Should I Post Again?

So much going on. I haven't written in ages. Maybe it's time again.

We'll see.

Dismantle. Repair.

I am the patron saint of lost causes
A fraction of who I once believed (change)
It's only a matter of time
Opinions I would try and rewrite
If life had background music playing your song
I have got to be honest, I tried to escape you
But the orchestra plays on, and they sang

Oh, things are going to change now for the better
And oh, things are going to change

Hands, like secrets, are the hardest thing to keep from you
Lines and phrases, like knives, your words can cut me through
Dismantle me down (repair)
You dismantle me
You dismantle me


... Ill be damned if I haven't heard a better song in years. Justin and Kristin, seriously... thank you for introducing me to Anberlin. I'm obsessed.

"Heaven's not a place that you go when you die..."

"... it's that moment in life when you actually feel alive." The Tide, The Spill Canvas

I can't write anymore. It sucks. Oh, I've been researching a bit of a book, maybe... it started pretty heavy, at least the research did, but... work, life, everything else got in the way, and I lost my spark.

Seems like I am losing my spark more and more these days. I'm not saying that as some drastic or depressed statement. I'm actually rather apathetic about it, and that probably bothers me more than anything about it.

But it's there... like a seed. Just needs water. The right kind of water.

So, it's a dry spell, another drout for the soul and the heart, but at least not a bad bad one. It's just done writing the same old story.

So, then... I need a new story. Not just for now, but for good. Words that matter, breaths that matter, touch that matters. As with everything, patience must rule... but I have been patient, and I really want to write again. I really want to feel again, to water the seed.

Off to find an ocean and a dusky evening, a dream, a watering can...

"The results are always perfect..."

"... but that's old news."

I love you, Meat Puppets. And yes, Nirvana, but please people... go check out Meat Puppets II - it's where it all started.

So... no real results until tomorrow, but for now, the preliminary results: (drum roll, please)........ nothing wrong!

Sigh. If another doctor tells me, "whelp, it's not this!," I am going to punch him in the jaw. Especially after having had to "clean out" my system two weeks in a row, with a stomach/abdominal attack (that lasted longer than any one of them yet) in between.

So far, so little information. Hopefully we'll know more tomorrow. But like I said, Doctor Brown (a new one, this one the X-ray Guy) was optimistic he didn't see anything wrong. Which worries me.

Mom is convinced then that it's either my gall bladder (a point she made on my first trip to the emergency room, almost 6 weeks ago now) or a stomach ulcer - my original thought, and the reason why I went to my family doctor two months ago.

Thankfully, mom and I aren't doctors, but seriously, if this ends up being one of those two things, that, AHEM, the patient has MENTIONED time and again since the beginning of this ordeal... I'm gonna havta call Wayne Brady. And Wayne Brady is gonna havta smack a bitch!

"Should I Turn On My Religion?"

"These demons in my head tell me to..."

The lyrics above - both the post title and the first line in the post - come from the Dream Theater song "Voices," long one of my favorites. For some reason, I woke up with the song "Lie" in my head, and grabbed the band's album Awake to listen to on my journeys this morning.

I had to make a trip downtown this morning, to Methodist and a place called Tower Surgical, for a consultation. It seems my stomach/abdominal issues have wrecked havoc on more than just my bowels. And with a name like Tower Surgical, I kind of had an idea what they'd be wanting to talk to me about.

Thankfully, my doctor was a friendly, older man who made me feel about as comfortable about surgery (something that profoundly freaks me the frack out) as I possibly could. We talked about the procedure, recovery time, and so on. He listened, too, which is always a good thing. Aside from the parking garage only taking cash - who does that any more?!? - the experience wasn't quite the pain in the ass I thought it would be - ahem.

But, I digress. Driving downtown, and back to my pharmacy on the far west side of Plainfield, and then back to the west side of Indianapolis for work gave me ample of time to listen to Awake. Nearly in it's entirity, which is saying something - the damn thing is nearly 75 minutes long. Like, I think they invented 80 minute compact discs because of this thing. I skipped around a lot, but just missed most of "Innocence Faded."

As I was driving and listening to "Voices," the lines "Should I turn on my religion/ these demons in my head tell me to..." hit me particularly hard. After having a bit of a "relapse" this past winter, I really haven't been very religious at all. I really haven't been touched or moved by religion since my friend Andrew (a Methodist pastor, and once a very good friend and like-minded, deep-thinking individual) and I had a falling out. I reckon this probably had to do with the fact that he was stronger in his beliefs, and lead me to think a certain way. Separate the sheep from the flock... and he easily gets lost, so they say.

I didn't abandon my beliefs all at once, and I am not sure I would say I have "abandoned" them now. Rather, my perspective has slowly changed, as has my life and experiences. Whereas before I had a deep-seated belief in God as savior, goodness, instructor, risk-taker, and a mover and shaker in the world, now... I simply don't. God, to me, is... something, something untangible. Not unreal, but just... distant.

The good Christian will chide me and say, "No, Dusty, it is YOU who is distant from God, not the other way around." But, alas, distance is distance. I can be no less than a mile away from God if he is no less than a mile away from me, and vice versa. I do still pray, though I don't necessarily believe in prayer any more than I do the Easter bunny. I recognize Jesus as a prophet, though I doubt the relational experience so many people rave about that I just truly have never felt in my heart. I do think God speaks to us, every single one of us, but only when we ARE looking for it, as in a sunset or a smile.

My discussions with Cory, Rachel, Joe, Mike, recently Olivia, and earlier Andy, all continue to, not influence me, but rather encourage me to continue to explore, to find the limits of my beliefs, the comfort zones and the danger zones. Music, as always, plays its part, sometimes quite largely. I have always been a fan of passion, and some Christian music is very passionate, very moving, deep and thoughtful. Some of my favorite bands are Christian or have had religious ties (though that aren't ever the truly popular ones).

I have always been a bit of a seeker, a searcher. It is only until recently when my fear of "letting down God" has subsided enough for me to face the truth - I have lost the faith I once had. Or, rather, that faith has changed, is being placed in other things, other... people. And myself. Friends, family, and myself.

God as a grand creator appeals to me, in a very real, spiritual way. The ebb and flow of the ocean tides, the stars and the moon, the swaying, green praries and the far, nigh-unreachable mountain tops remind me daily that we were created by something, something grand and big and beautiful. But... a good grandfather doesn't just dole out candy to the kids. Actually, the grandfather metaphor doesn't even work, at all really.

God as benevolent grandfather is myth. God as Father is a myth. God as mover and shaker is a myth. God as healer, comforter... myth. Or maybe he is. How the hell should I know? (see, I still have a hard time completely letting go... sigh)

This is what I know... in the last few weeks, when I have hurt so bad that I got delusional, and started honestly thinking that drilling a hole in my stomach to relieve the pressure was a good idea, I prayed. I prayed the pain would go away. And, it didn't. When a table saw to the gut sounded less like a horror flick and more like heaven-sent, and I prayed for some release of the pain and the madness it produced... the prayers were not answered. So... God chose me to suffer, instead? That doesn't line up with a caring, comforting, healing God.

Olivia had some wonderful things to say about this, with her own experiences and her father's failing health. It was good to speak to her. She had many thoughtful things to say. Rachel, too, has had a lot of things to say recently - not as in depth, and more towards the other end of the spectrum of belief, but thoughtful nonetheless. Each of us carries our own life experiences to God and religion, and so each of us carries something different away from those same places.

As for me... I still hold out hope that God, if anything, is love. I desperately want him to be a doddering old fool of a grandfather, with few teeth but a lovely smile, old, wrinkled hands, a papery smell and a worn old sweater. I want him to look at me when I die and say, "You did well - you had to learn your lessons the hard way, but it was a good life. You loved, your learned, you lived. That's all you were meant to do." And I want that to be the truth.

So the rules, the prayers, the scriptures and the crushing doubt that always stands in my shadows, I can do without them. The calling out in the middle of the night for some release for the pain, I can do without that. The silent, shaking hands, clasped in dire need or want of something, some goodness, I might get by without it. I think God loves us. I just don't think he moves and shakes, at least not very much, not any more. He's a good God, but not a gentle one. He set the world to spin, and sometimes, it spins out of control, and we just have to hold on. We make our way in the world, the best way we know how.

For all the pain, there is some goodness. For all the suffering, there is peace and hope. We love, we learn, we live.

It scares me to death to post this, not because I fear for me. I'm afraid God will steal someone I love away. As punishment. And God really shouldn't be like that. It's a sad state of affairs, that religion has made of my mind and my heart. Sigh.

Guessing Games

Well. I haven't written on here very much - at all? - about what has been going on in my life lately. Not that I have many readers - 2, 3? - and not that they don't already know...

Over the last two months, I've been having some severe stomach/abdominal pains. About a month and a half ago, it got so bad after three intense days that I had my parents take me to the emergency room. Some morphine and a CT scan later... they decided I did not have Appendicitis. Or a bad gall bladder (so they said). The word that they mentioned was Colitis, and possible Crohn's Disease. I was recommended to a gastro-intestinal specialist, given some Vicodin for the pain and some antibiotics to kill the inflammation they saw in my large and small intestines.

Well, I saw that doctor, and he recommended I have a test done where they stick a tube down my throat, blow dye into my stomach and bowels, and do a CT scan to see the results. He also said if I was feeling better, I could play the "wait and see" game. I didn't want to have to blow my system out with drugs to get ready for the test - I was already having lower bowel pain and issues from all the sickness, as it were - so I decided to play wait and see.

(INTERJECTION: for clarity's sake - I was not supposed to eat spicy or greasy foods, which I did my best to stay away from, for the most part. Also, the pain - my stomach hurts in general, but there is also a severe cramping and bloating that comes with it. Sometimes the bloating gets so bad that I feel like my insides surely will burst, and sometimes, I wish that would happen, as some kind of release from the pain. Read more below. End Interjection.)

Long story short: I was back in the emergency room within a week, almost two weeks exactly since the first time. I called my family doctor to get more meds, to no avail. The gastro-intestinal doctor denied me meds, too, and said to go to the emergency room (or so his nurse said). So, back to the ER I went, where I had another CT scan (this time with contrast dye) after a failed half-hour of trying to get my IV in. I ended up getting sick and vomitting in the hospital, after which I felt much better.

The second emergency visit prompted my stomach doctor to rush me in for... a colonoscopy. Now, I really had to blow my system out. This was about two weeks ago. It was miserable, I was and still am so sore from all the havoc wrecked on my system. Long story short: they found two polyps, sent away for biopsy, came back negative. No cancer, no evidence of Crohn's disease or Inflammatory Bowel Disease. I was given a clean bill of health - this past Tuesday.

So why did my pain return on Thursday? Part of it is surely my fault - I ate pizza on Tuesday night, I was so hungry (couldn't eat for 36+ hours) and I was craving something tasty. But, they said all the inflammation was gone, no trace of it. So, I thought, in essence, I was cured.

Turns out they may have been looking in the wrong place.

Since the ER does me little good - it's basically a chance to get high powered pain meds like Morphine, which works incredibly well but wears off and doesn't prevent the pain from returning - I decided to tough it out this weekend when the ailment returned.

Now I've got an appointment, as a consultation, to deal with my destroyed lower bowels on Monday, and the original Stomach Dye test that I turned down on Tuesday. Hopefully, we'll start figuring out what this IS, and not what it is NOT.

In the meantime... I am trying to keep my spirits up. This has been the first really bad medical thing I have had to go through. It's starting to get to me, to get into my head a little bit. I can't describe that... it's just odd to not be able to escape your pain. Pain medicines, the ones you buy over the counter, even the Vicodin they gave me, they all don't really work. They just tear my system up even more, which starts this whole thing over again.

For now, I am hanging in there. My life has been pretty disrupted, but I am game for the next steps... hopefully they can find out what is wrong, we can treat it, and I can move on. Keep your fingers crossed.

We Built The Pyramids

So... is geek really chic? It's a fun question. Is it now cool to be into video games, dungeons and dragons, striped shirts, big rims (glasses, not wheels), science fiction, and corduroys? Why not - what there is not to love?

After spending a good amount of time - in a short while, mind you - blitzing through the wonderful television series Freaks and Geeks, I was rewarded with The Big Bang Theory Season One, a gift from a friend that, well, kept on giving. Regretfully, I have not had time to watch the "Guided to Geek Chic" bonus feature - busy as I am downloading WoW patches and re-watching the first three seasons of Battlestar Galactica in order to prepare for watching said show's fourth and final season - but seeing that the BBT season collection had such a thing as a featurette on Geek dress made me... start to think.

Now, I am a geek. Maybe not in the painfully obvious, and overblown, ways that the characters in BBT are, and a little less High School, and more a mixture of both the geeks and the freaks, as in Freaks and Geeks (my slavish devotion and rabid obsession with music gets me awfully close to freak territory - then again, the useless, nearly depthless amount of useless knowledge I possess about music probably swings me back towards geek - it's not physics, but I promise you, it's big and impressive...). But a geek, nonetheless. I own my fair share of esoteric geek material, such as a pretty fine collectioon of Dragonlance novels (and game materials), way too many BattleMechs, a bunch of the original Final Fantasy games for PlayStation (FF1 and FF2/4 being my faves), and Firefly and BSG and CSI seasons on DVD. We won't get into the bad movies I love.

TV shows like BBT make geeks fun, make 'em look cool. But me and you? We're not cool. Well, I am, but that's a different story. Then, it struck me... maybe I'm not geeky enough! I mean, this whole new geek world is supposed to be full of opportunities for us, like sex with scientific girls who play violin, and making out with cheerleaders, and all that jazz. I mean, am I missing something? Am I just too plan ordinary?

I have always been a fence sitter, one foot on one side of the yard, one foot in the other. I was never a full jock, never a full geek, never a full freak, never a full church kid. I was always somewhere in the middle, able to surf the social channels of high school with (relative) ease. Now, I got picked on a lot when I was younger, but as I aged, that changed, and by my junior year of high school I was pretty damned comfortable being the almost-jock/nerd/geek/churchkid/freak that I was. Does that mean I was everything and nothing, faceless, too homogenized to be exciting?

Nowadays? It's all rock music mixed with folk and metal. It's (not often) lifting weights afterwork and running on the treadmill mixed with (more often) weeks of being lazy, or (less often) walking the dog at that park or shooting hoops by myself. (and summer means hiking!!) It's Battlestar Galactica and World of Warcraft mixed with lots and lots of college and NBA basketball, cheesey and crude Judd Apatow movies, less crude but still corny Cameron Crowe movies, and The Who biography on DVD. It's t-shirts and jeans and work boots mixed with... sometimes a button down, but usually not much else. Maybe a sweater. It's geeky, boxy glasses mixed with a fading hairline and a goatee with the chin-strap, teeth all brushed and body all showered. It's fit everywhere else mixed in with a little beer tummy. It's cranky, silly humor mixed in with tempermental driving mixed with rapid fire wit and backporch, beer-and-cigarette philosphy, and long, late night conversations with good friends.

So, what I am trying to say, is that I am cool while being geek. Who know's if it's chic. Who cares? I can't quote physics equations, and I can't quote baseball statistics. I ain't tall, don't have good hair, and don't dress GQ. But I've got skillz on guitarz, Gheis and Choppy will make mince meat out of your Hordemoh little druid thing, and I can tell you that one of the original Beatles managers slept with the Beatles original drummer's mom, despite being 20+ years her junion, and whilst her son was still drumming in the band. Godspeed, Pete Best's mom. Godspeed.

Teenage Dirtbag?

Sigh. Drama. I thought geek was supposed to be chic? But seriously, listening to young people talk around my office, I always pause and wonder... how did we get this way? How did it get this bad?

I wonder when we're going to start appreciating people again. Maybe I am not the one to get on a soapbox here. I have a friend who constantly calls me out for not doing as much as she does for me. Sometimes I think that is just projection - we can't be everywhere at once. But many times I know she is right.

As I traverse the daily landscape of my life, I frequently forget about people who should be on my mind - a friend I haven't spoken to in months in the hospital, a friend far away who's mother is ill, making time to do something with my best friend from high school who lives right down the road from me - and instead focus on my own problems. That, I suppose, is human nature. And, I suspect, so too is prioritizing - participating in one friend's life more than another, and doing more for someone who means more to you than you might do for another friend. Sometimes, we might not do or say much but still feel a strong bond of friendship. I don't think the difference between one friend and another is a matter of slight or anything personal. Again, I suspect it is more human nature, and how strong we perceive our bonds of friendship to that person.

Bah. This was supposed to be a fun post, but conversations I overhear at work stick with me. They make me wonder. Making fun of a kid, ostracizing him because he didn't know how to ask you out, that's just bullshit. Relations between the opposite sex are hard enough on their own. Add in meanness and suspicion... and I swear, that kid is FAR BETTER OFF. Because I wouldn't wish some of these people, on their best day, on my enemies.

Which just reminds me... we all make fun of other people. Someone makes a terrible face, or does something silly, or makes some hideous cheese blunder, and we're off to the races. And that's ok, because life is full of funny moments. And it's ok to laugh at other people, even at their own expense. Some people DO dress themselves, after all... and they chose that? Wha? But, I digress. There's a time for everything, a season, so the song says. Just don't forget to have a heart and be a real person when someone else is being serious, and laying themselves on the line. How would you feel if someone told you that you were too fat to date? Or too short? Or too tall, too skinny? What if they laughed in your face and said you were too white, or too black? Too normal? Too strange? A simple no will do. Have a heart, people. For God's sakes or your own, I don't care which. Be good to each other!

Note to self: be good to others. Grow, live, learn, love... and have a good time.

And I Must Refuse Your Test

Reflection. It's like a really good drug that sometimes screws you up, and sometimes fixes you. Depends on your mood? Maybe. 2008 was my "big year of reflection." You know, getting all of the baggage out of the way, seeing which ways things might swing, putting to bed lingering issues, moving forward.

2008 was all of that, and more. But life is kind of a cycle, is definitely a journey, and is truly better with experience. Sometimes, living from the blood machine can be painful, as much as it can be uplifting and joyous. Happiness comes in waves. Yes, general happiness can be ever-present, and more so than since 2005-ish, I was pretty damned happy last year, generally speaking.

Reflection continues, however. Small my table... often, seats just one. Gets so crowded, and there's no fun.

You love what you love, people. And I love a lot. A lot of things, I don't or can't love - it's not in the cards. And we are fickle, selfish people. Nothing new there. I believe in the goodness of mankind, and have for a while. But I also believe it takes one helluva effort to get man out of his own way - his goodness only goes so far as his selfishness will allow.

My take on personal relationships: see above. Friends and lovers: see above. Family can be so much easier... it is easier to be selfless to ones you've loved and been with your whole life (for some, and notice the qualifier "loved" - not all family works this way. for the rest: see above).

We're all wanting something. The world throws a billion tests our way, along the way. Religion, politics, death, love, friendship, sex, food, work, you name it. Road blocks. Yes, road blocks to some of those very things - love can interfere with love, can and will. Be a philosopher. It works. Think it. Feel it. Put one foot in front of the other. Step over the road blocks? Isn't that easy, not usually. But... maybe.

It is tough to be a searcher. But call me The Seeker - I've been searching low and high. I hope that I get what I'm after... before the day I die.

Past, Present, Future... Karl.

It sometimes makes little to no sense, but sometimes, when you are sick and hurting and bored (and lonely), you start to take stock of what is going on in your life. And maybe because you're sore and not feeling hot, everything feels like a little kick to the shins or a punch to the gut, or a knee to the groin. It's not that there is no hope; it's just that you feel stuck. I worry like that - worry that I'll end up a fat, bald, lonely Karl, like Karl from Aqua Teens. I've got my sweatpants and my girlie mags and and beer and my hookers paid off in quarters and nickels and dimes. Sometimes I worry that's how I'll end up.

Girls don't scream about how cute I am. My health is failing, my hair is receding, my gut is growing despite my half-hearted attempts to shrink it. I'm a little bitter, but mostly just worried. No companionship sucks.

Sometimes I feel like I am going nowhere with my life, because I am going nowhere with my job. I make dick.99, which makes it hard to save, go back to school, pay off bad credit decisions made when I made more money, etc. I can blame the economy, but some of it is my fault. Problem is, sometimes it feels like a lot of it is my fault. My job makes me feel like a mindless drone, a poor monkey, a goes-nowhere Karl.

Sometimes your friends surprise you, and then again, sometimes you wonder who your friends really are; sometimes they piss you off. Sometimes you piss them off, too. Happens. But sometimes they are just Karls too.

People fail, I get that. Life is as much failure as success, and it's how we handle BOTH that really defines us. But as I look at a non-existent love life (for christ's sakes, my ex-girlfriend - who doesn't consider ours much a relationship - showed more concern about me being in the hospital than my current semi-girlfriend, who doesn't seem all that interested in me at all), as I look at others moving on and up and work, as I look at friends leaving, at I look at my financial situation growing dimmer, as I look at friends hurting and none of these things changing in major positive ways... I just don't want to be a Karl.