this recent rash of kidsmoke

The man had traveled alone for a very long time, and it was understandable that he was not a big talker.  It wasn’t that he felt uncomfortable in the presence of others or that he didn’t enjoy their company, it was simply that he wasn’t used to talking while he was moving.  The boys had begun their journey tittering and laughing and whining and running ahead and behind, just as boys should, but they soon adopted the slow but steady and quiet pace of the man they now followed.  The three would stop to rest a few times a day and exchange a few observations, and at night around their small campfire they would share stories--the boys wide-eyed and silent while the dark man, made darker somehow by the light of the fire, told tales of places his steady pace had taken him--but during the day, moving straight ahead was all that was on their minds.

It occurred to him, of course, that the boys might have wanted to talk, to banter, simply to pass the long hot hours under the sun.  Because while the desert was beautiful to him, full of life and sound, the truth was that it was just a landscape, and a relatively featureless one at that.  Perhaps the boys were only silent to impress him, or perhaps it was a juvenile attempt to imitate him, who had, simply for lack of anything better, adopted him as a father.  When his thoughts led him down this path, he would admit to himself that he was in fact impressed with their relatively quick maturation.  It followed then that perhaps he had adopted them as well.

They were eleven days out of the last town, a small but surprisingly clean tangle of buildings, a stop not big enough for a name but big enough to feel like something.  The people were friendly and asked few questions, allowing the man and his boys to stay the night and leave in the morning without the kind of trouble that he had gotten used to of late.  It had been the third--no, the fourth--settlement that he had passed through with the boys, the only real measurement of time and space out here in the beautiful emptiness of the desert.  Neither boy had made mention of his mother since sometime after the second town; he hadn’t quite decided how to feel about that yet. There were times for words and times for silence, times for walking away and times for holding your ground, but every once in a while a road would loom heavy on the horizon that would offer no hint as to what was at the other end, and the only way to find out was to just keep walking. It was a familiar feeling to him, uncertainty, and a not altogether unwelcome one for someone who had seen so much of the world. a familiar feeling, but one that had come less and less frequent as the years and the traveling continued. he had given up wondering how long the roads would stretch out in front of him a long time ago.

but no, the boys were definitely something new. he had had companions before--after all, he had been traveling for a very long time--but the two brothers were something fundamentally differently. at first he had thought it might simply be their youth: he had spent quite a while away from the kind of refreshing sincerity and naivety that blows children around like leaves in a strong breeze. after even just a few days with them, however, he picked up on an odd, almost ageless quality about the pair; their innocence still shrouded them like a fog, but occasionally he caught a flash of something deeper, an intelligence that, to wince through a cliche, was far beyond their years. he had first noticed at night, around their storytelling campfire, two or three days--probably three--after leaving their mother. he had been deep in a tale that he had started the night before, one of his almost endless stock of stories about those uncertain roads he had walked down.

[tired now bedtime; it's good to be alone guitar solo]

you know i stay fresh to death

welcome back, friends, to the lowercase hipster info hub. you might remember this place being located on a blogger site, but i decided that wasn't really the best format for what i was trying to do with it. i've been using a relatively simple journaling program to do all my writing, you see, and after a while i started to realize that i would often find myself in a place that i wanted to write without the tools to do it. here, i can organize everything as i see fit and access it from pretty much anywhere. it might end up being slightly disorganized, but that is a feature: i'm pretty disorganized myself, so i suppose this place should be too. what's that you say? it's still on blogger? oh yeah, i switched back after i found out that google pages couldn't do what i wanted either. then i gave blogger a little more time and i think i have it set up pretty okay now, what with proper labels and all.

so please, sit back, relax, enjoy the smooth sounds of elvis costello and burt bacharach (not provided), drink a tall, cool glass of milk, whatever makes you happy. personally, listening to my crazy neighbor wail along to jethro tull makes me happy. seriously, he really gets into it: i'll be sitting here in relative peace and quiet and then out of nowhere IN THE SHUF-FULL-LING MAAAADNEAAAAASSS!!!! it's awesome. anyway, the point i never got arond to making is that this is a place of work, but most certainly not a place of business, so please understand that nothing here is actually serious and no, i don't actually think any of it is any good. the main reason i organized everything in this way was to be able to change anything i wanted at any time. and if you'd like to leave a comment, you know, like you used to leave at the old site, well, you'll just have to do it the hard way and email me: adampetersen@gmail.com. yep, there's another couple sentences that don't apply now that i'm back here. oh well, i always liked my "don't ever use the backspace rule" so why stop now.

now to get to work on putting everything in it's right place... you can navigate the site using the links on the right side, one for each section. i'll change the date to reflect when a particular section has been updated. shout is just me ranting about things like i used to on the blog, while dark, undoing, and paycheck are active projects, and crash is where i'll put all my reviews. yes, this paragraph made a lot more sense when it was in google pages. each link on the right is now just a label, so it will link to all the posts that fall under said label. no, there is nothing under crash at the moment, which is why it's not there. man, my neighbor is still going. i mean, he is screaming. okay, back to work.

i will find my fears and face them, or i will cower like a dog

i said i was going to write something on the drive home, so i’m going to do it. i don’t care how tired i am. wait, no, that’s a lie, of course i care how tired i am. but i have to write down what i said or i will forget it and then i’ll have to wait another four months to feel like i need to write something.

i have often joked that i should develop a drinking problem so that i have some sort of real issue in my life to worry about. tonight, i have officially determined that such action would not be altogether wise. you see, while i do give myself quite the benefit of the doubt, the doubt itself lingers. at some point i’m going to have to realize that nothing is going to change unless i change it.

one of my favorite things to do is to find hidden metaphors in my daily life. my clever adamism of the other day read “my face is a metaphor for my life, and i need to shave.” on the way home tonight, i think i may have found a new clever little metaphor, one that i hope might actually do me some good.

i probably have an ulcer. i say “probably” because it’s not really definite; my doctor doesn’t really know what it is, and i suppose there’s no real way to know without some seriously invasive tests--which i may or may not have to go through since my next stop is at a gastrointestinologist’s office--but all signs point to ulcer. she prescribed me harder antacids this time with the hope that they’ll make a difference, but when it all comes down to it, i need to realize that this isn’t something that has any sort of quick fix. this is pretty much going to require an actual lifestyle change, something that i’ve been avoiding for just about the entire time i’ve had my own lifestyle. i’m going to have to eat better and take better care of myself if i ever want to heal. this isn’t something i can put off any longer; my body has finally had enough of my bullshit and it’s trying to bring me down from the inside for revenge. i’ve been faking it over the last several weeks, but only because i thought--well, i don’t know why i was doing it, because i thought that the meds would take care of it. even just typing out that sentence makes me realize that i didn’t really believe that; i guess i was just putting it off just that little bit longer. but i can’t do that anymore.

so why, then, do i think the rest of my life is any different? do i really believe that whatever constitutes the meds in this metaphor is going to suddenly turn my life around and make me happy? do i think that someone is just going to come along and hand me the answer to my problems? i don’t think i can, if i’m being completely honest to myself, just get a new job and make it all better. i can’t blame my job for everything that’s wrong with my life, everything that makes me unhappy.

i need to grow up. i need to eat a salad. but no tomatoes still, thankfully; they’re on the ulcer no-no list. i can’t expect to cold-turkey my way into this, though, because a) i know myself and i don’t have that kind of conviction, and b) i don’t really know what it is i need to fix. so let’s extend the metaphor, then: i’ve been to my life general practitioner and i know i have a problem, now it’s time for a trip to the life specialist. life gastrointestinologist. whatever.