That Good Night -

The Sickness, The New Job, The Training, The Long Weekend

Sun, 07 Oct 2007 20:56:23 -0700

And that sums up my week. Started the new job officially on Monday, and didn't do a goddamn thing related to it all week. Got sick Sunday afternoon and spent the entire week being miserable. Found out Monday morning that I had to go to some training in Boston Wednesday and Friday. But not Thursday. Oh, no. They "understood" that I had to be back for a jury trial date. So, I had to drive to my folks' house, take the train in, take the train back, then drive back home, all in about 24 hours. Then I was super extra miserable the next day. So I called in sick Friday. The training was useless. Fuck'em all.

Thankfully, I'm finishing up a long weekend here at my folks' place. Drove back for the second time Friday afternoon after taking an extended sleepytime. Good food and comfort were on the menu all weekend. I helped make some homemade pizza today that was balls to the wall. It involved a roasted garlic/olive oil/parmesan/oregano spread on the dough followed by the pizza sauce, a mozzerella/sharp cheddar blend, then sliced tomato and crushed red pepper to top it off. It was awesome. There was also some chicken pot pie action, some chicken soup, and some apple crisp somewhere in there near the end.

There, but for, go I, etc.

Sun, 23 Sep 2007 22:41:40 -0700

One of my colleagues, one whom I never met, is a colleague no longer. Having received notice of her hiring rather late, she skipped get-to-know-Springfield week and went straight to the intensive training for new attorneys. Thus, we never met in person. We heard an interesting anecdote from our boss and got some personal/professional details, but that was it.

Now she is dead.

Suicide and I have had an interesting relationship. Like most of my relationships, there was always a dearth of primal connection. I confess to fascination, indignation, philosphication, dramatization, and even a bit of novelization. But I have never known anyone personally who has taken that road, at least, not all the way. I've known quite a few near-misses and a few more likely candidates. I do not wish to cast aspersions on either the living or the dead, but from the living I've received virtually no insight or useful information about the process or the state of mind surrounding the phenomenon. And so, my relationship with suicide is one of abstract thought.

Review: Metroid Prime 3: Corruption (Wii)

Fri, 14 Sep 2007 06:19:32 -0700

It's been about a year since my totally awesome mom waited in line at 5:30 AM in front of a Toys'r'us to get me a Wii for a birthday present. Before that, I had been behind the video game curve. My "reviews," such as they were, were for games that had already been played and reviewed to death everywhere else.

But a new era has dawned, and although I cannot claim to have played the many new games for PS3 and Xbox360, I have decided that new Wii games are a luxury I can afford.

Enter Metroid Prime 3: Corruption.

I just finished this game yesterday. I would have finished much, much sooner, if not for three problems. The first problem is work. The second problem is that FPS-ish games tend to give me vertigo unless/until I immerse myself in one thoroughly for several days. See the first problem for why I could not do this.

My third and final problem was, Metroid Prime 3 just did not "wow" me.

The game's got a lot going for it. It's visually superior to the first and second entries. The sound and music is, like before, fantastic - it matches the various stages very well, sets/reinforces the appropriate mood, and the various pieces stand by themselves as well-composed and arranged. The iconic space bounty hunter always gives an "intangible awesome" bump to any title in which she appears, and the voice acting (a first for the series) was done competently. Samus of course remains one of Nintendo's silent heroes.

In defense of the common usage: "unique"

Wed, 12 Sep 2007 20:35:03 -0700

According to the internet, and other, more reputable sources, the word "unique" is one of many modern litmus tests for the properly-educated and grammatically fastidious. If one lazily uses the term with a modifier, i.e. "quite unique," "rather unique," or the anathematized "very unique," one is out of the club - no secret handshake, no decoder ring, no access to the secret hideout.

My so-called peers and colleagues may look upon me with shame and disgust, but I must rise to the defense of the informal and colloquial use of this term. But defending the term is meaningless if I don't first tell you why I feel compelled to do so. So, part the first: me loves words. Part the second: the word "unique."

Part The First

Although I have no great aptitude for languages or linguistics, I've developed sort of a niche when it comes to the English language. I feel a deep affinity for my native tongue. I give credit to my love of music (yay awesome song lyrics) and my method of reading books for pleasure. I tend to sort of "hear' the words as I read over them. It's hard to describe, and I need to move on. Suffice to say whatever mastery I've acheived with English is due to an inexplicable compulsion to say exactly what I mean.

Another Side, Part II

Tue, 04 Sep 2007 13:55:07 -0700

I will say this and this alone regarding my communications to you, my stranger friend: because I have visited your world, I will make the effort to meet you on your terms. I cannot tarry, however, to wrangle with the way that my world defies description by your words. I will simply do the best I can.

************

Our kind are never truly young, though we are, for a time, ill-formed.

As best I can remember, I spent my ill-formed days very close to that soupy swamp. This was not so uncommon. Many congregated there to slip amongst the fragmented pictures and sounds. Some preferred the tactile bits, while others searched for the rarest of morsels, a taste.

By and large we did not bother each other. There, we were protected. We had no particular benefactor. We benefitted from the unmalleability of the swamp, however, because even the most senseless and vicious among us could not swallow up and digest the swamp. Only to the rare few did the swamp become a hobgoblin or nemesis; most, upon discovering its dumb defiance, promptly ignored it forevermore.

A work of fiction, tentatively titled "Another Side," Part I

Mon, 03 Sep 2007 21:56:07 -0700

The following comes with no promises or guarantees as to when, if ever, it will be continued or concluded.

To Whom It may Concern,

Although you have never met me, rest assured that you know me. You have borne witness to several jumbled fragments of my existence, as I have to yours. We are connected, you and I. I know not how and I know not why.
I begin with this proclamation of ignorance in the hopes that you will not distract yourself by attempting to answer the questions, or worse yet, attempting to glean the answers from my tale. They are not there. I say this with such confidence because I have tried, and failed, to discern those same answers from the fragments of your experience with which I have collided on so many occasions.

I am sure many others like myself have attempted to do what I am doing now – to transmit in some orderly fashion a message to someone or something that they cannot truly touch. And no, we are not sure if you are merely figments (intentionally created or otherwise) or if you really do exist somewhere. There are opinions, and opinions differ. The majority of us feel you must exist, much as the majority of your cohorts feel we must not. I have my theories as to this opposition. From what I have seen, your people have adapted in such a way that the intersection of your desire and your will and your stray thoughts are pushed out into your world, and the decision is made quite early, and not wholly voluntarily, if you will birth something real or something imaginary. Somehow, and here the details truly escape me, there seems to be a firm consensus (most of the time) as to what truly is.

Young and Old

Fri, 31 Aug 2007 09:20:41 -0700

Originally written late May/early June, 2007 on a scratch paper notepad.

My chosen destination for a late lunch on this warm sunny spring day was a Friendly’s restaurant snuggled in strip-mall suburbia. A local establishment (its headquarters mere miles away in Wilbraham, MA,) it’s changed little since I was a child, and changes little from place to place.
I would hesitate to call anything about its décor “homegrown” or distinctively New England. The closest it comes is a tiny shelf of assorted knickknacks perched high above the reach of the restaurant’s youngest patrons. I see old books and copper pails, some blue-colored glass jars, an old oatmeal tin. Somehow amidst the old-time wooden chairs and tables and a panoply of dingy carnival colors, these oddball antiquities don’t seem out of place. Nor do the oldest patrons: pairs of old men and pairs of old women mostly at this time of day; one supposes that it’s still an hour or two too early for the husband and wife duos seeking the ever-elusive early bird special.

Evening Addendum: spontaneous musings on writing style

Wed, 29 Aug 2007 20:33:50 -0700

The sentences were getting a little long tonight. It denotes a lack of subject matter and a lack of focus. Also a lack of practice. I need to get myself back in the blogging saddle. Having read some new blogs recently, I've come to the conclusion that blogging is a very different animal from just writing. One may certainly have a blog that is specifically intended to thrust one's non-bloggy writing out into the blogosphere. However, to truly blog, one must shift literary gears. Blogging is hyperlinked and hyperdigital and, well, just kinda hyper. My writing is much more analog. It smells of thick black ink on old, worn paper. When words come as though unbidden, each one has a rich aroma and a thick flavor, and those many flavors come together in the ancient formulae of grammatical alchemy. A synonym will rarely do, and everything must be just so. Punctuation is to taste - not just pinches but also dashes, and not just dashes but also commas colons and semicolons.

I speak of flavors in some vain attempt to capture the sensory synthesis I experience when my writing truly satisfies me. It looks right, hence the allowances for slang and vernacular and the improvisational onomatopoeia of modern speech and internet memes. It also sounds right, for I am never satisfied until I successfully speak out the words silently in my head, hearing a well-phrased line as though it were melody. The rhythms are denoted with the punctuation, so the language barrier is breached and there is a translation not just of words to notes but also of spaces and breaks and pauses to rests and decrescendos.

Cool Stuff

Wed, 29 Aug 2007 20:20:35 -0700

Something cool happened at my job. After feeling the pain of professional rejection, and the far greater pain of having a full caseload for the first time in months, I was notified last week that I am getting promoted. As far as the "just kidding"s of the world go, this one was not so bad.

Of course, now I will feel the pain of trying to dispose of almost a full caseload in about a month. Meanwhile, I've encountered a statistical aberration: two whiny white guys at once. Now, don't get me wrong. These are not assembly-line WWGs. One, having lost the genetic lottery at conception (though not to a horrendous extreme,) then proceeded to accrue a very unfortunate package of environmental influences over his 21 years on this miserable rock. He now looks/talks/walks/acts like a sex offender. And he's charged with a sex offense. Ouch.

The other one has the wild-yet-crystal-clear pale blue eyes of a serial killer, and could easily have been killing dozens of enemy soldiers in hand-to-hand combat during his stint in the military if only we'd had some decent armed conflicts at the time. Granada doesn't really count. This is to say, they are very different clients, and one is "whiny" only in a very strained sense of the word. I'm actually more concerned he might tear a limb off me if he gets any more upset than he already is.

P.S. - classic video gaming, anyone?

Sun, 19 Aug 2007 08:07:44 -0700

Anyone up for some Brood War? I was never good at it, and I'm even worse now. But since Starcraft II is on the horizon, I'm going to give it my best shot so that I can try to get in on the ground floor when the sequel is launched. I already have plans to get a new Mac in the fall, so hopefully my system will be 1337 enough to handle the new killer Blizzard app. However, I will not be 1337 enough. Anyone willing to play AND/OR be patient and try to teach me the nuances of Blizzard RTS at the same time would have my eternal digital gratitude.

World of Warcraft is something I won't be doing ever anymore - my line of work simply does not permit me using 4-6 hours of each day on a game, and quite frankly, I'm not going to play a game "casually" when I spend $15 every month just to keep a subscription going. I want to suck the marrow out of every game I play, and for WoW, that means (re?)joining a serious guild and experiencing the high-end content. It probably also means buying a PC, unless the Intel Mac chips have closed the enormous performance gap I was experiencing last year. But still, setting all that aside, the inherent limits of the game engine have made me pretty sure that the game will never be as fun as it was for that first almost-year.

love you for what I am not

Sun, 19 Aug 2007 07:58:29 -0700

Howdy from the further East, boys'n'girls. I've been bunkering down with the family since Thursday night, and it's been a blast. I ordered one of them nice greasy local pizzas, rented some movies, read the last Harry Potter book, slept late, went to lunch at John Harvard's, did a whole lot of nothing and loved every minute of it.

I've also watched enough TV to kill a clump of brain cells equivalent to one possessed by a large-ish lizard or a small rodent. TV is good. If I could afford lots of TV in my apartment, I might never do anything else. Besides, you know, show up at my job when absolutely necessary.

This is vacation, boiled down to its glorious essence: mindless entertainment, good food, a dose of those family members most tolerable. Although I may be a working man now, I am not touching the work stuff for three more days. That will make six whole days of studiously avoiding my responsibilities. I daresay, that might be the longest I've consciously kept some sort of responsibility out of my mind since last August. Even then, moving and packing and whatnot encroached dangerously on my mental turf.

Stream-of-consciousness experiment 1

Sat, 11 Aug 2007 17:22:45 -0700

An experiment in stream of consciousness writing. Any attempts to discern meaning are futile and any adverse consequences from any such attempts are solely the responsibility of the reader. -Ed.

Most typos will remain unedited unless I catch them quickly.

Come hither and I will tell you a tale of a time long past,
when all the world was gray
no man had yet set foot upon the endless coast and all the world was silent
no world to speak of in fact, for such a word implies form.
Likewise any failed attempts before had been washed away.
From the ther there was a sound perhaps if such a word could even convey and then, a light. Dazzling if there had been but eyes to see it. No doubt shining brilliantly in the not yet formed sky. Wha thtis imports for the future is for no man to know. Come now and bring yourself to the edge so oft spoken of by so many before as if there were some cusp that we could discern. For there will always be a blurry line, the border itself unknowable, that will forever delineate both the reach and grasp of our consciousness. The reach will speak of things in tired terms that we nonetheless hope to communicate, while the grasp will remain forever implanted in the things we have heard and tasted and touched before. There is no story of sound. Nor of taste. The written word conveys first and foremost a description for the eyes. It is our first limitation. It should speak to any wary mind of the natural instinct which must not be trusted. For if we behin to trust in our speculation and rationalize the consequence of random firings of the neurons nesteled deep within, then we have already fallen into the familiar fabled patterns of those who have come before. The energy burn must be for skepticism, the most entropic of all processes. We must forever doubt for by doubting we can hope to question the reach and the grasp. Our assemblage of energy and matter will operate beyond and under our awareness and our ability to self-reflect, and we must nevertheless struggle with the hints and suggestions of the hidden parts - the place begind the eyes, the sounds between the ears, the flavor of the parts forever separated from our tongue. To truly know. To understand the notion of omniscience. What forgotten, what knowable, what never-know thing must we have become before we begin. Tonight under the glow of fiction's sun, I speak through touch of unspeakable. I speak with eyes closed in ryhthmic motion of the neck and head and while I slowly sink into semi slumber I will try for the briefest of moments to penetrate the ugly cloud of constant thought and try to send a signal from the core of nausea of something new. I am done.

My desktop computer is 8 years old. I shit you not.

Sun, 05 Aug 2007 20:30:05 -0700

Why am I posting about a potential computer purchase? Because I need some help, not necessarily with hardware, but with software.

As you may or may not know, my demo recordings posted to this site are rough. Really rough. Sandpaper-on-your-most-intimate-parts rough. I've got some decent musical equipment (although I suppose one SM-58 microphone doesn't really cut it) but getting the sounds INTO the computer has been a real challenge.

Digital distortion flareups make recording vocals onto my laptop an exercise in futility, and the software I've begged/borrowed/stolen is craptastic. Even the lowliest shareware programs claim to have a panoply of "effects" you can apply to tracks, but the reality is that they all sound like ass, and, even if they don't, they can't magically turn a noisy, crackly, hissy, poppy, low-volume track into radio gold.

I need to invest in some legit music recording/editing software. My preference of course would be something that doesn't cost hundreds and hundreds of dollars, and that doesn't have an insane learning curve. Is GarageBand worth my time? Or is it geared too much to MIDI-input instruments? Does it handle vocals? If not, I need something else.

Things to do in Springfield when you're Poor

Tue, 31 Jul 2007 14:07:02 -0700

Today I had a "trial" with a bully of a judge. I represented a man charged with felony larceny. His crime? Failing to make (totally) good on an agreement to purchase parts and perform labor on some other dude's car.

Cash was delivered. An ad-hoc agreement was signed. Some work was done. Lots of it wasn't. Parts were ordered, twice. My guy gets charged with a crime.

I want you to pause and really digest that for a moment or two. In the United States of Fucking America, a man who breaches a contract is charged with a crime.

Now, granted, there are snakes out there to be sure. There are sneaky dudes who claim they're fully licensed wallet inspectors and then *poof* no more wallet. These things, they happen, and they are larceny.

However, breach of contract, no matter how bad, is not a crime. Partial performance of a contract means that the prosecution cannot prove that the recipient of the big old wad of cash intended to permanently deprive the owner of that cash without giving back anything in exchange. At least not when the money was originally taken. Later on, things, they can happen. Other crimes can be committed vis-a-vis the monies. But not larceny.

How do I look?

Sat, 28 Jul 2007 15:31:26 -0700

I'm really not one to harp upon my physical appearance. You will note that what I look like has only been the subject of one post during my entire tenure here at That Good Night, and even then, I was making a South Park avatar.

I am not overly thrilled with the way I look. I don't consider myself ugly by any stretch; by the same token, if I make the conscious effort to think about the way I look and compare it to my fuzzy mental ideals, I don't stack up all that well. My eyebrows are a little too Andy-Rooney-esque, my physique manages to be both scrawny and flabby, my skin is sickly white, my smile is horribly thin and creepy, and there's hair everywhere I really don't need hair to be. I mean really people, hair on toes and the space between the knuckle joints on my fingers? Hair all over my forearms? That's just stupid. Also, the hair on my head has a mind of its goddamn own, so forget salvaging the headshot with a good cut.

I'm also non-photogenic to the extreme. Given the heartwarming description above, you may think to yourself "well no shit Sherlock," but when I say I am non-photogenic (or would it be unphotogenic?) I am objectively comparing the hard-knocks reality of what I look like in Real Life World to my doppelganger in Photo and Video World. It's bad news upon bad news.