egg white inside.

That damned rooster finally made a personal appearance. I’m talking about the same one that’s been waking us each dawn with his insanely loud and incessant crowing for the past few months. This past week he decided to fly over into our neighbor’s backyard. Today we finally put out a raccoon trap to catch it. While setting the trap and sprinkling a trail of feed corn into it, I felt like I was living out a cartoon. Of course, in the cartoon I’d be the bear who’s trying to hibernate. Here’s a couple photos of him strutting around in Joyce’s backyard:

I’m off from work early to wait on the Whirlpool repairman. I’ll probably spend the day getting my proverbial shit together.

Sometimes I want to get rid of everything I own and just drive somewhere to get away and start over. Maybe be a busboy in some restaurant in Seattle or Alaska, or a waiter in Barcelona. Then I wouldn’t talk to anyone I know for a couple of years and when I’d come back more gaunt, bearded, and with more wrinkles. It’d be like Robinson Crusoe.

I’ve been spending some time trying to get really organized. On impulse, I bought a 256 MB Lexar USB drive for storing important files with me at all times, so I started using it to store stuff text files containing todo lists, contact info, project outlines, buddy lists in xml, bookmarks, etc. It’s been handy for swapping files back and forth from my desktop to my laptop to my work computer. I need to find something that will sync everything automatically to a webserver. I’m sure it’s a simple thing to write, but the main file syncing programs out there seem to really suck.

Here are a few things I intend on doing very soon:

1. Moving LNS to my server and converting it to wordpress.
2. Getting the photo gallery reintegrated into the site. Right now some of the perl libraries are missing on my webhost, and I don’t feel like asking him to install them.
3. Converting my layout from table-based to full CSS. Apparently, CSS is de rigeur and tables should only be used for presenting tabular data. Makes sense to me.

I found out today that it is legal to own chickens in the City of Austin. There is a rooster across the street that wakes us up every morning, especially now that sunrise is so early. I may have to talk to my neighbor about it soon.

Yesterday the Voss twins,Oliver and Chris, from Blizzard called me up at work since they were in Austin to visit friends and family. After they came by to pick me up we ran over to Dave and Buster’s to sit around and catch up. It was good to see them both and to hear that they were doing well and enjoying Irvine.

After they dropped me off back at my car I called up Sab to see if he wanted to grab something to eat. We went over to Hyde Park Bar and Grill and had dinner. Over at the next table I spotted the woman who had administered my allergy test several months ago, pricking my back with plastic spines dipped in pollen and mold. She was with her girlfriend, I assume, or someone she felt comfortable enough kissing. I don’t know if she remembered me, but I think she recognized me in some way because we kept looking at each other.

After dinner, Sab and I went next door to Dolce Vita where we sat outside talking. I had my back to Duval Road and I heard some guy on a bike stop by the couple at the table next to us and ask the girl, “Do you have a license for that?” I assumed they knew each other but then it became apparent that the young man on the bike did not know either of the people and was just being creepy and trying to bother the woman with his unwanted attention. After being asked to leave repeatedly, he just kept trying to talk to her and tell her he really liked what she was wearing and that he didn’t want to hurt her. We kept telling him he should leave and while it was creepy I don’t think anyone was scared because the guy was pretty short and actually ridiculously not scary-looking.

I went in to tell the people behind the counter they might want to call the police to come get rid of this guy, and when I came back Sab was walking toward the man as he backed away with his bicycle in front of him. Sab kept telling him firmly, “You need to leave right now. Just go.” Then the guy said something like, “Hey, I’m about to get beat up by a fag.” To which Sab replied, “Yeah, isn’t that sad?” Then Sab laughed and the guy said, “You don’t laugh like a fag. You laugh like Santa Claus.” which made Sab laugh louder. The woman behind the counter came out with the phone and told him to beat it and then the woman’s european boyfriend who had been telling him to go away finally got up and chased him down the street with one of the plastic patio chairs. The guy came back once more and was chased away again and that time he stayed away, especially since the woman from behind the counter had called the police. Some of the people there were wondering if maybe he was the Hyde Park groper. All in all, it was the highlight of the evening, especially since no one got hurt.