Terrible Analogies

I am an unintentional collector.

At any given time I can look in my wallet and find no less than ten receipts from various stores.  In my car I have a vast assortment of long-ignored pennies.  My desk drawers at work contain mini mountains of scribbled notes that consisting of information so vital to me that I locked them away only to forget that they ever existed.  On my pantry shelves are stacks of tinned food missing their labels that I’m afraid to open.  My closet is stacked high with old computer parts, Christmas gifts still in their packages, and manuals to electronics that I don’t recall ever owning.  And in my bathroom medicine cabinet are expired medications, Band-Aids whose paper wrappings have yellowed with age, and that half-filled mini-bottle of mouthwash that’s desperate to be put out of its misery.

All of these things, and more, surround me.  They’re all small.  Insignificant.  After all, they’re just coins, scraps of paper, and tiny pills.  They normally thrive in the void where ignored things live, happy in the fact that they exist at all.  And I’m guilty of living the lie that my life is orderly.  Neat.  Uncluttered.

That is, until I investigate my wallet to see why it’s so darned fat, only to pull out receipts so old that the ink on them has faded.

Then I get to thinking about all of those little things that take up space.

The kitchen spices so old that they’ve frozen into columns of concrete inside their containers. The magazines secreted away under the coffee table.  The junk drawer whose depths haven’t been plumbed in years.

All of these things have turned me into an unintentional collector of the mundane.  An accruer of the banal.

These placeholders…these unnecessary watermarks of a life in motion must be purged.  Starting today.

First things first.  Let’s clean out that wallet…

My permit for this year’s run up Mt. Whitney has finally arrived!

When I submitted my request in February, I requested an ascent date anywhere in the first three weeks of September (to better my chances of getting a permit).  Looks like I managed to grab a September 20th start time.

I’m now off to reserve a hotel room for Wednesday night in Lone Pine, put in a request for vacation days at work, and really start buckling down on some extended trail runs at Mt. Woodson and Iron Mountain in Poway.

Man, I’m excited!  Get to pick up a new water bladder solution (my Camelbak is disintegrating), try out some new GU gels, and get a new pair of shoes.  WooHoo!

See you on the trails!

Luckily, for us, our cat never discovered this little trick. Perhaps it’s because she sleeps in bed with us every night? In fact, she’s less of a cat and more of a house mom…

Oh, and if you want to recreate this fun in your very own home, click here! Have fun wasting the next few minutes…

I’ve been hard at work on my book once again.  Can’t seem to be able to break away from this tale of strange people doing strange things.

Forgive the roughness of this offering.  It’s from an unedited section that I’ll be re-visiting sometime in the future on second/third re-write…

Donnie eyes the familiar forms and fills them out with the necessary lies: Birth date, weight, height, social security number, medical history, family history, emergency point of contact.  It’s the same required information at every location, only the name of the test is different.  This one reads “National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases: Hemorrhagic Fever Vaccine Case Study 5.65a”.

Completing them, he hands them back to the emotionless nurse behind the counter who unclips the carbon forms and tosses them on a pile in a plastic bin on her desk.  Nobody bothers to double-check the information given.  “Please, follow me,” She tells Donnie, pointing him to the door to his left.

Turning towards the door and the nurse is already there, holding it open, motioning him with a slow tilt of her head towards the end of a long hall where a large bald man with rolls of skin running down the back of his neck stands.  This man, he doesn’t wear a nametag.  Opening the door he tells Donnie to take a seat.  That the doctor will be here in a minute.

Fast forward, and Donnie’s gripping the steering wheel of his beat up Chevy Caprice with one hand and swiping at the sweat from his face with his other like he’s swatting at an insistent insect.  An electrode still stuck to the side of his neck.  Crossing the bridge headed back for Galveston, his first instinct is to run home.  To get away from the noise.

Guiding the dented front end of his car into his assigned spot Donnie cuts the engine and sits in the darkness for a few minutes, squeezing the steering wheel with both hands, his head doubled over the back of his seat.  Eyes closed.  Sweat dripping from the edges of his ears, each drop pounding out a rhythm on the cracked pleather next to his neck.

The tests weren’t unusual, Donnie thinks.  The shots.  The examinations.  The questions.  The bad food.  All standard.

When the staff stopped showing up, calling in sick or going home early, when the doctors were concerned that the vaccine being tested was causing an adverse reaction in the subjects, that something unmentionable was happening to them, that’s when Donnie thought that this might finally be the one.

With the yelling and the screaming and the squeaking of shoes running up and down the halls, Donnie laid back in his bed, with arms at his side palms up.  Relaxed.  At peace.  Closing his eyes he willed himself open to the sickness.  In his mind’s eye Donnie could envision his veins enlarging, his heart pumping strong, giving the vaccine an open super highway though his circulatory system, allowing unfettered access to his soft insides, wishing for organ failure or internal hemorrhaging on a massive, incurable scale.

And Donnie smiled.  Soft and innocent.  Calm in the eye of the darkest storm.  Zen and the art of assisted suicide; his prayers were finally being answered.

But that’s when Abbey crashes through his door, locking it from the inside.  She’s telling him to get out of bed.  Put some fucking pants on.  That they’re coming for him next.

Donnie sees that in her hand Abbey holds a cell phone, and he can hear a familiar voice shouting from it.

It sounds oddly enough like his brother.

The deepest I’ve ever been underwater was when I rode on the Finding Nemo ride at Disneyland.

Given my minutes of underwater expertise, I find it an amazing accomplishment that James Cameron managed to dive to the deepest depths of the ocean and return home unscathed.

To put this feat into perspective, the good folks over at xkcd have released a scale drawing of not only the Marianas Trench, but also the depths of various bodies of water around the world.  Along with some fascinating facts (check out what James Cameron found in the Challenger Deep), this graphics makes for an entertaining and educational read.

Click on this picture to embiggen:

Please consider this my “teachable moment” for the week…

…oh, and “Happy Friday the 13th”!