|
|
|
acts to bend reality a certain way
Friday, January 6 2017
[REDACTED]
You may remember that in the summer of 2015, I'd torn up most of the basement carpet and replaced it with a plastic tile made to closely-resemble the appearance of wooden flooring. Gretchen had had me leave half the carpet (a long blue shag) in her library with the hope that the dogs and cats would quit pissing in it. But they never did; for some reason Ramona was a particularly egregious offender. So in recent days Gretchen decided that the remaining piece of wall-to-wall carpet had to go, and managed to rip it up herself. The plan was that I would then continue the faux wooden flooring into the rest of the room. Of course, there is more to a carpet removal than just removing the carpet itself. Those nasty nail strips have to be pried off the concrete floor as well, and though I showed Gretchen how to do this, she quickly decided that she sucked at it and it was a job best left for me to do. So on a few occasions to day I took brief breaks to remove the nail strips, a task that probably took less than fifteen minutes total. Later this evening I vacuumed up much of the debris along the wall and then repaired all the divots in the concrete. Gretchen just wanted me to do the job and she seemed to think I could elide the divot repair (and she might've been right about that). But, as I pointed out to her, I don't want to be the sort of person who puts in a floor depending on a solid substrate without first ensuring that substrate contains no voids. The "I don't want to be the sort of person who..." informs a lot of behavior that others might see as needlessly ritualistic. But I would like to think my presence in the world acts to bend reality a certain way, and one way to make sure that bend is in the correct direction is to always take a certain restorative action whenever encountering a flaw in the world. Another example is this: whenever I'm reading an old post in this online journal and encounter a typo, I always fix it. I never do not fix it. For others, a version of this might be always picking up trash encountered when walking along the road (though that quickly becomes a big job). That's not something I do (indeed, I used to advocate highway littering as a way of combatting suburban sprawl, since, from the biosphere's perspective, the road itself is the actual insult). I do reliably pick up any trash I encounter in the forest, which mostly consists of mylar birthday balloons (which I sometimes repurpose as gift wrap) and occasional beer containers.
I've run out of credit cards with numbers embossed on their surface, so I've returned to painting on tiny canvases. Here's one of an Amanita muscaria that I painted today; it measures 2.5 by 3.5 inches:
This afternoon in the laboratory, I found some really ancient marijuana buds that had to have dated to early 2014 or so. They'd been in the dark but exposed to free-flowing air all that time. They'd lost all their fragrance and the green in their color; now they were now the hue of "baby camel" (which Susan and Gretchen use to describe the color of coffee containing the proper amount of creamer). I figured they couldn't possibly have retained their pharmaceutical properties, but what the hell, I smoked them anyway. I wouldn't say they had much of a kick, but they managed to get me mildly stoned. The main problem with the experience was a cloying property in the smoke that inhaling it a less-pleasant experience than it otherwise would've been.
I ended up staying up very late trying to watch Deadwood and then switching to old Black Mirror episodes I already know that I like. Periodically I'd communicate with colleagues on Slack, one of whom (Ca) was on California time. Knowing I'd be going to sleep soon enough, I took an ambien. I could tell it was kicking in when I saw the text on web pages starting to look as though it had been handwritten. So I warned Ca that I would like to not take responsibility for anything that I was about to say. I continued trying to type things after that, but my ability to do so became increasingly handicapped. One of my posts had a hundred identical characters in a row, suggesting I fell asleep with my finger pressing a button. I then awoke and typed some garbage and hit post. My next thought was that I could interact with a looped GIF of a little girl. I then somehow managed to make a /giphy post referring to the cleanliness one achieves when wiping one's ass. My last post of the evening contained no typos at all ("there's so much more to say about robots that sit and blink"), suggesting that perhaps the ambien had begun to wear off. That was probably when I collected myself together enough to get up, walk to the couch in the teevee room, and settle in for the night.
The next day Gretchen said awaken at around 3:00 am to the sound of our elderly cat Sylvia yelling at the laboratory door to be let out. Gretchen had gotten up and let Sylvia out. She'd found the laboratory reeking of marijuana smoke and seen me sitting there at my computer, typing somehow but completely oblivious to anything else. (I had a vague memory of that, but in that memory, I could barely hear Sylvia at all and Gretchen's releasing her had happened so quickly that I'd missed the whole thing by the time I'd turned to look.)
Gretchen describes the IT Department at The Organization (from what she can see of it) as being "like family," and it really is. We can say almost anything to each other, and nobody is ever shocked or takes offense. And if there are hurt feelings, they don't blossom into grudges. All that being said, it's probably best if I not make a habit of going into ambien fugue states in my professional communication environment, even if it is in the off hours. Everything is fine for now; our team is small and cohesive. But on Monday we're getting a new team member, and the addition of just that one person could change everything.
For linking purposes this article's URL is:
http://asecular.com/blog.php?170106 feedback
previous | next |
