I have the attention span of a woodpecker.

Which is to say I’m easily distracte — ohh! Shiny!

(I’m sorry, I stole that joke from my friend Beano, but she can have it back, she does it better)

This is why I sat down today to make an entry – no, wait, that was yesterday – wait, saturday – ah, whatever fucking day it was – and instead spent two days fiddling with cascading style sheets, php, javascripts, and blah blah blah ginger.

So this why it’s possible you are now reading this with a too-cool-but-sort-of-annoying matrix look to it, unless I’ve already grown bored with that, or unless I have gotten really ambitious (and fucked off a lot at work) and gotten the style-switcher function in place so you’re seeing this any damned way you please.

But we were talking about distraction. I must have gotten — oh, Shiny!

This is what happens to me. I sit down to write something and will take any excuse not to. Oh, first I need coffee. Wait, now I need some food. Oh, this music isn’t right, where’s that first album by, oh, man, these CD’s need to be organized, I’ll just — Ooh! Look! I forgot I had this one, I should play it. Wait, I need to hook up the stereo to the good speakers and…. And I need some more coffee now.

Yeah. It’s like that. And that’s the horror of the internet for people like me. The tools of my trade, and the tools of my – um – whatever writing is, hobby sounds wrong – are also the greatest source of distraction in my life. Here, clickity-click, is my email, some music, shopping, porn, an article on the mating habits of the capybara, political diatribe, computer-date-matching, (I’m an elk, looking for a wombat, for casual dating and maybe cross–species monkey business. Mmm, with monkeys!), porn, chit-chat, discographies for bands I don’t even like, dictionaries (don’t get me started, I’m gone for days once I’m in a dictionary), blogs and porn and recipes and – well, porn.

Some days I think I should cut the damned wire and turn my computer back into a fancy typewriter (which is sort of how my mother-in-law thinks of it).

But you know, that might be right when the email comes in, the one I REALLY REALLY NEED to READ RIGHT NOW.

So here’s were I should talk about exactly how far broken safety glass can go in a garage (any garage – ok, my garage) when it’s flexed beyond it’s natural range. But that story might make me look stupid. Let’s just say that the majority of my day, when not working on making the blog nobody reads user-configurable, was spent sweeping up a tiny, tiny hash of shiny (Oooh! Shiny!) fragments of safety glass from my garage floor.

And you know what? Now, it’s sure to rain. That always happens when I take the top off my jeep, even when I don’t break the mother fucking rear window of the hard top. If there wasn’t enough weather mojo just from removing the top, this seals the deal. 40 days and 40 nights, call me Noah, and load up the ark with goth girls, two by two.

You know, my garage floor is swept really clean now. At least there’s that. Only, I’m sure to be the one who finds the shard I missed, and I’m sure to find it with my foot. Because that’s how luck is running. Trip to vegas? Nah, not this season.

---

So I promised myself I would not blog about orkut ever again. That lasted – oh, what time is it now – at least a few minutes. But I’ve entered a new phase as an orkut user. I’m no longer simply trying to collect my friends and show off how cool I am by which communities I have. I’ve crossed over. I’m now a friend slut. I’m friending people I don’t even know because they 1) up my friend count, and 2) look good in my list of friends.

“Hi, I’m Karl Elvis, and I’m an Orkut Friend Slut“

Somebody stop me. Please.

---

Ooh, slap the cuffs on me.

I just got put in Orkut Jail.

More on the whys and hows of this later, but it seems some automated evil-doer filter caught me in the nefarious act of posting something (the horror!), and now my account has been suspended and my picture replaced with this image.

Read more “Distractions”

So one of the effects Orkut has had on me is to think a lot about the past.

One of the favorite games (at least for those of us who’ve been on the net since god was still in his diapers) is to locate people we have no t seen or talked to in many many years. I’ve found a few, some who I’ve friended (and it’s funny that “friend” is suddenly a verb), others whom I’ve noticed but not yet friended.

And while I’m on that, let me digress for a second. Ever have those words you can’t ever seen to type correctly? ‘Teh‘ is my old standby, but suddenly it’s ‘frined‘. I even say it out loud as I type it (a habit I picked up from a dyslexic friend), ‘F-R-I-E-N-D’, and then as I say it, still type ‘frined‘. It’s like my hands have an auxiliary spelling engine which just does not agree with my brain.

But anyway…

There are a lot of old friends that I’ve not found yet. I keep checking, seeing if they turn up. If I had email addresses for some of them I’d send ’em an invite, for some, but for others it’s just a question of “Whatever happened to…”

So with all this thought of old friends must come, I suppose, internal review.

Now, by nature I turn the microscope inwards almost constantly, so it’s not like there are vast expanses (I wanted to sage “huge tracts but don’t start me on that) of my psyche unexplored. I know where the bodies are buried and which corners hold the cobwebs and who’s living in that dungeon under the secret trap door (No wait, that’s my house, not my head, forget I said that).

But this is more about the measurements taken over time.

I recently looked up a name I’ve had in my head for a long time, and got a hit on it. Someone I was really good friends with a LONG time ago (universe far far away, as they say), when I worked at Sun and socializing by email was a new and thrilling concept. Person I’ve not talked to in a lot of years.

So you wonder, when this happens, how said person has changed. Did they get old? Did they get boring? Settled down? Wilder than ever? Did they dreams they talked about when they were young ever pan out?

And then this flips. How have I changed since then?

I’m trying to put a time frame on this. I’m finding that I started work at Sun – um – *cough*nineteen*cough* years ago. And left there six years later. So I’m talking somewhere in that time frame. Say fifteen years.

So. Wow. I’m the same, right? Fifteen years?

I was 27 then. I was childless. I was still working on the business side of high tech, hadn’t made my great leap over to engineering (Net? We don’t need no steeenking’ net!). Hadn’t yet taken up diving. Was writing, but didn’t yet know what I was doing. I had only a few tattoos, but was known far and wide as father of bodyart on the net (I actually had fans).

I was still mean. I still looked for people to fight with on a daily basis. I still felt I needed to prove I was SMARTER THAN YOU. Chip on my shoulder? No, not so much. More a slab.

I had a mullet.

I was hanging out with bands, roadie and bouncer and sound guy and driver and whatever I needed to do to be a part of the scene, not just a guy on the scene. I drank like a fish, often starting the party after midnight and getting home after dawn.

It’s been a long time.

But am I different? Or do I just do different things?

Having children changes a person. Or it should, I guess it doesn’t always. It changed me. I sold the fastest motorcycle I’ve ever owned just before my first kid was born. I had a moment of clarity after two possibly fatal near-crashes in one week, and traded that bike on something big and slow and heavily chromed. There are a million other changes but that one is a good metaphor. I had to give away part of being a child in exchange for having to be parent and protector and anchor for a family.

But there’s more. Time and life experience, financial responsibility, business successes and failures. Friendships. Relationships. Loves and heart-breaks (ok, a dozen of these a day, what can I say?). Emotional breakdowns and rebirths.

I’m tempted to say something about finding one’s self, but that implies I was missing. And while I can’t find my car-keys and – oh, there are my glasses, up on top of my head – I don’t think it’s really that. Not finding myself, but maybe getting to a point of comfort with who I am. What I can do, what I want, what I need.

So then the question, thinking back on then, and fast-forwarding to now, is always one of “will we connect”?

I spoke to an old friend a month or two ago. My childhood “best friend”, David. I could write a long piece on David, he’s a character. He introduced me to comics (First comic? ‘Kamadi, the last boy on earth’. Silly, but hell, it was Jack King Kirby, so that’s allright, baby!), he introduced me to Zappa. I introduced him to pot, and Edgar Rice Burroughs, and Tolkien. We drifted a apart in highschool, he moved away. I have not talked to him since my last trip back east, 18 years or so ago. Wonder of the internet, though, I tracked him down recently and we found, in a strange conversation where he was wired on too much coffee and maybe booze and I was feverish with flu and it was 2am here, that we still connect, as ever. Music and books and likes and opinions, politics and a shared experience growing up with 60’s radical parents. It was a beautiful moment for both of us, finding that, with all our divergent parts, we are still friends and still like each other and feel that soul connection you can’t really forge when you’re older that 20 or so without love being involved.

So – are we different? or are we just old?

Read more “Different or just old?”

So is a blog different when you know people are reading?

That’s my question to ask of myself. “Self,” I ask…

So I just had my first ‘I found your blog via your web page from…‘ feedback, which startled me. I mean, I know a couple people read this, but it’s not like I’ve gone out of my way to send people here. I do this for me, mostly. Actually I was sort of waiting to see if anyone actually found it by accident, which, to my surprise, happened.

So suddenly today – yesterday – I felt like I suddeny had to write somehing more important because, y’know, people are paying attention.

Blog Fright?

Something.

But it could be something else. I still have a a brain that’s made mostly from wood (cue ‘Little Wooden Head‘) from last week’s attack of bio-engineered-respiritory-system-dwelling-crab-people or whatever was in there. I can’t say I’m operating at anything like 100% capacity (hell, I’m lucky most days if I can reach a solid 50%, so I think ‘m down in single digits right now). So maybe my creativity has gone off to hide where lost socks go and it will turn up in a few days, static-clung to my hipster-coolguy-lucky13 shirt or my black-ninja-BDU-swat-team pants.

Crackle! Ah! Here it is! Now can I re-attach this with soap? Wendy? Can you sew this on please?

And think happy thoughts.

And I’d like to point out, I’m already over quota (over-quota? Somebody stop me) for hyphens in this entry, and have yet to say anything. Quick, send more hyphens!

---

And so endeth an era.

I gave up my SF 49ers season tickets yesterday.

After staying with the team through the firing of a good coach (George Siefert), hiring an unknown (Mooch), rebuilding and then more rebuilding, and sucking and then not sucking and then kind of sucking, firing of a great coach (Mooch) for an insane reason, and various and sundry mis-management, after staying for all that and proving I’m a fan by watching when the games sucked, and paying for a seat is a stadium that is a fucking pig sty…

It feels weird.

There’s a history. A friend-of-a-friend-of-a-(wait while I open another pack of hyphens)-friend sort of story. These tickets belong to this guy, but his kids stopped going (one moved away, the other moved farther away). But my friend James (and let’s just say right here, James fucking rules, but we’ll get to that later) sort of inherited one of these tickets, and my friend Chad inherited the other (Wait, I need a whole entry for Friends who Rule). So I got the extra stray ticket over the years, a game or two, then more. Finally the owner of said tickets gave up on going to every game, and the other two offered me control of that seat since I’d proved fandom. And so it’s been for several years now. Another friend, Eric (my best-dive-buddy-and-brother-I-never-had-but-with-questionable-politics) picked up the adjacent seat when it became available.

These seats have been in the family, so to speak, since ’81. I’ve been going for – I dunno. A lotta years now. James and Chad for a lot more. And it’s been good, good when the team won, good when the team lost, even good when we left early for what turned out to be the biggest come-from-behind win in playoff history vs the NY Giants.

But now. Now, with new families, busier jobs, tighter finances, and more interests taking our time and money; now, with the team’s management in a tailspin, and our top players being released, and our stadium ever more a pig-sty (And later, I shall tell the story of the hanging pigeon, a story with no end now, it seems, or no end I shall ever know).

And a brief aside – in a chat window, just now, I typed:

Here’s a concept:
Teletubby phone sex.
Think on that.

And so I suggest to you – yes, think on that.

But anyway (This is bloging for the short-attention-span), with all this, we came to the conclusion, collectively, that the money and the commitment were too much given our growing level of frustration with the team and the facilities and our own shrinking time availabilities.

It was a strange and emotional moment. Like giving up on a team I’ve been supporting since the early 80’s. I know it’s not quite like that, and I’m still a fan and will still go to games when possible, but it did feel strange.

Now remind me about the pigeon story later…

Read more “Shhh! They’re listening!”