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June 7, 2005
Tweaker
+4
Spend crazy inordinate amounts of time putterin’ around over this HTML and the other HTML tweaking this and adjusting that which, in general is so much less important than posting, writing, and more so considering how sometimes I’m banging my head against the LCD panel to get another pixel or two. I’m ANAL. Is it unusual for a crackhead to be so detail oriented or is that an indicated personality trait—one prone to one is statistically prone to the other? Oh, it’s ridiculous. I’ll have to stop myself from time to time. Thing is I had it dialed in Firefox, that lovely little clever, svelt canvasser (-or?) of the wide wide whackadoo. Then I discovered that it was almost totally disfunctional in IE. Pissily—tired from working rock-steady insteady of sleeping log-zombied and tired of it, and needing to not be late for work ever ever ever again, not even a minute—I hurriedly wrote a little script to test for IE and if found/caught(!), pop an alert that says “This site only works in Firefox!”
Well, that’s a lame-ass thing to do, and I don’t like to be lame-ass. Furthermore, I’d like the thing to look good and be readable. And IE is still and forever (it seems) an http hog, a packett pig, a blustery buffoon of a browser with a commandingly, chasmatically dominant market share. Thus, tonight’s project: retrofit to cross-browseribility. Damn. I did it.
And in the process spent all energy I should have spent on jottin’ and typenatin’ the absurdities of my recent existence. Not that you can tell by this lead-in, but the wind-down windeth…and, um, downeth…and stuff. Let me see what crumbs I can shake out of my pocket and red hot out of the remaining fibers of my poor screen, and see if I can’t come back for a sum ‘em up session.
…
K. No crumbs, which is in the direction of shocking as you will understand if I make it that far, but there was hi-shine resin love and I’m nauseated again and good to go. So. Where to begin?…Perhaps where I left off. I’ll give that shot, see how it works out.
Sunight when I’m doing laundry and waiting for to buy me some hard drugs, Rich, the seller of said, calls and says, “I’ll be there in a minute. I had to stop by the health food store.” If this is not the first thing you’ve read here, you know I’m a sucker for those unexpectancies. There are some more sort of business approach takers in the dealing field for whom such a stop off might not seem so incongruent, but Rich ain’t one a them.
Now. Next item on the agenda. How indescribably stupid I am. Oh, yeah, I’m aware of it; I’ll admit it. So, if you’ve come here to laugh at me, or to point fingers, and feel superior, I’ve beat you to it. I thereby proclaimed you all Superiors about 25 minutes ago and oft ‘fore that in fits of mental anguish and self-beratement, all fully warranted because the layers are sea-deep.
It’s astounding. From the base level stupidity of ever doing this drug at all, to not quitting a million times over, to the physical stupizing effect it has on my brain (see?), to doing things I know will benefit me not at all and make me miserable quite a bit, to digging my hole deeper in the worst possible moments all the while knowing better but not really knowing better, eh.
E.G. going out to bar last night instead of going to bed when could have and should have, compounded by decision to buy, compounded by decision to buy not one, two, three, or four bags, but eight, at 3:30am, and then smoking up to leaving for work, and smoking on the way, and smoking when I get there, which makes my face flush brilliantly, and my eyes dilate widely, and my extremeties tremble and my voice creakle, and my behavior and body bumble. In close quarters, mind you. And because I’m cracked, jonesing for more, but up, and self-conscious, and anxious, and needing out of the pressure cooker, and needing into the the glass firing chamber in my pocket and so on, I’m getting up for ostensible bathroom breaks and/or smoke breaks but at numbers beyond any human norm. So I look like a fool. I’m not super sharp. I’m weird. It’s embarrassing.
Now despite my having smoked all night and remained sleepless, I’d be relatively fine if I’d just stop smoking. And thing is, when I escape to smoke it’s fraught with stress, worry, and fear of getting caught, time pressure to get back and not be missed, and not time to actually enjoy any high-like feelings I might get, though I don’t think I was really capable of getting high, having reached by duration and circumstances that treadmillish maintainance mode. So it wasn’t so much a good feeling as a delay—slight—of the yucky feelings that aren’t/weren’t all that bad anyway. And I walk back shaky-like all over, on high alert for best behavior (which just makes me more awkward). And so it progresses, with turboboosts by a couple of particular stressors.
Client D. wants a sudden conference call to “discuss the project” with her highers and mine. Such vague terms can only mean trouble. As PM, I should lead the call. So, what do I do? Kick the smoking into high gear, getting little enjoyment, and a lot of debility. Smart, huh. Oh,…etc. Other examples will only serve to beat the dead horse I aspire to become… Just let me skip ahead to the going home. I take a taxi. It’s much longer than the train and $25 more expensive when I’m pinched dollar-wise, and really just want to get home a soon as possible to be able to take a big long careless lung full of crackley vapor. Skip ahead now once again, it’s 4:11am, no sleep in sight, will thus return to work having worked all night, not rested, only killed brain cells by the docena. So stupid.
So the 8 I got from Max carried me through the evening (I came home with one rock). ‘Round 9 sumpin’ or other, I rung my Maximum man. I leaned through the car window for four with his assistant assisting, and told him, with a nod to the hard rain coming down, “You gotta be out working in this shit? Man, you work too much. You need a break.” They did some kind and quantity of laughing but I don’t think they were 100% sure what to make of that.
Now a little note I wanted to notify before:
Muslims don’t drink alcohol. S. my developer at the O-fis is muslim. Fresh out of college where he experimented with Western darkness and bachanalia as university attendees are wont to do. He’s back to charging up along the straight and narry, but of course he has friends that drink and want his company and, well, you see the hardships. He said something I think you don’t hear often but that I constantly deal with as Truth Everpresent in my life: “The longer I go without, the more I want to.” I think conventional wisdome has it that the longer you go, the easier it becomes. Not me. Not for me. Not with me. I can easily kickstart a strong offensive, and because of that, the defenses are not on guard when they’re needed. They’re riding the offensive lines coattails, and thus we get ambushed, caught off guard and by surprise, at the mercy of Satan and his little helpers. And the longer I go, the harder I fall.
Next blurbyblurb:
When I loaded up and fired the first of Rich’s Riches last-last night, I got that nostalgic sensation usually reserved for childhood foods and soaps and such. The taste of that batch was so closely reminiscent of my first few times that it brought it all back, the feeling, a few memories, but mostly recognition and indefinable emotion. Nostalgia for crack. Who’d a thought.
Yeah, well, so, all in all, I feel like a clown, and idiot, a weirdo, completely and just about utterly inept, a buffoony and a little cartoony. It’s really humbling. Not that I needed to feel any worse about myself. I don’t think I was all that arrogant. But…then…is it arrogant to say that?
One marker of all that—not that I fear anyone needs convincing, in fact, I wholly trust that many are far more judgemental than I, not knowing or even beginning to understand what it’s like or how easy it is to arrive there and how, not hard exactly, but maybe recalcitrant is the leaving, but the marker, the waterline, it—is a new one, another on the pile of micro-developments and gradations of sink: I’m ashamed to look or talk much to a person I always felt was my champion, my cheerleader, a believer in me beyond what I felt I deserved, and now is no more, is none of those, is also angry and probably bewildered. I sometimes wonder if they say to themselves, this crowd, and to each other, “What happened to him down there? Damn, Central America fucked that kid up. Did a number on him…” That’s not it at all, but due to the trajectory of it all, I sometimes think like that myself, feeling like Kurtz lost in the Heart Of Darkness. Taken over by the jungle, by the savagery and the mystery. And sometimes, too, like my own Marlowe, however doomed that expedition turns, and turns to mercy, a little mercy of deceit. Anyway…
Posted by peligrito at June 7, 2005 4:35 AM
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