Letter Never Sent

I sold “Das Boot” two days ago. It was a car I bought from my Granny’s estate after she died. It belonged to her and she drove it regularly to go play cards and bingo (I even found an ink dobber under the seat once). “Das Boot” was an ’87 Ford Crown Victoria with a 5.0 liter V8 302. For all you non-car folks (and I number myself among you) this means it hauled balls. Large and in charge, “Das Boot” was more of a big-boned gal than a slim sporty thing. She moved like a freight train and was quick to respond when you gave her gas. She could jump up to highway speeds in no time flat, running like a thoroughbred. I used to loved peeling out in her and feeling our combined mass float along the highway at night. She had a bench seat of blood red velour and you could stretch out on it with your legs kicked out.

On hot days you could climb into the front seat and breathe in the remnants of my grandmother’s perfume haunting the car.

After a while, DB started causing more mechanical troubles than I wanted to deal with. Maybe that’s just an excuse for a love affair that ended. Instead of seeing what had drawn me to her in the first place, I started to see only how she held me back. She was rough and uncivilized, and I felt like I had to explain why I was with her. Ugly, gas-hungry, leaking oil, tempermental, and…old.

I moved on to another car but let DB linger on the street in front of my house not knowing exactly how to let her go. This week I cleaned her out and made her up. Various suitors came to look at her, poking and peering. I watched through the blinds when the new owner drove her away and out of my life forever.

Havelock Ellis once said, “All the art of living lies in a fine mingling of letting go and holding on.” It seems like the further you go in life the more you are faced with the decision of what to hold on to and what to let go of. It becomes more and more important to consider what you need to keep and what you need to change.

Maybe it’s part of getting older, but lately I’ve been trying to put more effort into getting along well with my family. It can be a lot of work. It’s been my experience that your family knows you in a way no one else will ever know you. In family there is an intimate knowlege born out of spending your most important and difficult years with the same small group of imperfect people. It is not a comfortable intimacy by any means. You love your family yet they are the ones who know exactly how to get to you and how to move across your boundaries. You cannot fool them with your different costumes and personas. They will not buy into your reinvention. It’s almost as if they preserve an original image of you, which you are unable to change. This is frustrating if you’d like very much to change who you are.

Your family can be an anchor, yet it can also be a smothering sea of quicksand. I’ve found this to be this case with relationships in general. What happens when you start to change who you are and the people around you do not welcome the change? What happens if you realize that you no longer want the same things as the people around you? This is a difficult realization. In the end you have to do what you need to do and hold onto the belief that everything else will fall into place. The people who love you will always stick by you, in one way or another.

I forgot to mention some of the weird themes in my dreams this morning:

• In one dream I was driving a car around with Jody spotting strange owls on the side of the roads and then later a snow white barn owl flew into the car and landed on my arm. Possibly influenced by hooting we heard while walking last night.
• Dreamt I was a mujahadeen in Afghanistan fighting quasi-American forces in some unreal/lunar mountainous landscape. Usually this just involved me hiding under hanging cliff edges while soldiers walked above me, alerted to my position.
• Strange and disgusting deformed people living in a mine. I don’t remember this one much.
• Preparing some sort of food or slop in a large bowl. I specifically remember crushing a black, thick-shelled, ostrich-sized egg with my hands so that my hands went into the viscous yolk and egg white inside.

That damned rooster finally made a personal appearance. I’m talking about the same one that’s been waking us each dawn with his insanely loud and incessant crowing for the past few months. This past week he decided to fly over into our neighbor’s backyard. Today we finally put out a raccoon trap to catch it. While setting the trap and sprinkling a trail of feed corn into it, I felt like I was living out a cartoon. Of course, in the cartoon I’d be the bear who’s trying to hibernate. Here’s a couple photos of him strutting around in Joyce’s backyard:

I’m off from work early to wait on the Whirlpool repairman. I’ll probably spend the day getting my proverbial shit together.

Sometimes I want to get rid of everything I own and just drive somewhere to get away and start over. Maybe be a busboy in some restaurant in Seattle or Alaska, or a waiter in Barcelona. Then I wouldn’t talk to anyone I know for a couple of years and when I’d come back more gaunt, bearded, and with more wrinkles. It’d be like Robinson Crusoe.

I’ve been spending some time trying to get really organized. On impulse, I bought a 256 MB Lexar USB drive for storing important files with me at all times, so I started using it to store stuff text files containing todo lists, contact info, project outlines, buddy lists in xml, bookmarks, etc. It’s been handy for swapping files back and forth from my desktop to my laptop to my work computer. I need to find something that will sync everything automatically to a webserver. I’m sure it’s a simple thing to write, but the main file syncing programs out there seem to really suck.

Here are a few things I intend on doing very soon:

1. Moving LNS to my server and converting it to wordpress.
2. Getting the photo gallery reintegrated into the site. Right now some of the perl libraries are missing on my webhost, and I don’t feel like asking him to install them.
3. Converting my layout from table-based to full CSS. Apparently, CSS is de rigeur and tables should only be used for presenting tabular data. Makes sense to me.