Some Days in the Life - April 27, 1999

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The reasons why are unimportant, I guess. Maybe they have as much to do with my endemic lack of sleep as any perceived insult. In any case, there was a lot of spillover into areas that I didn't want there to be spillovers in, and today I feel...

How do I feel? How do you feel when everyone says it wasn't your fault, but you can still see how your life's been damaged, and not by the people who started the rock rolling down the hill?

Fragile, I guess. Like glass that's cracked -- it may still hold water, but you want to lift it up carefully and slowly, because you're afraid it will fall apart in your hands. It's days like today that help me understand poetry. Help me understand what the power of poetry really is. "Poetry is imagery," as they say -- but the image is the medium, not the message. The message....

Poetry expresses the essential parts of life that description fails at. It does it indirectly, like judo for the soul. It lets those bits of yourself that hurt or love or do whatever complex emotional dance they're doing come out in code. It lets you reveal yourself on the page.

Which is why so much poetry is self-referential crap. But it's well meant.

I'm not writing poetry today. But I understand why some people would. My poetry is the New England school, which is to say desolate and generally sparse. Sooner or later, I'm going to reprint the published stuff and some of the stuff I haven't even tried to publish up here. If there's one nice thing about the web, it's that chapbooks come easily and cheap.

You try to be strong. You try to be strong for all the people who aren't, or for the people who look to you for direction, or for the people who just aren't strong today. But every so often you're not strong. And every once in a great while the day you're weak is also the day someone kicks you in the chest. And when that happens, sometimes you flail a little bit. Or a lot. In the room with all the crystal.

This was a personal matter, not a professional one. My job is secure. Which is a good thing -- that pressure I don't need. I like my job. I seem to be good at it. Though they need me to be strong when I want to curl up and die.

In a way, rage is like panic. Your parasympathetic nervous system kicks in, adrenaline fills you, and you feel no pain. You can't feel pain. It's like you're floating in a haze that says get him! And, when you come off it, you ache in all the places where you took hits or cuts.

Apparently that applies to intangibles as well.

One thing someone said to me last night was "is a sense of honor that important?"

Is a sense of honor that important?

Honor's weird. We don't really hold by it in today's day and age. We've replaced it with the word "pride" in most parts, which is considered a sin. "Are you too proud to let yourself look bad?" "Is your pride more important than your love?" "What price will your pride make you pay?"

But honor isn't pride. You just can't be proud without honor. Not really proud. Not the kind of pride that makes you shout for the Mariners when you're in the middle of Fenway Park, and they're down by eight. You need honor -- you need that sense, deep inside yourself, that your reputation is an important thing. That people who insult you are not your equals. That accepting an insult is tantamount to accepting subservience. That no one can take who and what you are and spit on it. That rudeness is unacceptable.

It's just... if you stand up for those core things you believe are right, you get a lot of ammunition fired your way. And the flak hits the people around you. And your return fire hits the crowd too. And in the end, you feel like you've broken the very things that you care about most. The very things you took honor in. The very essence of your pride.

So in the end, the price of honor is the things you hold most dear, and the price of having no honor is the things you hold most dear. Maybe we go through our lives hanging on to elaborate sculptures of glass, and hold them together with our hands, waiting for the day either honor or dishonor builds up and shatters them, and then you put them back together in a new shape and see where that takes you.

Whatever.

For those of you passionate about New Hampshire weather, and I know you are, a quick update.

It almost rained, yesterday. We actually had water fall from the sky -- big drops of it -- but it wasn't enough to even make the entire driveway wet, much less be a real soaking rain.

Today it's sunny, with no clouds in the sky. Our wait goes on.

4:11 pm

In unangstful news, Bill "Bill" Dickson recommended Adobe GoLive as a better alternative for creating web pages and updates than Word. Rob Furr recommended Dreamweaver 2, which we have at the Academy. So, I tried Dreamweaver.

It seems very nice and very powerful, but I just didn't cotton to it. So, today I'm trying GoLive, and it seems like a winner. We'll see how it handles "other things" like site management and other somesuch.

One thing it does that I like -- it gives you a specific icon for your site. Pagemill makes you either open the site from the menu of what it remembers or "choose the folder" for it. I'm a Mac user. I like my little icons. I want my little icons. I live my little icons.

We may have a winner.