The day before Thanksgiving, I fucked my back up: slipped disk. A week later, I’ve scored a steady source of pain killers. The thing with pain killers is that the detriment to your schedule they cause is inversely proportional to the pain relief benefit they provide. There are a few interesting side-effects: my eating schedule is as random and vague as my sleeping schedule, but the 800mg of ibuprofen I take every six hours requires a “made bed” to climb into: taken on an empty stomach, this stuff tears you up. So I’ve started eating something at least once every six hours.

Between that and the comparative surfeit of sleep I’ve been getting, my body is thoroughly confused. I also get to re-learn things like lifting and walking upright and sitting in a chair. So the orthodoxy of my posture, sleep and dietary habits is a net benefit.

Still, the better I feel, the less I get done, owing to the glassy tunnel vision the ibuprofen and robaxin provide. I’m aiming for some hypothetical maximum arc of effect and intend to bombard my work from a distance today.

I still don’t have a main work computer. I continue to annex Case’s, and she has lately taken to encouraging me to hasten the purchase of a new machine because she misses being able to use hers whenever she wants to … and since that issue has been raised, I should get some work done while she’s still asleep and I’m relegated to something non-technical.

My friend Angela was flying home to Boston yesterday for Thanksgiving with her family; I was her ride to the airport (though I just realized we have no arrangements for a ride home from the airport—A, if you’re reading this, call me with your return flight details). A 12:30 PM flight, so we figured we’d leave around ten and get her there with a ton of time to get through security and boarding and all that shit.

Slight hitch: her flight was actually arriving in Boston at 12:30, but leaving DC an hour-and-a-half earlier. She had read the wrong line on her ticket. After a frantic “fuck dude you’ll never believe what I did” conversation and some chugged coffee, we hopped in the car, played Speed Racer and Fuck the Other Driver for a bit, then a quick round of Zoom Around the Taxi, and got her to the Delta curbside drop off at 10:20. Fifteen minutes later, she was boarding, and a few minutes later called from the plane, much relieved.

Angela self-chastised the entire trip, but I assured her it was not only an understandable error, but probably a common one. She’s an inveterate traveller, and was verging on the inconsolable, but all’s well etc. Oh, and her Bahstahn accent is much more pronounced when she’s excited (”Craaaaahhp!”).

Today, a tanker truck evidently exploded on the inner loop of the Capital Beltway, promising to wrong-hole the travel plans of everyone headed anywhere near, through, or rhyming with Washington, D.C. (the truck driver escaped, apparently without injury). Good luck to everyone we know trying to get out of town for the weekend.

I have some friends and family who will be spending the holiday in places and ways they wish they weren’t. It makes me realize how much I have to be thankful for. You guys are foremost in my thoughts and in what passes for my prayers. I wish words were more useful to you all.

Still no working “main” computer—I’m sharing a “work station” with Case, mostly checking email and doing work type things at intervals throughout the day (we haven’t started “tapping out” in tag-team fashion, but I’m going to suggest it). I haven’t ordered the parts for a new system yet.

Still not entirely sure which direction to go, gladly taking any suggestions at all: primary concerns are noise and heat, as I’m tired of fan noise and tired of worrying about whether an overheated CPU is going to burst into flame in the middle of the night during that two or three weeks a year when my apartment building doesn’t have air conditioning (Southern efficiency in action). I’m looking for a system right around the $800 mark. I haven’t stayed current with this shit and find that learning the details of the sheer number of CPUs and motherboards, let alone memory types and configurations, to be more work than I have time for right now.

Can’t believe it’s already Thanksgiving week. There’s a huge chunk of work I need to attend to this week, so I’m a little tempted to just order a low-mid-end Dell or a Gateway or whatever prebuilt doesn’t suck right now and pay for the second day air (I know I’d regret it, though). Also tempted to just buy a replacement hard drive for the interim, but I’m still not 100% sure it’s not a defective controller or a flaky motherboard that’s eating these drives.

The split-desk thing isn’t so bad (by that I mean actually pretty great). Case and I are seeing a lot more of each other than we ordinarily do (we’re literally in the same room about 20 hours a day now, instead of the usual 16). Once we get through the next few (incredibly busy) weeks, I’m going to make some kind of permanent desk move to this part of the apartment (we’ll probably convert her studio into an office, since she’s not painting in there on a regular basis and has assured me the presence of a couple of computers and a bunch of work stuff wouldn’t deter her, anyway). I will need a relatively robust computer in the bedroom at some point for writing (I need privacy—I just can’t write out here during the day), but for now we might just leave a “crappy web and email machine” in there and have the two main decks out here. Man, this is degenerating into boring blogdom at an alarming rate. Moving on.

At this stage I owe everyone email; I will try to get to you all by Wednesday at the latest. I also don’t have my IM client up and running out here (just one too many things to try to wrangle in a shared environment), so if it’s urgent, the cell phone is your best bet (though I may be on it a lot this week, so you might have to contend with voice mail).

Oh, heard from Sam—he’s safe and sound and back in a relatively removed position (sounding a little disappointed in the emails, as he preferred the “real base” to the “shopping mall base,” but I’m sure everyone back here at home is grateful he’s not quite so close to the action).

Something on my main computer is failing. The operating system, the hard drive, or possibly both. Ironic that this would happen less than twenty-four hours after I posted an excerpt (see the post below) dealing with a similar issue.

First my hard drive started making ominous clicking noises, then my system rebooted on me spontaneously … until it decided it couldn’t load WinXP anymore. I’ve run WinXP’s repair procedure, which (while somewhat harrowing) seems to have worked. The fact that the hard drive is no longer clicking would lead me to (hopefully) believe that this is (hopefully) a software issue.

I’ve backed up crucial files and plan on spending most of the morning looking for anything I may have misplaced but would want to save—mostly any “hidden” pictures of my cat, Fritz, who died in April (I still miss him so intensely that the thought of losing even one blurry, stupid picture of him is just about unbearable). That I haven’t learned better habits in backing up important files is embarrassing. I’m grateful for the reminder (thanks, universe). I’ll be sketching out sane backup procedures all morning, too (and taking suggestions). It’s a little amazing how complex my personal data storage has gotten. All this music, all these books …

Though my system seems solid at the moment, I’m not sure how reliable it’s going to be over the next few days. It might be wise to CC all email to kriskane (at) gmail (dot) com for the next week or so. I owe a few of you email, and planned to call everyone I have numbers for (I’m trying to get better about that). If you really need to get in touch, feel free to email me for IM screen names, my cell number, whatever, at that gmail address (I will have access to a working computer pretty much all the time).

Sam, if you’re reading this: Happy Veterans’ Day, and thanks.

Crappy science fiction, for now. You’ll need to IM me or email for a password—so much shit on the net is plagiarized, I feel compelled to keep this stuff behind some rudimentary protection. Feel free to distribute the password to anyone you know who asks, though, provided they aren’t a plagiarizing fuckwit.

The writing appears under the pages link to the right.

I’ve spent the past few hours deciding which project to work on this morning, working on it, listening to music, watching the last half hour of Belle de Jour and most of Moby Dick (still playing in the background) with the sound turned all the way down, filling in holes in my music collection, and drinking decaf. Think I’ve got enough going on? I’m wondering what the chicken/egg relationship is between my chronic insomnia and the stuff I tend to do in the late night and early morning. At least I’m drinking decaf, right?

I finally decided to work on a “crappy science fiction” project with the pompous working title “The Ark in Ice.” It’s about a long-haul interstellar colony ship that suffers some sort of accident, which cripples a lot of its automatic systems, destroys most of its library, and kills about 90% of its population, both “waking” and those in whatever cliché for suspended animation I end up using. Lot of room there for all kinds of alienation and “search for a purpose in life” themes, which I appear to be harping on quite a bit these days anyway. If I can avoid writing shitty science fiction, it might be readable. I’ll post an excerpt later today (or I won’t, but will soon).

I’ve been listening to a real schizophrenic mix tonight. Some Elliot Smith (stuff off of From a Basement on the Hill) a bit of the Hedwig and the Angry Inch soundtrack, a bit of the Wig in a Box tribute album, Zero 7 (some Simple Things), My Bloody Valentine (a bunch of stuff), Laverne Baker (ditto), Massive Attack (Mezzanine, I think I’m trying to decide if I actually like them or just don’t dislike them), The New Pornographers (Electric Version), TV on the Radio (the Desperate Youth, Blood Thirsty Babes album, which is reminding me of The Doves’s Lost Souls a lot right now), Brian Eno (always a staple, Music for Films tonight), and right now The Polyphonic Spree (I forget which album this is, I think it’s Together We’re Heavy, which, considering there are a hundred thousand people in this band …). All of this music is connected by pretty clear lines in my mind. If you can guess what they are, I’ll burn my entire music collection to a series of DVDs for you.

Last but not least, the decaf isn’t bad, for decaf. I think I’m going to switch to tea, push on to a thousand words, and try to get to sleep. If I were ambitious and bold, I’d provide links for all of the bands I just mentioned. I’m sure there’s some way to select the text and have Google milk the internet’s honeyed teat for you. Be bold, be ambitious.

Samhain (an Old Irish (pre-Gaelic) word pronounced “sow en” or “sow een”) marked the end of one year and the beginning of the next, sort of an agrarian New Year’s Day. It was celebrated midway between the Autumnal Equinox and the Winter Solstice (one of the “cross quarter” days), and generally marked the last harvest of the year. It began the “dark” half of the Celtic calendar—the ancient Celts dividing their year between dark and light (the old Beltane, which has morphed into May Day, begins the light half).

Formalized observance of some sort is unquestionably ancient (it was marked with a three-day festival in medieval Ireland, but by that point was a holiday already older than memory), but the exact beginnings and nature of those observances remain in the realm of educated guesswork. One of the nicer versions of “typical observances” I’ve read details the lighting of a communal bonfire in the center of a village and the extinguishing of all other fires and lights. Everyone in the village would then carry lit kindling from this common fire to light their family hearth, uniting every house and hearth with that single fire. I guess if you liked your neighbors, this felt really unifying and reassuring. If you didn’t like them, I bet this would be the ancient equivalent of “Christmas Spirit”—an annual reminder that we’re all in this together, so lighten the fuck up and try not to be such a bastard. It was also (almost certainly) an important rite of thanks to the gods for another year survived, and a plea for help getting through the coming winter months. The English word for “bonfire” is dervied from “bone fire”—the bones of cattle (a few sources specifically mention the bones of every cow and bull slaughtered in the previous year) would be piled on top of these ritual fires as tribute for everything received since the last Samhain.

Everything we now celebrated as Halloween originated with the ancient Irish. In Irish mythology, the warrior-queen Scáthach (whose name means “shadowy one”) would lower her shield on Samhain night, allowing the dead to cross over into the world of the living. The Irish would expect these visitors—the souls of those who had passed away and of those who had yet to be born—and would welcome them with food, drink, and entertainment. Sometimes, evil spirits would kidnap the living and drag them back over to the shadow realm, or cause general mischief and ruin. To prevent the former, anyone travelling at night would wear a mask, fooling malevolent spirits into thinking the traveler was one of them. To combat the latter, turnips, beets, or potatoes would be hollowed out and carved with frightening faces, then illuminated from within by a candle, frightening off anything intent on havoc or making evil spirits think some other bogey was already on the clock at the house decorated with glowing, scowling faces. That so many elements of this holiday have survived intact (even if renamed) is amazing.

I’m sure it’s predictable that this is my favorite holiday. It connects us with the fundamental human problem—what happens after death—and provides the comforting thought of Samhain feasts to come, when we might be waiting on the other side of the dark shield.

Not that I did anything to mark the occasion, other than my own half-assed oddball spirituality (which mainly consists of thinking a specific set of good thoughts and the equivalent of giving dead friends and loved ones a casual “sup?” every so often). The older meanings and significance of these holidays always inspires me to wish I had observed them more formally and faithfully, though the pace and structure of the lives we choose for ourselves tends to be an impediment. Even someone like me, who works at home and doesn’t have much of an external schedule to keep, needs to slow the fuck down and think about being more thoughtful. It’s a fitting time of year to remind myself to embrace superstition in more meaningful ways.

And for anyone who thinks this is coming a few minutes late (just after midnight, local time) two closing notes: the ancient Irish counted the day as beginning at nightfall, so it’s not even afternoon yet, and the original Samhain would have been celebrated on the nearest full moon to today (November 1st). It’s a new moon right now, so we’re almost right in the middle of the lunar cycle. Consult your local druid—I might be two weeks early.