Personal

The stuff about me and my life. The “diary” side of blogging.

The City Sleeps

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Stealing down an ally on a cold dark night
I see a halo in the rain around the street light
I stop and look, and listen to the sound
As the raindrops penetrate the silence all around
Alone, I gaze into the glistening street
The distant thunder echoing my heartbeat
Urging me on to a secret goal
Away from the light from this lamp on a pole
So I turn, slip away into the rain
Drifting like a spirit through the shadows in the lane
Clutching the tools of my trade in my hand
An old box of matches and a gasoline can
Darkness envelopes the scene like a shroud
A veil of emptiness hangs from the clouds
Filling up the cracks in this desolate place
Cradled by the night in an icy embrace

Moving to the town like a ghost in the rain
A dim reflection in a dark window pane
Blackness beckons from every side
Creeping all around like an incoming tide
A broken window in an empty house
I slip inside and begin to douse
The whole place with the fuel that will feed the fire
And push back the night, taking me higher
On out of the darkness in a defeaning roar
The match in my hand is the key to the door
A simple turn of the wrist will suffice
To open a passage to paradise
I pause, I think about the past and the gloom
The smell of gasoline permeates the room
Everyone has a little secret he keeps
I light the fires while the city sleeps

(Like the 4th of July)

The match makes a graceful arc to the floor
And time stands still as I turn for the door
Which explodes in a fireball and throws me to the street
I hit the ground running with the flames at my feet
Reaching for the night which recoils from the fire
The raindrops hiss like a devilish choir
Dying in the flames with a terrible sound
Calling all the names of the sleepers all around
But then in the arms of the night, they lay
Their dreams sprout wings and fly away
Out of the houses in a gathering flock
Swarming overhead as I hurry down the block
I make my escape with the greatest of ease
And savor the darkness, drop to my knees
And the lightless window, my hand on the latch
I reach in my pocket, and pull out a match

(Like the 4th of July)

— MC 900 Ft. Jesus, “The City Sleeps”

So, the big news of the moment is that we appear to have an arsonist running around North Seattle. It’s really freaky to think about — thirteen fires in the North Seattle area over the past three days, the majority of which have been definitely determined to be arson, and now there’s a reward of up to $30,000 for information leading to an arrest.

Local weblogger Danelope had a night of listening to sirens, and included links to Seattle Police scanners streaming audio (which, unfortunately, wasn’t working for me when I just tried to listen in) and a resource that I keep forgetting about, the live 911 incident list for Seattle. A little unnerving to go down the list, though, as right now there is an active “Fire in Building” listing at North 61st and Phinney with multiple units responding. While it’s a little tough to be sure, it looks like it’s at least possible that the local fire departments might have another busy night ahead of them.

It’s also a little concerning because Prairie’s sister Hope just moved into a new apartment in the North Seattle area. While so far the arsonist seems to be avoiding populated buildings, and there haven’t been any injuries, there’s always the possibility that a fire might spread to other areas. We’ll just keep our fingers crossed and hope that North Seattle’s big enough that any new fires don’t hit Hope’s area — or if they do, that everyone’s alert enough that nothing happens.

Freaky stuff.

Almost amusingly, though, it’s almost starting to seem that my time living in Seattle is going to be punctuated by fires of one sort or another. The summer I moved down here was one of the driest in Washington in a long time, actually putting the state into official drought status, and there were fires all across the state for much of the summer. When I went with some friends to see the Barenaked Ladies perform at the Gorge in central Washington, much of the weekend was scented with woodsmoke, as we were often no more than a few miles away from one of the fires.

After getting everything set up at the campsite, we packed ourselves into two cars, and headed down a quicker route back to the Gorge for the show. The way there was fascinating — currently, huge amounts of the state of Washington are on fire, and there were amazing clouds of smoke from the fires just 40 miles away or so in the sky. The smoke turned an otherwise clear night to a completely opaque murk. Just fascinating to see — and the smell of burning pine in the air was an added reminder that all this stuff wasn’t that far away.

While I can’t come up with any notable fires over the past two summers, earlier this year the Jensonia Hotel, next door to my apartment building, went up in flames three times over the course of a couple months (two of which I got pictures of, in January and in March), eventually being damaged enough that it has been permanently closed down. I still haven’t heard any word on whether or not those fires were ever determined to be arson or accidental, though.

And now we’ve got this going on right here in town. I’m quite curious is the responsible party is going to be sticking to North Seattle, or if things are going to spread. You can be sure I’ll be keeping my eyes and ears open.

Of course, all this did give me an excuse to post the lyrics to MC 900 Foot Jesus‘ “The City Sleeps“, written from the point of view of an arsonist on the prowl. This, of course, prompted Prairie to comment, “You WOULD have just the right creepy song in your collection!” :)

Benefits to being a music whore, I guess. ;)

Ballard Locks Photo Workshop

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So yesterday was the big photo gathering at the Locks. Prairie and I picked up her sister Hope and then headed out, eventually getting there about an hour into the event. As I’d never been to the Locks before, I wasn’t entirely sure where to go at first, so we just started following the paths and wandering around. It wasn’t long before we stumbled across a fairly large group with a higher-than-average ratio of cameras…

Photographers at the Locks

Myk spotted me when I wandered in and we spent a few minutes chatting, idly wondering what could potentially get him into more trouble with Homeland Security: organizing the event, or taking a wild leap into the water in an attempt to escape should anyone try to arrest him. Of course, nothing along those lines happened, and the day was quite nice, just a lot of people gathered to talk and look for some decent shots.

A nice medium-format camera

Many photos were taken by everyone, of the Locks, boats, and — of course — all the other photographers. A representative from the ACLU was there (complete with an old 110 pocket camera, which I hadn’t seen in years), along with a photographer from the Seattle P-I, some people who’d read about the event in the Stranger, and many who’d read about it online. I’m afraid I didn’t end up meeting very many of the people who were there, but seeing the turnout was great.

Wave Sculpture

After milling with the crowd for a while, Prairie, Hope and I decided to go wandering around the area for a bit and see what all was there. There were a fair amount of activities going on in addition to the photographer’s gathering, including a flower show, a band playing on the grass, and many tourists wandering around the grounds. Prime people-watching, in other words, which we took full advantage of.

Children at the Fish Ladder

There were a couple of attempts at group photos during the gathering, one of which I was around for, but I think I missed a later one set up by the P-I photographer. Still, at one point he made sure to come by and get my name, so I suppose I must have made it into one or another of his shots. Who knows, maybe I’ll have another appearance in a local paper sometime this week? It’s getting hard to keep track of all my press…;)

Anyway, all things considered, it was a very pleasant time, and many thanks to Myk for organizing the event. There are rumbles of a similar workshop day being set up at some point later on from a different vantage point (after it was pointed out that Ian was taking his photos from Commodore Park, rather than on the Locks themselves). Should that come through, I’ll definitely see what I can do to attend that one, also.

I’ve uploaded the majority of the photos I took yesterday to my gallery, as always.

Other writeups and photo collections:

iTunes: “One Too Many Mornings” by Chemical Brothers, The from the album Exit Planet Dust (1995, 4:13).

Tattoo number two: Ouroboros

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Some time ago, I got my first tattoo: a yin-yang made of smiley faces, a design I was taken with because of the symbolism of the yin-yang (light and dark intertwined and dependent upon each other) and the incorporation of the smiley face, which I interpreted as meaning that light or dark, good or bad, there’s some good in every situation.

For some time now, I’ve been pondering what to get as a second tattoo. I didn’t want to get something merely because it “looked cool” or struck my fancy for a passing moment. Rather, I wanted to get something to both complement and balance the tattoo I already had. As the smiley yin-yang is a roughly 3 inch diameter circle on my right upper arm/shoulder, I knew I something similar on my left upper arm, but I wanted to find something that matched thematically, as well as visually.

Nothing struck my fancy for quite a few years, but off and on for the past year or so, I’ve been thinking more and more seriously about one particular design that first caught my eye when I was around eleven or so.

At that time, movies often came to Anchorage months after they had wide release in the lower 48. I’d seen trailers on television for a new fantasy movie that looked incredibly cool: The Neverending Story. However, the movie just didn’t ever seem to come out, and I eventually went out and picked up the book by Michael Ende.

I completely and entirely fell in love with the book (and later was somewhat disappointed by the movie when it eventually hit Anchorage — it’s enjoyable and a lot of fun on its own, but it only covers the first half of the book, ignores roughly half of that, and scrambles what little is left), but the cover of that edition of the book featured stills from the movie, and had Atreyu’s amulet, the Auryn, featured prominently on the front cover.

The Neverending Story

The Auryn in the film was actually a stylized version of an Ouroboros: while the traditional Ouroboros is a single snake consuming its own tail, the Auryn was designed as two intertwined snakes, one light and one dark, each consuming the other’s tail.

The symbol has stuck with me ever since then, and more and more often as of late, it’s been popping into my head as what I’d like to get to complement the tattoo I already have. I spent a little time this morning trying to find good images and information on the symbol — something of a difficult task, unfortunately, as there are quite a few possible spellings of Ouroboros — but have found a bit of each. I’m not sure if I’ve found an image that’s clean enough for me to give to a tattoo artist yet, but I did confirm some of what I’d already believed of the symbolism of the Ouroboros:

The ouroboros has several meanings interwoven into it. Foremost is the symbolism of the serpent biting, devouring, eating its own tail. This symbolises the cyclic Nature of the Universe: creation out of destruction, Life out of Death. The ouroboros eats its own tail to sustain its life, in an eternal cycle of renewal. In the above drawing, from a book by an early Alchemist, Cleopatra, the black half symbolises the Night, Earth, and the destructive force of nature, yin. The light half represents Day, Heaven, the generative, creative force, yang.

So it looks to me like we’ve got a winner. Now, the search is on for a good, clean image that will work well as a black-and-white tattoo. Once that’s done, it’ll be time to get inked again!

iTunes “Behind the Wheel” by Kirk from the album Trancemode Express 1.01: A Tribute to Depeche Mode (1996, 7:30).

Ash to Ash, Dust to Dust

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August 18, 1992. I was living in Anchorage in an apartment off of Muldoon Road, and working slinging popcorn at the Fireweed Theaters. It was a rather muggy, hot day, and I was quite happy to be getting off of work at 6pm that evening. One of the girls I worked with offered me a ride home, and on our way across town, we turned on the radio, anxious to hear about the day’s news — the sudden eruption of Mt. Spurr, a volcano just across Cook Inlet from Anchorage.

Mt. Spurr erupts

The eruption had blown plumes of ash miles into the sky, and winds were blowing all of that ash directly towards Anchorage. As we drove down Northern Lights Boulevard towards Muldoon, we could glance behind us and see the sky starting to darken as the already overcast sky started to fill with the incoming clouds of ash.

I was wearing my hair long at the time — the very ‘alternative trendy’ style of shaved along the sides and back, with the top long, down to just past my shoulder blades — and after having it pulled back in a ponytail for work, was more than ready to let it loose. I pulled out the ponytail holder, shook my head a couple times to let my hair fall loose…

…and then yelped as my glasses slipped off my face and went flying out the open passenger window of the car. We pulled over as fast as possible, but it was too late, and all we could do was pick up as many of the pieces of my glasses as we could find after they’d been quite thoroughly demolished by the tires of the cars behind us.

For the rest of the evening, I watched as much of I could of the volcanic ash fall over the city, but given my poor vision (I’m legally blind without my glasses), that was limited to seeing the world get darker and darker as the city got blanketed by the ash from Mt. Spurr.

The next day I got a new pair of glasses, and got to see the aftereffects of the ash fall. The entire city was grey — apparently it wasn’t that big of an ash fall, only a millimeter or two, but it was enough to blanket the city and choke the air filters of nearly every car in town. Not far from my apartment, someone had scrawled ‘Ash to Ash, Dust to Dust’ on the back window of a car.

Now, it looks like there’s a possibility that Anchorage could be getting hit again — Mt. Spurr is showing signs of life.

Mount Spurr, the volcano on Anchorage’s doorstep, is kicking up once again, the first time since it erupted 12 years ago, scientists said this week.

Tiny earthquakes by the hundreds have been rumbling beneath the mountain across Cook Inlet from the city, according to the Alaska Volcano Observatory in Anchorage.

The observatory on Monday raised its official level of concern from Code Green, or “No eruption anticipated,” to Yellow, meaning “An eruption is possible in the next few weeks and may occur with little or no additional warning.”

Scientists hastened to say the earthquake swarm does not necessarily presage an eruption of Spurr, which blew its top three times in 1992 and, in the August ’92 explosion, spread a thin, obnoxious layer of ash over Anchorage.

“The most likely scenario,” geophysicist John Power said, “is that the earthquakes will die off.” That’s what commonly occurs.

But it’s also true, Power said, that when volcanoes blow, their eruptions most often follow just such a swarm of quakes.

Nifty! If it happens, I wanna see pictures, since I managed to miss most of the fun last time!

iTunes: “Stalemate” by Limp Bizkit from the album Three Dollar Bill Y’All (1997, 6:14).

Switzerland

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This rant from Mickey reminded me of something that’s been a hallmark of my relationships with many of my friends for years — I’m Switzerland. Neutral, and very happily so, steadfastly refusing to be dragged to one side or another in a debate between two friends.

This used to exasperate as much as amuse my friends, and there were times when I was teased mercilessly about it. James used to do his best to come up with either/or situations to try to force me to come down on one side or another, and invariably, I’d come up with a third, middle-ground option.

To me, it just makes sense. I’ve got a good number of friends (though, admittedly, at this point most of them are up in Alaska), and it’s not at all uncommon for the occasional minor (or sometimes major) spat to erupt between two of them — especially when there were more than a few instances of dating mishaps among various parties in the group. I’ve never seen much point in letting difficulties between two of my friends adversely affect my friendship with one or the other of them, and tend to do anything I can to make sure that it stays that way. I’ll listen to either or both parties involved, give advice when possible, provide a friendly ear or shoulder to cry on when necessary, but the one thing I won’t do is side with one over the other.

So, Switzerland I am, Switzerland I have been, and Switzerland I continue to be.

The one possible exception to this, of course, is the (thankfully very rare) circumstance when one party has done something particularly inexcusable and heinous, such as physical abuse, life threatening situations, voting for George Bush (okay, that one’s a joke) or the like. Things like this, though, are things that I would not be very accepting of in any circumstance, and would be likely to damage that person’s standing in my eyes no matter what.

iTunes: “Bang” by Eve 6 from the album Horrorscope (2000, 3:34).

I can function again!

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Oh my lord — this last weekend was just far too hot for me. Okay, okay, so I moved out of Alaska to get away from the cold weather, and I know I’ve got some readers of this page who will put me squarely in the “whine” category for this, but when things push up to 96°, I just stop functioning as well as I should. My appetite drops off to the point where it’s difficult to eat, and after a couple days of that…well, as a skinny boy with a high metabolism, going without enough food just doesn’t work well.

I was so happy to see clouds in the sky when I got up yesterday. I still ended up spending a good portion of the day in bed, feeling a little woozy, but with temperatures back in the 70’s, everything seems to be working as it should again.

Right now, I’m just glad I didn’t move any further south than Seattle. A few days a year of weather this hot is more than enough for me, I don’t know how well I’d cope if this were a regular thing.

iTunes: “Key to the Highway (Live)” by Derek and the Dominos from the album Crossroads (1970, 6:27).

Goodbye Georgetown

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Every so often, things actually seem to work out right.

One of the services that the company I work for provides is known as ‘facilities management’ — setting up and running a small, private print shop on the premises of another company to handle that company’s in-house printing needs. The FM site generally has a limited amount of equipment, so small, quick-turnaround jobs are done locally, while larger more complex jobs are farmed out to the FM site’s parent branch.

Recently, The Company picked up a new FM contract, and put out a call for applicants. It sounded interesting, but the job listing specified a required minimum of one year with The Company, and I’ve only been employed with them for about seven months. However, as I had worked for The Company in the past, and have prior FM experience (both as part of a team, when I was working for the Xerox FM site on the Microsoft campus; and on my own, running the Xerox FM site for Arthur Anderson), I figured it was worth inquiring whether they’d consider me. I made a call to the manager in charge of the position, and considering my prior experience, he agreed to look at my total time of employment with The Company — nearly four years, though there is a seven-year gap in the middle — and I put my application in.

Two weeks ago I had one interview with the site manager, and then last week I had a second interview with the cluster manager. Both interviews seemed to go well, and while job interviews always tend to make me a little nervous, the FM site is part of the same cluster that my current store is, so I’d already met and worked with both of the people interviewing me, which made it a lot easier than if I’d never met either of them before.

Well, yesterday my current manager let me know that I’ve got the spot! I probably won’t actually switch over into the new position for about two weeks or so, as a replacement for my current position needs to be found, and as business has been slow throughout the cluster this past month, they don’t want to switch my payroll over to the FM site’s parent branch in this pay period — but I’ve been assured that I’ve got the spot.

There are a number of benefits to the new position. I’ll be moving back to a more “normal” work schedule, as the FM site needs to be open during the same hours as the business it supports, so I’ll be working Monday through Friday, 8am to 5pm. The first week or so will probably be a little rough as I switch my sleep schedule back around (no more wandering off to bed between two and three in the morning), but it’s certainly nothing I can’t deal with.

I don’t know if there’s an immediate difference in my pay (quite possibly not, as I just got a raise a few months ago during The Company’s standard review cycle), but even without that, I’ll still end up taking home more money. As business has been slow for the past month, one of the cost-cutting measures that all the stores have been taking is cutting hours when possible to save on payroll. As I’ll be the sole regular on-site employee for the FM site, I won’t have to worry about hours being cut, so I’ll be guaranteed my full forty every week.

One of my favorite benefits, though, is that I’ll be saving \$45 dollars a month by not having to buy a bus pass, as the FM site is a whopping three blocks from my apartment. Not even a five minute walk away. It’s going to be so nice to be living and working that close together again, right in the heart of downtown Seattle.

Another big reason I’m happy about getting the new position is that by moving to a standard daytime schedule, I can finally look into following through on some of the plans I’ve had bouncing around in my head for the past few years. Since I’ll have my evenings free, that opens up a number of hours that I can put to good use, and I’ve got a few ideas of activites that I’d like to fill those hours with, ranging from the Tai Chi classes that I rambled about last week to investigating technical writing classes to seeing what I can find at SCCC to get the education ball rolling again.

So, that’s the word, and celebrations are in order. Last night I had a celebratory drink with Valindria and then hung out with her here for a while, and Prairie will be out this weekend, with plans including heading out to see the new King Arthur movie (Keira Knightley wearing a whole lot of not very much — yum!) and head to the zoo to see their current spider exhibit, which should do a wonderful job of giving me the creeps. Between all that and the current incredible weather Seattle’s having (we’re predicted to hit 94°F today, 96°F tomorrow), it should make for a very good weekend.

iTunes: “King of Birds” by R.E.M. from the album Document (1987, 4:10).

Eyes everywhere

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Domino’s Pizza has a “two-for-Tuesday” buy one, get one free deal, so I’ve gotten in the habit of picking up a couple medium pizzas on Tuesday nights. It’s relatively cheap, especially when I can often stretch those two pizzas out for two or three days. What with things like caller ID on the phone systems and computer databases, I’ve gotten very used to whoever takes the order already having my name and address based on my phone number.

Last night when I called, slightly later than usual, the person who answered the phone told me that they were closed. “Already? I thought you guys were open until midnight.” “Well, we’re actually kind of backed up right now, so I’m just taking carry out orders.” “Oh, well, alright….”

Then came the kicker. “Actually, I’ll go ahead and take the order. It looks like you’re a regular customer, and we’d hate to drive you away.” I was only mildly surprised by this — tracking how often a given customer orders is simple enough these days — and it meant that I got my munchies for the night, but it was a little amusing.

Depending on where the various data collection and sharing initiatives and technologies go, though, in the future my little experience could be just the tip of the iceberg…

The government and corporations are aggressively collecting information about your personal life and your habits. They want to track your purchases, your medical records, and even your relationships. The Bush Administration’s policies, coupled with invasive new technologies, could eliminate your right to privacy completely. Please help us protect our privacy rights and prevent the Total Surveillance Society.

(via Tom Negrino)

iTunes: “Higher and Higher (DJ Skribble and Anthony Acid)” by DJ Jurgen from the album Essential Dance 2000 (2000, 7:19).

Uninspired

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For one reason or another, I just don’t seem to be terribly talkative right at the moment. The usual stuff is going on out in the world, of course, much of which is quite outrage-worthy, but…well, everyone else is doing such a good job covering it all.

I’m sure something will pop up eventually that will kick things off and get me babbling again. For now, though, things might be a wee bit quiet round these parts.

Of course, now that I’ve said that, I’m almost guaranteed to find a good six things that I want to ramble on about. Maybe that’s the point of posting this? ;)

So…as long as I’m a bit lacking at the moment — any questions, curiosity, or comments from the peanut gallery? No particular topic, anything goes. I’m just curious to see what might pop up if anyone actually responds.

iTunes: “Suck (Live)” by Shriekback from the album Dancing Years, The (1990, 4:54).

There’s no such thing as too much music

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My one major accomplishment of the weekend was finally completing a project that I’ve had going on for months now: importing every CD I own into iTunes. Quite a task, when after years of being a complete music junkie (compounded by a few years of DJing), I’ve built up a CD collection of 1,142 albums!

Now that I’m done, though, the final tally…

  • Total songs in my iTunes library: 14,622
  • Total time: 49.6 days (49 days, 15 hours, 8 minutes, 23 seconds)
  • Total space: 65.09 GB

The fact that all that music takes up only 65 GB was a pleasant surprise. When I was using my G3 as my primary computer, I picked up an 80GB drive specifically to hold all my music. At that point, though, encoding my music as 160kbps VBR MP3 files, I couldn’t fit all of my music on that drive! This time, though, I’ve been encoding at 128kbps AAC (not archival quality, but slightly better sound quality than the 160kbps .mp3s even at smaller file sizes), and managed to get all of my music on the ‘puter in 15 GB less space than before.

Then, since iTunes has a special “Grouping” field that can be used for whatever sort of customized sorting options the user wants, I set up four groups for my music. I’ve always prided myself on the fact that the majority of my music is music that I actually own, and I’ve generally only resorted to downloading songs from peer to peer networks such as Napster or the like when I was trying to get really rare tracks that I couldn’t find any other way. I was curious as to just how the numbers worked out, though, so here’s my four groups, and their final results…

  • Copied from friends or downloaded from P2P networks (technically illegal): 610 (4.172%)
  • Original rips (my own mixes, GarageBand creations, or imports from vinyl): 51 (0.349%)
  • Bought from the iTunes Music Store (legally owned, though without the physical CD): 232 (1.587%)
  • Ripped from CDs that I own: 13,729 (93.893%)

Overall, I really don’t think that that’s too bad of a ratio.

And yes. I’m a complete and total music whore. :)

iTunes: “Come What May” by Kidman, Nicole/McGregor, Ewan from the album Moulin Rouge (2001, 4:48).