Does this mean I’ll start blogging again?

Do bears use toilets?

If you play bass, are not terrible (at bass, at driving, at not being a jerk, at life… take that however you wish), live sort of near me, and would like to be an understudy, please contact me via whichever medium you wish. I’d like to work with one or two people to be sort of “on call” for our gigs in June in case I have to, you know, perform some fathering or husbandry.

This morning it was still doing the bananashits. It’s probably just trying to manifest all of my suppressed emotions about the pending Michael Bay Adult Non-Ninja Non-mutant Turds culture brouhaha. After two minutes of uptime I can’t even ssh to it anymore. So I’m backing it up via target disk mode with SuperDuper. It will probably take all day to finish that backup process. I’m amazed that it’s staying online even in target mode.

Tomorrow I will ask the Apple store people to tell me how much it would cost to fix it. The support site is down right now, and I don’t want to schedule anything until I’m more certain of when my backup will complete anyway. If it’s effed in the ay, I’m probably going to give myself a peptic ulcer over whether to buy a new machine and if so which one.

I have a brand new 13″ MacBook Air that my new job bought for me. I’d like to think that’s all the portable computing I need. I have my wife’s three-year-old MacBook, good enough for fiddling around while I’m in the kitchen or something.

What I won’t have anymore if the iMac has met its demise is a main machine I can throw stupid tasks at in my office. Recording and editing audio and video, watching stupid TV shows and movies while I clean or rearrange my office or fold underwear, compiling code, whatever.

I have gotten used to having many square miles of screen real estate: 27″ Thunderbolt display I connect to the Air when I’m at my desk, the 24″ main display on my iMac, and a 30″ secondary display connected to the iMac. I’ve got a system for what goes where on what screen and I love it. Right now, more than 60% of that space is unusable. I only have the work machine’s piddly 27″ display to use. I can add the 13″ built into the Air if I want to temporarily rearrange and keep the Air opened rather than closed, but I don’t see an efficient use of such a small-by-contrast screen at the moment. I could barely fit a 24pt Comic Sans “First World Problems” banner on such a screen.

Should I consider downsizing all of that? Maybe just get a Mac Mini and connect it to that 30″ display? It would give me more free desk space for workbenching. Or I could get a much smaller desk and have more room for music gear in the office, since I have a very fancy workbench in the garage that would get a lot of use if I could just motivate myself to clean the damn garage.

Or I could get a MacBook pro. It would make life slightly less complicated when I want to move my recording workspace somewhere else.

I think I want to get another iMac, but I also think that I don’t need it. It would be cheaper. Two giant displays on my desk is probably more than enough for work and play. I’d try to downsize to just one, but then I’d run into the problem of having to disconnect the Thunderbolt from the work machine when I need to use it for play.

I briefly considered just hooking up one of the 500 PCs I have for now, but I don’t wanna do that, and it would still leave me with an unsavory environment for recording and editing. All of my stuff is in GarageBand, Logic, iMovie, or Final Cut. I guess I could go Hackintosh, but that hasn’t sounded like fun for a few years now.

I could also just not replace it, and only use the Air for work and light play, dragging out an older machine for any creative stuff that requires something more dedicated. It would certainly save a ton of money. We do have a baby on the way. I hear babies like money. Stupid greedy babies.

Anyway, here’s a video. No awesome, accidental, Abramsian lens flares, sorry:

Christopher Hitchens was (and will forever be), aside from a great hero of mine, a very convenient crutch in a world of intelligent, well-meaning, and otherwise pleasant cow-orkers who, upon learning of my atheism, seek to “debate” with me over how untenable such a worldview is. After it becomes apparent that neither side is more open to re-evaluating a truth than the other, I often drop a copy of a Hitch book, essay, or article on their desk (or in their inbox) with a quick note along the lines of “Hey, it was fun, but this should explain why I’m really not interested in continuing this conversation.” Most of the time they send me a rebuttal such as “I see. I understand how someone such as yourself would be attracted to such a poorly-reasoned argument as Hitchens’s, but the evidence clearly indicates that he bases his conclusions more on emotion than fact.”

I get a good chuckle at that, refrain from taking the bait, and go on caring a lot less about who approves of my “worldview” than most of those folks do. Hitch just makes it very easy to find an eloquent way to end such a discussion, which is much different than trying to win one. I know I didn’t change the other guy’s mind, and I most likely didn’t even make him think twice about his position, but I do feel better having not fallen into the trap of getting upset over it beyond my capacity to hold my own intellectual ground.

And most of them do exactly the same thing for themselves with the writings of William Lane Craig. At the risk of sounding snotty (and feel free to chastise me if I indeed do): (A) Which of those two men is more entertaining to read or listen to? And (B) which name is better known?

Why was my title all wonky? Why did I have to copy only the HTML text within the < body > tags? It seems to me that, unless there is a plugin for Scrivener that will take what I give it in Markdown, convert it to WordPress-friendly HTML, and post it directly to WordPress in an aesthetically pleasing manner, I will still have to manually cut out the doctype, < head >, and < body > crap. That ain’t me. I’m not a damn HTML coder, I’m just this guy who desperately wants to write stuff without thinking too much about how he’s doing that.

How much do you reckon Merlin Mann would charge me to come sit fully clothed on my office futon for a week and give me notes while I try to juggle my soul-sucking job and my quest to show people stuff that’s in my head in various formats?

I’m going to post an entry on my blog. The temporal language might be confusing, since your reading this would seem to imply or require that this has already occurred. Don’t lose any sleep over it, since it doesn’t really matter.

Here I am again, writing about writing instead of just writing. I’m still stuck in a tool-rut. People who think they’re giving encouragement will say, “Hey, it doesn’t matter what tools you use, just do it.” And they’re right. But they can go straight to hell. I know myself, and I know that each time I try to get back in to the swing of this, the tools get in my way and I develop just enough dread over starting to write or finding where I last left off to justify procrastinating myself into oblivion.

So I’m going to try using some combination of no more than three writing tools. If there are plugins available, I’d like to get it down to one tool that I actually have to manipulate.

What I want to do is write in Scrivener, using Markdown syntax, and then hit a button (or short series of buttons) to review it and then publish it directly to WordPress. My google-fu is failing to find the special sauce required to do that, but it appears that I can add an extra step to compile in Scrivener from Markdown to HTML and then select-all, copy, and paste into WordPress. We’ll see how that goes.

(Pardon me while I try that.)

(It didn’t work. I must be missing some Markdown plugin for Scrivener.)

(I also need to learn the Markdown code for italics. Or do I mean emphasis? Man, I’m probably way off on both. I have a shitload of reading to do. Mostly about Scrivener, which I paid for, Markdown, which I think is free, and WordPress, which I have used for almost a damn decade and still get mad at frequently.)

This is getting pretty bad. Let’s recap the progress:

• I have written some words.
• I have not learned anything about the tools I have decided to try to use for continuing to write word.
• I need a job that gives me more free time to read about these things enough to be productive with them.
• I have some awesome links with my own commentary in the Research section of my Scrivener file about how to fix all the problems I’ve discovered so that I can just use Scrivener for blogging.
• I think I’m still missing some magic to let me compile Markdown -> HTML from within Scrivener.
• No, I’m not, it’s in the “Compile for” drop-down in Scrivener.
• I need to figure out my file workflow. A new Scrivener file for each blog post, or separate Binder items in one big Blog file in Scrivener?

A section of the ceiling in my garage has been slowly separating from the joists for a little over a year. It’s one of those things that I’ve told myself I would get around to fixing (or having fixed) when work is less demanding and finances are less demoralizing. This weekend, while my father and brother were in town just for the hell of it, most of that particular sheet of drywall fell right off the ceiling. Just for the hell of it. For a few minutes I thought, “Hey, this is great timing! I’ve got two of the most awesome dudes in the world here, and they would be glad to help me fix this.” However, it’s been hot as hell for weeks, and the thought of the three of us standing on various ladders and dubiously makeshift step-stools to patch the hole (never mind the cutting, prepping, and temporary garage door removal) quickly put the kibosh on asking them to actually do anything about it.

In other words, my house is old and busted, and I’m too lazy or busy (take your pick, I’m fine with either one) to do anygoddamnthing about it.

But I like this house quite a bit. I know that I could start now to take better care of it, and in less than a year things would be better, but there are no truly urgent problems motivating me to do so. The water heater is barely a year old, the air conditioning keeps inhabitants mostly comfortable, and the only things leaking are the ancient soaker hoses I use to at least attempt to keep the foundation from crumbling in the cracked, grassless earth.

The front lawn is watered, in part, each morning by a very convenient watering timer. I used to have a similar device in the backyard, but the last freeze this winter destroyed it and I have yet to shell out the cash for another. Also, the leaky hose in the back, again quite conveniently, keeps my sister’s dog’s water bowl full most of the time when one of us finds the motivation to at least pretend we’re watering the yard.

This afternoon, at the top of the sixth inning of today’s employment adventures, I decided to take a break. I poured myself a drink and walked out onto the triple-digit heat of the concrete jungle that is my back patio. Something inspired me to find a shaded spot for the sprinkler and open the nozzle as wide as possible. Immediately, the water pressure turned the big hole in the soaker hose next to the rose bush into a giant hole. Water arced halfway across my back yard, irrigating a nice chunk of my singed St. Augustine. Frustrated that my equipment was malfunctioning, but appreciative of the hydrating side-effect, I did what any sensible, adult homeowner would do in such a situation:

I ran straight into the geyser of water and soaked myself, jumping around in it for many minutes as if I were participating in some neopagan ritual thanking the municipal watergod for the opportunity to look and act like a complete buffoon behind the shield of my cedar privacy fence.

Summer. I like it, and you can’t take it away from me.

I have no plans today. I know I have all day to accomplish some of the domestic goals I have let pile up over the last few months. I also know that at some point in the late afternoon or early evening I will receive an invite, directly or indirectly, to some social event, formal or informal, that will entice me to ignore the fact that I’ve allowed those domestic goals to pile up in favor of consuming various audiovisual and textual trivia all day.

The incredulity that will not permit me to believe the truck emblazoned with the “if you’re not right with God, you’re doing it wrong” (or some other such cute verbiage) back-window sign was strategically slated to pull in front of me on the freeway at the very moment I was having a semi-humorous, tongue-in-gums conversation with Christ is the same boring realism that prevents me from doing anything productive with the following actual memory from this week’s whirlwind trek from DFW to NYC to Austin and back:

I’m in an elevator ascending to the fourth floor after walking around the building for some at-this-point forgotten and unfinished purpose. I had received a phonecall eliciting an abrupt return to the office before reaching my intended external destination. The sharply dressed black gentleman who pressed the button for me after politely inquiring “Which floor?” exits on the second floor.

As the elevator door beings to close, I hear the receptionist at the second-floor real estate office ask him, “Victor?”

As the door is nearly shut, I hear the well-tailored man respond, “Who the fuck is Victor?” Both the question and the response are repeated, with heightened insecurity from the receptionist and near-violent defensiveness from the visitor.

As I reach my office, my phone rings again. It’s the previous caller, a VP who needs help with a customer. His phone signal is so poor that after three attempts to convey the specifics of the problem to me, he decides to hang up and call me from a land line. Between the end of the mobile call and the subsequent terrestrial one, I had remembered the reason for originally leaving the building: I was hungry and needed some lunch.

After giving the VP all the information I had about the problem, and several well-developed possible solutions, I am certain my services will not be needed for at least long enough to run down to the ATM, buy a gyro from a very nice Palestinian food cart vendor, and bring it back upstairs to sit and get cold while I entertain further confused distress signals from the same caller.

As I place my ATM card into the slot beside the external door to gain access to the ATM alcove (Have you seen these things? They’re pretty cool. Kinda like checkpoints to semi-secure areas of some civilian, capitalist space vessel.), I hear a mobile phone inside chirp out a semi-recognizable polyphonic muzak rendition of some Coldplay tune I can’t be bothered to recall the name of. While I wait for the previous patron, already finished with her ATM activities, to finish her obviously unimportant phone call so that she will move out of the way and allow me to get some cash, only one sentence from her typically-NewYorker, diarrheic mouth piques my attention enough to remain forever in my memory: “I don’t know anybody named Farris.”

She moves slightly to the left of the ATM screen, and I position myself to the right so she knows for certain that I, though completely respectful of her freedom to take her own sweet goddamn time, semi-urgently require the use of this functionally unoccupied, semi-public device. With a brief, “who-the-fuck-do-you-think-you-are” bit of eye contact, she puts the phone between her ear and shoulder and shuffles to the courtesy table a few feet away, all while continuing her wastefully cynical phone call and fishing out some shade of asshole-brown lipstick from her overpriced purse.

Gyro in hand, I walk to my temporary desk on the fourth floor and wittily dismiss my Hebraic cohorts’ semi-jovial accusations of supporting “the enemy” by purchasing and consuming “terrorist food.”

The preceding collage of empirically unrelated moments in time represent a miniscule glimpse into my internally well-reasoned (“good enough for me”) contentment with my inability to do (and disinterest in doing) the following things with any measure of aptitude:

⁃ Hold a sufficiently succinct telephone conversation with strangers or loved ones without either upsetting the other party or allowing myself to become uncomfortably annoyed that I have not yet hung up the phone.
⁃ Find a job that doesn’t frustrate me so much even if it means adjusting to a smaller paycheck.
⁃ Understand why some writers feel they are incapable of practicing their craft without access to specific tools upon which they have become sentimentally dependent.
⁃ Employ an adequately balanced mixture of adjectives, adverbs, parentheticals, and appositives.
⁃ Curb my addiction to sitting outside doing nothing but read, think, drink coffee, and watch my awesome dog enjoy the sunshine of her backyard.
⁃ Overcome my counterproductive tendency to write too much about writing.
⁃ Find something nutritious to eat when it’s 2PM and I’ve had nothing but too much coffee all day.
⁃ Over-edit while in the process of writing.
⁃ Finally, actually record that really kick-ass guitar lick I’ve been farting around with for months.
⁃ Remember what the hell it was I initially intended to convey when I began writing.