Wednesday, August 6, 2008
Long
At 2:15 AM
Tuesday, August 5, 2008
Be Done With It
Monday, August 4, 2008
Ghosts
Alexander I. Solzhenitsyn's death had a strange effect on my today. I spent part of the day thinking about the eighty nine years of his life, about how that life inspired and perhaps compelled his literature. As a literary critic I am not qualified to comment on the body of work that is his legacy. I would not consider myself a fan. I often struggled through his work, but I read him, and I recognized the brilliance contained within those works.
I thought about all of those people in life who influence us in passing. They may touch us only very briefly, but they touch us. The memory of them resides within us somewhere. Sometimes we remember the actual person or the event. Other times I think it is more likely they attain a semi-mythic half remembered state. They become - images, icons, very specific memories, of very specific events. The moral of their story, the ghosts of the memories of them are always there, sometimes shrouded in light, sometimes in darkness, mostly in those swirling images of light and shadow that comprise all of us and the influences we have on each other.
I know there are others to whom I have been the shadowy ghost, the incident and accident of memory. I have had the pleasure of being told those stories a time or twenty in the course of my life. Indians are big story tellers and often we tell stories about - each other - it is often amusing and surprising the stories we occupy - stories of the things we did and failed to do, or failed at doing. I think it is good to be a ghost sometimes. It is good to have ghosts. It is good to have known ghosts.
After thinking about ghosts my thoughts turned to one of my favorite songs about a ghost...
Unknowing captor
You never know how much you
Pierce my spirit
But I can't touch you
Can you hear it
A cry to be free
Oh I'm forever under lock and key
As you pass through me...
Ghost, Indigo Girls
A Giant Dies...
"It is history's sorrow, the grief of our era, that lie about me like an anathema." Alexander I. Solzhenitsyn 1918 - 2008. Sent via BlackBerry by AT
I read the Gulag Archipelago years ago, through the course of a long winter weekend. I sat or laid on a big leather couch in the living room, warmed by a wood stove, snacking and drinking coffee. I read myself to sleep three nights in a row. I read myself awake three days in a row. I lived on coffee, sandwiches, and cigarettes. I was a different man then and the miles between here and there were alternately dark and light. But I remember that weekend well.
Sunday, August 3, 2008
A Final Thought For The Night
Thoughts At The End Of Vacation
Thoughts At The End Of Vacation
Well, I have just finished up seventeen days off. As far as vacations go it has been the longest stretch of time off I have taken that I can recall. It has possibly been three or four years, maybe more since I have taken time off in a long stretch like this. Normally, I take my vacation a week at a time and split it between a variety of destinations.
This time, I took four days in San Jose, then eight in San Diego, then five more in San Jose. I have planned to spend the last three days up at Lake Tahoe, but that part did not pan out, and that is fine. Had I gone up there I would have spent most of today getting back. So, I thought I would take a little time here in the evening and compose my thoughts about the vacation in general.
-It was very nice not to bend my knee to the clock. On several days I woke up, got up, tinkered around and then went back to bed. Those were enjoyable days. There were also a couple of nights when I stayed up late into the darkness. That was also very nice.
-The trip to San Deigo was excellent. The length was just about right. It was long enough to enjoy the San Diego area, but not long enough to get bored with the area. San Diego itself is diverse enough (being a major California city) that there is plenty to do.
-Of course, I thoroughly enjoyed the San Diego Comic Con. It is the ultimately pilgrimage for the inner geek and just all in all a good time. I will attend next year as well, having already bought my four day pass.
-There were a few things I would have liked to have done around the apartment, but they are ordinary things that I did not do because I chose not to do them. There is no real regret there - I will simply tackle them in the upcoming weeks.
-Following vacation it is pretty clear to me that the major stressor in my life, probably like a lot of other people, is work. I did have to spend part of two of my vacation days attending meetings related to work, mainly to bring me up to speed on developments when I am out so that I can hit the ground running when I get into the office tomorrow morning. The project that nearly broke me has developed a very long tail and that tail is thrashing around.
-I do feel much more centered than I did two weeks ago, so to that extent, I would consider the overall vacation a success. The main thing I wanted to do was settle things out, give myself a chance to spin down from the work stress, get refocused so that I can dive back into the fray on my return and to that end it was a successful vacation.
-I would have liked to have spent more time writing. I did write a lot of notes, a lot of scenarios, a lot of frames that I will be fleshing out over the course of the next couple of weeks. Hopefully that will be the tail of the vacation.
-Now that I am recentered and feel a great deal of clarity, it will be interesting to me to see how much that will carry into the work environment where I had previously been off center. As you can see from the frequency that work has appeared in this particular entry, my brain has already begun the process of shifting back into "work Rod" mode.
-So, with that, I think I will conclude this entry. It was a nice vacation, well deserved and excellent. I enjoyed it very much. So, with that in mind, I am going to call it a night, curl up in clean sheets, and try and get a nice nights sleep before I dive back into the fray.