Dialogue on a Loop

Man, 4:45am can have you up as if it was 6pm and you worked all day. Exhausted but wide awake. Your brain reeling all the events unfinished and completed. Some crazy dialogue on a loop. And as you walk into the kitchen, mindlessly looking through the fridge and cabinets, there is a certain still about the house because everyone is sleeping but you.

Over the years, I have spent a lot of free time with people I consider friends. By free time, I mean, my work is done and I'm in need of a break from its minute to minute intensity. However, I don't want to run from work/life, I want to celebrate and dissect it a bit. Wether through code or shared stories that can be relatable, you learn from friends or become a better listener and confidant. Some separation time. Time to reflect from a distance. Friends to me are the space in which that distance resides.

But there is nothing worse than spending that time with people, coming together and sharing those moments only to figure out that some of those good times and conversations were spent with people you considered friends. To find out that the alterations you may have made through their enlightenment is ignored for whatever reason. You become devalued for action. Put down through omission or inflection of acknowledgement. This weekend shrunk my universe in that regard and reopened it to me and a smaller more intimate group. It became the most rewarding weekend of my life and showed me that the personal moments and most inner thoughts should only be shared with a few and that maybe, distance and space is what we need. Distance from our fleeting connectivity. After all, real growth separates us naturally.

Last Nights Dream...

How trite it is to start off a blog this way, I know, but last nights dream left an unshakable, calming impression.

I was friends with and at President Obama's house. Not the White House, but his actual home. I drifted off from the gathering and made my way into his bedroom and started to draw "Proportions of the Human Figure" by Leonardo de Vinci on his sheets in charcoal. He came in the room as I was doing this, with a framed picture he had taken and a dirty tee shirt neatly rolled up in his hands. Extending his arms toward me, he presented it.

He said, "This is a picture of a man in the aftermath of (some infamous) plane crash and the tee shirt I was wearing on the day I took this picture." He said, "This person was so confused but knew to walk away from the wreckage...traumatized and covered in soot, he knew to walk away." I looked at him, like, "Wow, he had the presence of mind to take this photo and was unhurt by the event. Lucky. Present. Aware enough to document what his eye saw and completely aware of his own mortality. That really made an impression on him."

As he finished the story, I looked up and he had changed the bedding, so my masterpiece was gone. He might have been angry, but decided instead to preoccupy my mind with a story. He erased what he considered, I don't know, maybe offensive, all while not hurting my feelings or by actually saying he was displeased with what I had done. Class.

We started out into the hallway and I said, "Do you remember the last time we spoke, what I had told you?"

He looked at me and said, "Mike, I'm the president, I..."

So before he could continue, I cut him off and said, "Yes, I understand. Well..." (some Friend he was...)

But as I was talking, he started rearranging these random pieces of styrofoam that were there on the floor in the hall, of all different shapes and sizes and he kinda stopped listening to me. Carefully, he picked up the pieces and placed them where he wanted them. He cocked his head sideways looking at the floor scene.

In looking at his arrangement, I saw there were spaces in between these mix-matched pieces of styrofoam. Wanting to redeem myself for drawing on the presidential sheets, I started making those spaces smaller by kicking them closer, though a bit haphazardly with my right foot. He became really annoyed and I grew a little more embarrassed. Calmly again, he looked at me and said, "Mike, you don't always need to fill everything in. "

And there it was right there. Sometimes, I guess, you try and make things happen. Maybe even force them and by doing so, you get the end result, but often times, not the desired result. Things are what they are sometimes and incomplete is not entirely all that bad, so long as you see the spaces that can be filled in between.

28 Days Later

Well, the video's went from horribly amateur to mildly tolerable. But you have to learn a lot to be mildly tolerable, and then, after a while, you realize any monkey can make a video... Guess the difference the whole thing made in me is that now, I'm happier monkey.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oeSMwHGZnQ4