Letter Never Sent Tell me when to go.

There is a passage in the Hagakure “In the Shadow of the Leaves” that a samurai should meditate on death daily:

Meditation on inevitable death should be performed daily. Every day when one’s body and mind are at peace, one should meditate upon being ripped apart by arrows, muskets, spears and swords, being carried away by surging waves, being thrown into the midst of a great fire, being struck by lightning, being shaken to death by a great earthquake, falling from thousand-foot cliffs, dying of disease or committing seppuku at the death of one’s master. And every day without fail one should consider himself as dead.

When I think about death I know that everything that exists is fleeting and temporary, like a mist, not just myself, but every aspect of the universe. All the works of man, all the bones of our ancestors, all the knowledge we have produced and compiled, but we still desire perpetuation and timelessness. Defeat of death is the defeat of time itself.

We move through time as if stepping from one crumbling stone to another. In a very real sense, all you have is the flow of each moment, although this is itself a form of timelessness. My memories of life live on in some fashion. That much is undeniable.

I started off the day with my weekly Toastmasters meeting, which is less nerdy than it may seem to outsiders. Try it out, if you’d like to get better at communicating and speaking in public. It’s a very social thing and you get to meet people from all walks of life, although most of the members are usually above 30. Most of the people in my club have husbands, wives, kids, mortgages, the sort of thing that is foreign to most if not all of my contemporaries and myself. I can remember when my dad was my age. I remember walking around Sears around that time, him, my brother and I. My father had bought us each a padded satin jacket, and we wore them proudly. My brother wearing the navy and silver of the Dallas Cowboys while I sported the light blue of the Houston Oilers. My kid timeline seems to be running behind schedule.

People of my generation are waiting longer to have children and get married, if they do it at all. There seems to be a general sense of avoidance about these once ubiquitous facts of life. Is it too foreign or painful or precarious a subject to even consider realistically? Is it because many of us are the children of parents who dissolved their marriages in divorce and acrimony? Are we stuck in an extended state of adolescence? Or, has marriage become superfluous? That seems unlikely in an age where homosexuals fight for the right to legally marry. I could go on.

Anyway, the meeting went well, although I still haven’t gotten over my serious sense of nervousness that makes me freeze up for painful seconds whenever I have to get up there and try to speak. As someone who is fairly extraverted I have difficulty in the spotlight.

At the end of the meeting, Hollis Baker, 81 years of age, closed with a poignant story from his childhood about the importance of Armistice Day, what we now celebrate as Veteran’s Day. He told of his beloved math teacher who went off to fight and die in the Battle of the Bulge. When this man was sent home to be buried, the entire town turned out for his funeral. He told how after all the town preachers gave their eulogies, the local ne’er-do-well, a veteran of the First World War threaded his way through the crowd and up to the lectern and took a yellowed piece of paper out of his bib overalls. Then, although this man was not scheduled to speak, he recited “In Flanders Fields“, a poem of remembrance from the last Great War. As Hollis spun his yarn, he recited the poem from memory. It was a classic, profound Hollis moment.

We could stand to learn a few things from our elders. Namely that as individuals we have a place in this world, if for no other reason than to accept the torch of our fathers and grandfathers (or mothers and grandmothers) to light the way for those who follow.

…don’t let it kill again. We had the McRib Challenge yesterday outside the building of the video game company I used to work with.

I was glad to see all my old coworkers. It’s amazing how people can look different after six months. The latest contender against the McRib was Casey from QA. He ate about four and a half McRibs then he puked into the handy blue bucket.

Disappointing results especially since my friend, Mr. X, ate eight of them a year ago before breaking out in a sweat and succumbing to the dark McRib power. Jeff filmed the whole thing for posterity, and I took a few pictures of Casey against the McRib. I also made a design for the t-shirt in Illustrator. Now I just have to find somewhere to get them done.

Later in the day, I emailed Kyle and he replied back from his Blackberry that he was at Dave & Buster’s, so I ran out there and we hung out and drank beer for the next 5 hours. I hadn’t done that in a while, so it was fun.

I had a great conversation with Mariano, one of my clients out in California. I had never gotten a chance to speak with him much before, but when I returned his call about an email problem the first thing he asked if I was related to “Big-head” (I forget the Spanish word he used) Sivori, Enrique Omar Sivori, one of Argentina’s most famous soccer players, named by Pelé as one of the ” top 125 greatest footballers”. He pronounced Sivori as “sivery”, which seems to be the usual Italian pronunciation despite the fact that my family has always pronounced it as “sivoori”, which I think is the proper Klingon pronunciation. He gave me the whole run down on Argentine soccer and how there are so many Italians in Argentina that it is more like Italy than Italy is, especially the north of the boot, which he said has become very commercialized and fast-paced like America. All the talk of soccer and Italy made me want to buy a Juventus replica jersey.

Another bit I learned while researching: “oriundi” is a word meaning South Americans of Italian stock. I created a wikipedia account just to make a minor edit to the sparse english language version of the Omar Sivori article, and to add a stub for a definition of “oriundi”. Watch out Internet!

Added to my enemies list: Goobers who wear their bluetooth wireless headsets when they’re not on the phone. It’s an epidemic. This is worse than the tendency to wear cellphones on the belt.

Consumerism / frugality: Both Colgate and UltraBrite toothpastes are made by Colgate-Palmolive and have nearly identical ingredients, yet UltraBrite is half the price of the equivalent Colgate. I have been a sucker.

A couple of years ago I figured out that there was another guy out there with the same name as me, Chris Sivori, some distant cousin of mine I imagine in Louisville, Kentucky where my father’s family is from. It galled me that he was popping up first in Google searches when I searched for my own name. This search result is not surprising considering he played/plays college football, and I am just, well, me. A person of no consequence, especially in the world of college sports. Now I have finally made it to the top of the list and I can cross another pointless, petty crusade off my list. This would be more difficult if there were more than two people with my name.

I beebopped out to my car this fine, crisp like an apple morning and noticed the back right tire was flat on my car. Hey, no problem! I’m an expert at changing tires. It’s one of the five essential manly skills, second only to bug squashing. Ha! I laugh in the face of the whole concept of flatness.

I took all the crap out of my trunk (why are there Christmas lights in there?) and pulled out all the odds and ends necessary to get the job done. Spare… check. Tire tool… check. Dinky scissor jack… check. Then I loosened the lugs and starting jacking that bad boy up. I got the flat tire off and pushed the donut onto the hub. Then I started the lugnuts back on. Wait a minute, that spare looks a little low. Jesus, it’s completely flat. That means I did all this for nothing. Oh, you have won this time, flat tire, but I’ll be back.

The lesson here is always check your spare before you get too excited.