deeplyshallow // cryo-jason, june 2008

cryo-jason, june 2008

This was originally going to be an attempt to freeze me, textually, at this particular place in time. Sort of like those little pamphlets you can buy for somebody to show them what was popular the year they were born — in my case, a Jim was president of the United States, and another Jim orchestrated mass suicide in Guyana, and also the future of the human race, a Mr. Ashton Kutcher, was born — except in this case it would be more like telling my future, clueless self just what was happening to him in the past. It would be the start of an ongoing series of snapshots, maybe one or two per year.

Watch carefully as that intent devolves into something completely different altogether.

Running on the treadmill burns even more calories than the punishing vertical high-speed walks I was putting myself through. Worse, it burns more calories in much less time. Much, much less time. Downside: my battered knees can’t really take it. They’re on fire when I step off of the equipment. Upside: there is no upside. This is my teenage self — the one who would play indoor volleyball with reckless, diving, knee-cracking abandon — giving a big ha-ha, fuck-you to my present-day self.

My mustache really wants to be eyelashes. Strange rogue hairs at its corners flip up and point at my eyes. This is not really a problem for me, as I don’t feel them, much less know that they’re going crazy, but they make me look crazy, and they also tend to go up Felicia’s nose at all the wrong moments.

My hair, while we’re on the subject, makes me look crazy even when my mustache is well-behaved. It is too long to stay confined beneath my ever-present ballcap, and so for a couple of months now has flipped out like wings above my ears; only now, it is even longer but still too short to have enough weight to force it down, so the wings have become sprigs, and seem content with their frizzy state. Content enough that my hair doesn’t seem to be growing any longer. My hair wants you to think that I am crazy.

On airplane trips I always find myself obsessed with pretzels. I almost never eat pretzels. Flying back from Illinois in April, Felicia managed to addict me to chocolate-covered pretzels — Flips or whatever they’re called. She makes homemade ones that are even better. I have a dozen pretzel packets crammed into my middle desk drawer at work. I do not understand this. I do not even really like pretzels.

Related note: I am not wild about raisins, either. But I do like cherries, so you would think that raisin-like dried cherries would appeal to me. I am eating them, but I do not think I like them.

Losing five pounds in two days is ~~excessive~~ SUCCESSive.

Currently not really looking forward to: Saturday, three hours of which will be spent doing one-on-one portfolio reviews with Cal Poly art students. Some of them will be good, some of them will be not. The good ones you only want to take down a peg or two — this is kind of like the obsessive need to poke holes in the plastic that surrounds a fresh package of toilet tissue, or to twist the plastic clip of a ballpoint pen cap until it comes off — and the bad ones you can only think of depressing things to say to. My coworker who will accompany me: Is it wrong if I ask for phone numbers, Jason.

Establishing patterns in my life has turned out to be not so easy any more.

I cannot decide how I feel about Kurt Vonnegut. I mean the man’s work, not the man himself. The man is dead. His novels are astonishingly literary and impactful on one page, and strikingly pulpy the next.

The things that I choose to do for fun in my limited spare time, I have suddenly realized, are really just stressing me the fuck out. Case in point: Playing Halo 3 on Xbox Live. Nothing quite so fun as being repeatedly reminded by fourteen-year-olds that my reflexes are on the downward slope. Secondary case: Fantasy baseball. Love baseball, love stats. Just apparently not when I’m losing and every technique I employ makes me lose more.

Felicia and I live like sardines in our tiny apartment. Live sardines, not dead ones packed in jelly. Sardines with a lot of belongings, and dreams of space in which to frolic about without elbowing each other in the noggin. We are searching for a home, but nothing fits just yet. As much as we want to stay in Morro Bay, availability may dictate otherwise. We spotted a charming little place in Baywood that’s right on the water, and squeaks just out of our price range. ‘Spotted’ isn’t quite right, though — it’s at the end of one street or another, and it’s either one building or another, and we’d be happy with either but we’re not sure which it is.

Tonkatsu sauce is something tasty that Felicia has introduced me to. Applesauce is something that I have disliked for my entire life. Applesauce, naturally, is one of the prime ingredients in tonkatsu sauce. This is the sort of thing that comes to mind when people say that the universe has a sense of humor.

I enjoy reading aloud to Felicia. I tend to clear my throat a lot, or to choke up on words. I have noticed that this only happens when I am uninspired by or uninterested in what I am reading. If I am reading Carl Sagan, then I can read sentences like this one

The aggregate of our joy and our suffering, thousands of confident religions, ideologies, and economic doctrines, every hunter and forager, every hero and coward, every creator and destroyer of civilization, every king and peasant, every young couple in love, every mother and father, hopeful child, inventor and explorer, every teacher of morals, every corrupt politician, every “superstar”, every “supreme leader”, every saint and siner in the history of our species live here — on a mote of dust suspended in a sunbeam.

in a clear, dramatic voice, without tripping over a single syllable. Go figure.

Speaking of Sagan, here is something he said that I wish I had read earlier, because it’s the perfect quote to lead off a couple of things I’ve written here: “Personally, I would be delighted if there were a life after death, especially if it permitted me to continue to learn about this world and others, if it gave me a chance to discover how history turns out.”

A recurring theme of this stage of my life is time, and the lack of it. When work is finished, I have just a few hours before the day ends. Into those hours there is much to be fitted. Weekends, when the time should feel boundless, it feels even more constrained, because all of the things I do not have time for during the week have to be done when the week is through. Much as I wish otherwise, it is impossible to clean the house, do laundry and play tennis simultaneously.

There is a lack of good old-fashioned roughness in baseball. And there is a lack of poignancy in almost everything that I read. And there is a certain gap between my generation and the one previous which I cannot bring myself to appreciate. Opinion is only worth so much; facts are where the money is. I can’t figure out people who prefer to remain ignorant of contrary evidence so that they can maintain their preferred belief, however false it may be.

We can send a robotic spacecraft eight hundred twenty-one million miles into our solar system to capture photographs of Saturn and its moons. We can detect the existence of planets that we can’t even see. We just touched another lander down on Mars. The solar arrays that it carries on its back were created by an R&D lab not a hundred miles from where I live. Scientists have made a piece of cloth that can be dropped on an ocean oil spill, and will absorb the oil from the sea. Other scientists have made a cloth that absorbs rather than reflects all light that comes into contact with it. We got tired of hanging out on the ground, so we leapt up into the sky, and gravity didn’t haul us right back down. Back here on Earth we’ve just effectively selected the first black nominee for the office of president of the most powerful country. But we’re still going to draw dramatic and incorrect conclusions about his intentions because his name happens to be one consonant away from being the name of an outlaw. And we’re still going to see a ridiculous number of people vote for the ignorant alternative simply because they won’t vote for a black man. And if he wins anyway, he will likely do so by a slim margin, and he will probably spend his first couple of years under intense scrutiny. And he’ll work hard to prove that he was the right choice, and even if he makes dramatic and positive change, he’ll still probably be the president with the highest risk of assassination just because he isn’t white.

We’ve taken man to the moon and beyond, but we haven’t gone anywhere.

I wrote once before about a photograph that was taken by the Voyager craft. In short, Voyager was rotated to face Earth as it flew away from us. It took a photograph of our solar system, and in that photo (here), Earth is but a pixel. Carl Sagan said some magnificent things about that photograph, and what it represented. This is one of them:

The Earth is a very small stage in a vast cosmic arena. Think of the rivers of blood spilled by all those generals and emperors so that, in glory and triumph, they could become the momentary masters of a fraction of a dot. Think of the endless cruelties visited by the inhabitants of one corner of this pixel on the scarcely distinguishable inhabitants of some other corner, how frequent their misunderstandings, how eager they are to kill one another, how fervent their hatreds.

Our posturings, our imagined self-importance, the delusion that we have some privileged position in the Universe, are challenged by this point of pale light. Our planet is a lonely speck in the great enveloping cosmic dark. In our obscurity, in all this vastness, there is no hint that help will come from elsewhere to save us from ourselves.

Perhaps we have matured faster, technologically, than we have emotionally. Maybe that’s just the way it goes: maybe it’s easier to solve finite problems than it is to examine ourselves. Whatever the reason, the truth sucks: We have much, much to learn.