Walking in the air
I've been out a few times today, just enjoying walking in the snow. There's been a reasonable amount of traffic on the road, but it seems to be of the "I have an SUV and I can go anywhere kind". So it is almost amusing to find them being over-confident and spinning in circles when trying to turn corners. Maybe the drivers will complain to Mercedes Benz or Porsche or whatever that their toy isn't behaving as expected.
I finished Lullaby in two sittings. Excellent stuff! Similar to Fight Club the material is attention-grabbing from the get-go and then just as you are becoming comfortable with one premise he ups the ante and pushes you out even further. This could never be a film unless at least one of the more sensitive issues is removed or toned down, and yet I'd like to see it as a film as his characters are so big. This one reminds me a little of Stephen Wright's work, especially M31 and some of Meditations. Time to go and find some more Palahniuk.
Combing my hair after the shower this morning I realised that my hairline is slowly on the way back. Slicked back it looks a little like Dan Ackroyd's. Is my forehead really that big?
Yesterday, the bossman asked me to come in at 6:30 am for a "management meeting". I can now see the root cause of the problems with our department. They have these regular weekly BS sessions and then don't communicate any of the ideas to the plebs like me, we're just supposed to pick it up by osmosis. I don't know if this has gone too far to be fixed. I declined the offer of being able to attend future meetings until I actually get promoted so that people don't ignore me when I try and fix things. I do hope this left coast opportunity pans out. I need some hope these days. If it works out I'll thank the recruiter and will no longer automatically dislike people from Texarse.
I've alluded to the pull of the west coast at other times. I've rationalised this in many different ways, including things as vague as picking up the vibes from my Dad, and others of his fellow countrymen, that you have to keep moving west. It is also in the works of authors from Steinbeck to Ken Kesey's Sometimes a Great Notion. I was also reminded that the theme is there in Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance. That book annoyed me when I first read it as I saw it as a thinly veiled ego-trip. Yet among the many threads there's also the physical movement west from the mid-west to the Pacific coast. Not just the Pacific coast but San Francisco in particular. The metaphor for failure in the book is that the father and the son don't make it, just as they did't make it up the mountain. The author was scared of being in an environment where he couldn't dominate his son and so bad-mouthed an entire time-zone to justify himself before running away. The things that drove him away are the things that are calling me back.