persistence

tonight i stepped out onto my coveted (only a few of the rooms have them, and i made it a point to request one for every one of the remaining 5 weeks i'll be here) balcony at the lakeland courtyard marriott, and walked right through the web of a giant orangish spider.

now i got nothing against spiders, even giant orange ones; as my brother dan's bio prof in community college said, they are our "little friends". they catch bugs that i would otherwise have to violate some buddhist precept to dispose of, thus keeping my karma good, assuming that matters.

anyway, this spider web got all entangled in my carefully coifed (and heavily product saturated) (and increasingly "salt and pepper" colored) hair, which kind of freaked me out. but in keeping with the precept, i did not kill the little bugger (get it? bugger?); rather I surgically removed the remaining portion of the web that was in my path, while she sat there on the far side of it like some palestinian gaza resident watching some unusually benevolent massod-piloted dozer squash her house while leaving her unscathed.

i figured that in light of such a display of power, spidey would move on to greener pastures (or at least my neighbor's balcony).

well, after several hours of work, i went to step out onto the balcony again...only to discover that our little friend had completely rebuilt the web--in fact, she had built a much more splendid and complete and intricate web. a perfect, huge, geometrical mess spanning a good quarter of the door from the roof down.

i left it. there's a lesson somewhere in this.

hopefully i'll remember tomorrow.

irealized

tonight i realized several things.

1. lamb fat is kind of crunchy, and delightful, especially when my secret dry rub is seared into it.
2. i haven't seen a shooting star in probably 6 months (probably more, actually). I looked real hard tonight, for an accumulated total of about 90 seconds, and dind't see one. this can, i figure, be a sign of one of two things: a. stac is the firefly soul i've been searching for, so now that i've found her i no longer need nature's substitutes. see http://vincecavasin.com/Writing/Poetry/nightcamelotlodge.htm. b. i've been too goddamned busy to bother looking.
3. when cooking lamb, searing can create a fantastic spectacle of taste. actually that's probably hyperbole. but here's the story: i lit up my grill real hot and threw some lambchops on, and at one of my many runs into the house to check the peas and mushroom/onion concoction (two separate concoctions, note, one of onions/mushrooms and one of peas...the bottom line story of which is, when cooking dinner for oneself one should not try to overacheive), there was a flare up (note flare ups on my grill never flare down, because of all the accumulated grease they have to feed on), which singed the hell out of one (of the four) lambchops. the majority of this lambchop had a glorious texture and flavor. this, folks, is the scientific method at its best. or something like that.
4. it's hard to coach, but it's a very worthwhile skill to practice and therefore learn.
5. sauteed onions and mushrooms do not add anything to a plate of lambchops. for some reason i associate lambchops with toppings; probably because the meat has a different flavor than beef, one that i'm not used to so might say is "strong" (discourse on the semantics of strong vs. normal meat are left for a future discussion). last weekend, i made lambchops for me and stac (as it turns out, about 3 lbs of them when neither of us was that hungry), with a blu cheese/butter sauce, and it was delightful. but the mushroom/onion did not help. at first i thought it was because the mushrooms were canned, but then i tried some of the lamb with just onion. i mean, it could be that the canned mushrooms being sauteed with the onion altered the flavor so much that they didn't work. or maybe i'm a bad chef and didn't come in from the grill enough to check them and adjust the temp. but the onions did not add anything to the lamb alone. so whatever the cause, i recommend keeping lambchops pure. when cooked in my famous and secret rub anyway. the blu cheese crap worked well, but probably not worth the effort.
6. If we budget reasonably and all goes according to my financial plan (which includes no major economic catastrophes in the forecast period), in three years stac and i will be comfortable enough that I won't have anxiety about our financial future. that will be nice.
7. the insane and foundational beauty of a really great relationship is that even as you disagree, struggle, argue, etc., you grow. you are continually reminded of why you've been in awe of this other being for some years, and it's no leap to see how you will continue to be in awe of her (or him) for ever. and you look at your own life and contemplate how it's changed since you met her (or him), and how it's changing and will continue to change, and how you can't imagine how much better it's going to be as a result of those changes, of her. or him.

And that last one, my friends, makes you sit down at the computer and tell everyone about it, all of it.

the thing about stars

moby said we are all made of stars, and at a very fundamental level (given current scientific theory, anyway), he was right.

just ask carl sagan. or, if you're not clairvoyant, read what he wrote.

the thing that gets me about stars is that they've been there, pretty much as a rule, for billions of years (i'll dispense with qualifications wrt current scientific theory from here on out for the sake of brevity).

and they'll be there for billions of years after we're gone. after everyone, all our grandkids and greatgrandkids and googlegrandkids are gone.

so, stars live for, say, 10 billion years on average. you live for, say, 75 years on average. for the mathematically inclined among you, that means stars live 133,333,333.3333333 times longer than you do.

that's a long freakin' time, punk.

stac kinda rhymes with faith

i had a talk with stac tonight that was, fundamentally, about faith.

we've been talking about this marriage thing for a while, see, but last weekend we did a couple things that sort of made it more tangible: we looked at rings, and we bought a shitload of furniture for her house that will one day (hopefully sooner rather than later, regardless of the ring situation) be arranged around rooms in a home we call ours.

me, i'm not a faithful sort. i rationalize everything i come across in this life; if i can't explain it, i don't believe in it.

which is why my relationship with her has had such a uniquely profound impact on me.

it has shown me that faith takes over where rationality breaks down.

rationally, the notion of being with one person for the rest of my life--even stac--terrifies me. not because i can find anything to seriously complain about with respect to her, but because rationally i can't say that i trust myself. and this is basically what we were talking about, at least from my silly little perspective.

we all--those of us who think, anyway--have doubts about virtually every major decision we make. and i contend that those doubts have their root in fear--fear of our own ability to follow through, to deliver, to keep our word; in short, to be responsible for whatever decision we're making.

most decisions can be rationalized to the point of near certainty that they're correct; those that seem like they can't--or that aren't worth the bother--often are so insignificant that they simply don't merit the intellectual energy necessary for the rationalization.

but with love there's this other person involved that, if the love is worth a crap, has feelings and needs and goals at least equally important to your own. and you can rationalize your commitment to such a relationship till you're blue in the face, but ultimately all that rationalization points you in one direction: ya gotta have faith.

ya gotta have faith that the rationalization was correct. ya gotta have faith that the other person is as committed to the relationship as you are (even if their thought processes are diametricallly opposed to yours). and ultimately, ya gotta have faith in your own beliefs and commitments, knowing that things are bound to get tough at some or several points, and your faith may be the only thing--when rationality breaks down--that keeps you working at it.

this is the beautiful dichotomy of personal responsibility: love. when you love someone, your responsibility to that love--to yourself, to the other, to the two of you that make the one of you--requires faith. simultaneously and equally in yourself, in the other, in the two of you that make the one of you. faith is the thing that makes love permanent; without it, commitment becomes a current-state phenomenon, subject to change when the cost/benefit analysis goes negative.

with it, you know that such events are just dips in the road, and that while they will likely occur again, the final destination holds the greatest reward worth seeking: peace. for yourself, for the other, for the two of you that make the one of you.

so there you have it.

(did i just rationalize faith into existence?)

what

psssst....hey buddy...wanna read some real writin'?

what

hello world

they make this crap way too easy.

sorry, haven't got anything profound to say at the moment; i just couldn't sleep and was trying to kill some time. now i have to find something else to make myself tired.

more later.