Unexpected error: Error reading from file: Input/output error
Half my entry is gone. The USB drive where I was working on this entry is malfunctioning.
Ariadne found my name and email in a totally ordinary way. I would have been impressed if she had read it in a deck of Tarot Cards or drempt it. That's impossible, of course, but it is fun to imagine. She knows somebody who talked to me at the party, and they told her. The delay is because she had been skiing for 2 weeks in the Alps at Davos.
I've been seeing Ariadne since last week, and we seem to be hitting it off. This week, she had been trying to reserve a cabin for us at a resort within a few hours from Paris. My French isn't good enough to deal with reservations over the phone, and there was nothing on the internet, so it was nice of her to try. Anyway, slim chance at that because it's a holiday weekend and all Paris would be trying to do the same thing. We would take the train Friday night (yesterday), ski all day sat, sun, and half of lundi, then take the train back and be at work on Tuesday. Too late now, obviously. Everything was booked, and the weather is bad for skiing anyway. We will do something else for the holiday weekend.
Ariadne isn't her real name, I mentioned her real name in a previous entry, but I'm going to use Ariadne for the blog.
If there's an afterlife, my parents are probably looking up at me and gnashing their teeth in their own little pit in Hell. After my 3rd year of college, I realized I wasn't really happy with what I was studying. I had learned enough about the Corporate world and Clinical Medicine to question my path in college. I had straight As as an electrical engineering/neurobiology/preMed double major. (Premed refers to a concentration of electives and is not a full major.) I didn't want to become a YUPPIE working for 'the Man' and become an enthusiastic part of a morally corrupt system that I see as celebrating the shallow things in life, promoting unsustainable ways of living, and cheapening our existence. I wanted to earn an honest living and work to improve people's lives on a large scale. I don't buy into the type of feel good thinking that says that merely being polite, recycling, not farting in elevators, helping old ladies cross the street, or having your own children and teaching them to be "good people" is sufficient. I wanted to be active and invent something, come up with some idea, solve poverty, find a cure for AIDS or cancer or something that would bring about a big improvement in the quality of everyone's lives. (Currently, this is exactly what I am working on at the Institut. The project is probably too ambitious, and I won't make much of a dent in anything, but I'm trying). I knew I didn't know anythign about how to do this or even about the world in general.
Other than summer jobs, I didn't know what work was like. I had no male role model to emulate or follow. That alone made things very difficult, but it seemed like everything else was against me as well. My parents had never worked during my life, and they were uneducated to the point of being illiterate. My father was an abusive drunkard. With the dream of becoming a fighter pilot, he joined the Air Force, and when he didn't qualify to fly a plane but was instead assigned to work on the ground, he faked an injury. He was discharged and given "Disabled Veteran" status even though he had never been within 3000 miles of any conflict. That and he was awarded life-long disability payments. With no need to work, he didn't.
My mother only complained: the monthly handout was too small, it cost too much to feed me (I was so skinny and small for my age, my parents had investigated by Child Protective Services for that alone), she complained that my clothes cost too much (my clothes were 2nd hand and my shoes were $1 Bobos from Family Dollar.). She liked to complain about how much she had to spend in gas driving me to the hospital because I was sick all the time (medical care was free). I was a burden and she always pointed out how much more money she would have and how better her life would be if I had never been born. Despite that, she never got a job to improve our situation. She was content to be married to a monthly government check and let us live in poverty, the poverty of alcoholism and abuse. Even as a child, I realized that the only thing my parents would do in life was serve as examples to others of what not to do in life.
Without anybody to help me or give me advice, I decided to take a year off college, and I thought that wandering, writing in a journal, doing art, and working might be a good way to figure out what to do. The only problem is that I would be completely on my own. It wasn't 1950 anymore, and times had changed for the worse. Somethign like that was very hard to do in the 1990s. I had a full academic scholarship including living expenses, but my scholarship money would not come in for the year that I was taking off. I didnt have the safety net that parents owe their children, they were still alive, but they had never been "parents" to me in any way other than in the sense that they gave birth the same as stray cats and dogs in the back yard. I didnt have any savings. I had been completely on my own since age 17. So I had nobody to help pay rent for me, give me any advice, or in any way make this transition easier. I wasn't on good terms with grandparents or with my many aunts/uncles/cousins by default - they hated my parents. They also hated me, but I have no idea why. I had never asked them for money. I had been a straight A high school student (admittedly at a 23rd rate public school in a bad zipcode), and I had straight As in college, a top tier research university. I had never been in trouble with the police or had any behavior problems. I didn't use drugs very often because I had to concentrate on my studies, and when I did, it was low key.)
You could go nearly anywhere on Greyhound for $60 so I bought a bus ticket. The first place I went was New Orleans. While wandering around and hanging with gutterpunks and other homeless in the French Quarter, I ran into a friend from my home town, Monkey. He was nearly 10 years older than me and also living on the street. He showed me how to function on the street. He showed me a few squats, and my favorite was on top of a wall abutting an abandoned warehouse on the bank of the Mississippi just up stream from the French Quarter. It was high enough that nobody could see us up there. Other humans and pigs wouldn't bother you. The former rob you. The latter beat you, take you to jail, and sometimes shoot you if you are homeless. He showed me where to get food. There were several soup kitchens and feeding stations within walking distance of our squat. There was also a grocery store, Verti Marte, on Governor Nuchols in the French Quarter that sold a Po' Boy or a Meat and Three for $5. It was enough food to last all day. He showed me University of New Orleans on the edge of Lake Pontchartrain. They didn't ckeck IDs at the university gymJ. We would blend in with the students, and go in and lift weights, but the main point was to take a shower and do a little laundry. The stalls had doors on them so I would wash my underwear and socks with shampoo.
The dream started as soon as I closed my eyes. There was no obvious transition in awareness. I noticed dream characters talking to me. Plots lines and back sotries unfolded to reveal different dream seauences very quickly. I'm standing on a city street on the edge of an ocean. There are a few pedestrians walking quickly. It's getting dark and a storm is moving in fast. I felt the urgent need to find shelter. Heavy storm clouds were over the ocean. The wind was picking up. I didn't have any money or anywhere to go. I didn't know anyone. In the dream, I remembered back to a winter I spent homeless in New Orleans. I remembered that Monkey had a spot on a wall next to an abandoned warehouse on the Mississipi river just upriver from the French Quarter. We would climb it and sleep on top. It was sheltered by an overhanging roof.
To my left (West) is a sea wall. It lines the sidewalk for 100 meters or so and ends against a brick building seven stories tall. The city extends to the east, but tall buildings block the view. I climbed the wall and looked down the other side. There was a pit, like looking down from the top of a hydroelectric dam where the water is pouring. It was very deep. A srip of land and another wall was on the other side and beyond that, the ocean.
The backstory to the dream popped into my head like a déja vu. I was on the planet Deneb gamma. It was a colony world of the Orion Arm Hegemony. I had been shipped here on a sublight transport ship, but there had been an accident during my cryosleep. My life support system had malfunçioned and fried the memory centers of my brain. I didn't know who I was or why I was there. All of my bank information, assuming I had any, had been lost. I didn't have any money. There was no Emergency Contact information on me.
At this point, the flow of the dream started to break up. Suddenly, I was on the other side of the pit, on the strip of land looking out at the ocean. Ragged black clouds, violent wind. Now I was standing on top of the far wall, and I could see the ocean.
A maelström miles across, turning very slowly. It looked like it would swallow the city on the edge of the sea. It was extremely deep and the bottom was hidden in blackness. It could have been a black hole. I was still lucid but was convinced that the dream was real. I really thought I was about to die. Now, I was on the lip of the maelström being tossed around in the water, feeling and hearing the raging wind and sea spray. I had already crossed the event horizon and was falling in. I would be annihilated.
Half my entry is gone. The USB drive where I was working on this entry is malfunctioning.
Ariadne found my name and email in a totally ordinary way. I would have been impressed if she had read it in a deck of Tarot Cards or drempt it. That's impossible, of course, but it is fun to imagine. She knows somebody who talked to me at the party, and they told her. The delay is because she had been skiing for 2 weeks in the Alps at Davos.
I've been seeing Ariadne since last week, and we seem to be hitting it off. This week, she had been trying to reserve a cabin for us at a resort within a few hours from Paris. My French isn't good enough to deal with reservations over the phone, and there was nothing on the internet, so it was nice of her to try. Anyway, slim chance at that because it's a holiday weekend and all Paris would be trying to do the same thing. We would take the train Friday night (yesterday), ski all day sat, sun, and half of lundi, then take the train back and be at work on Tuesday. Too late now, obviously. Everything was booked, and the weather is bad for skiing anyway. We will do something else for the holiday weekend.
Ariadne isn't her real name, I mentioned her real name in a previous entry, but I'm going to use Ariadne for the blog.
If there's an afterlife, my parents are probably looking up at me and gnashing their teeth in their own little pit in Hell. After my 3rd year of college, I realized I wasn't really happy with what I was studying. I had learned enough about the Corporate world and Clinical Medicine to question my path in college. I had straight As as an electrical engineering/neurobiology/preMed double major. (Premed refers to a concentration of electives and is not a full major.) I didn't want to become a YUPPIE working for 'the Man' and become an enthusiastic part of a morally corrupt system that I see as celebrating the shallow things in life, promoting unsustainable ways of living, and cheapening our existence. I wanted to earn an honest living and work to improve people's lives on a large scale. I don't buy into the type of feel good thinking that says that merely being polite, recycling, not farting in elevators, helping old ladies cross the street, or having your own children and teaching them to be "good people" is sufficient. I wanted to be active and invent something, come up with some idea, solve poverty, find a cure for AIDS or cancer or something that would bring about a big improvement in the quality of everyone's lives. (Currently, this is exactly what I am working on at the Institut. The project is probably too ambitious, and I won't make much of a dent in anything, but I'm trying). I knew I didn't know anythign about how to do this or even about the world in general.
Other than summer jobs, I didn't know what work was like. I had no male role model to emulate or follow. That alone made things very difficult, but it seemed like everything else was against me as well. My parents had never worked during my life, and they were uneducated to the point of being illiterate. My father was an abusive drunkard. With the dream of becoming a fighter pilot, he joined the Air Force, and when he didn't qualify to fly a plane but was instead assigned to work on the ground, he faked an injury. He was discharged and given "Disabled Veteran" status even though he had never been within 3000 miles of any conflict. That and he was awarded life-long disability payments. With no need to work, he didn't.
My mother only complained: the monthly handout was too small, it cost too much to feed me (I was so skinny and small for my age, my parents had investigated by Child Protective Services for that alone), she complained that my clothes cost too much (my clothes were 2nd hand and my shoes were $1 Bobos from Family Dollar.). She liked to complain about how much she had to spend in gas driving me to the hospital because I was sick all the time (medical care was free). I was a burden and she always pointed out how much more money she would have and how better her life would be if I had never been born. Despite that, she never got a job to improve our situation. She was content to be married to a monthly government check and let us live in poverty, the poverty of alcoholism and abuse. Even as a child, I realized that the only thing my parents would do in life was serve as examples to others of what not to do in life.
Without anybody to help me or give me advice, I decided to take a year off college, and I thought that wandering, writing in a journal, doing art, and working might be a good way to figure out what to do. The only problem is that I would be completely on my own. It wasn't 1950 anymore, and times had changed for the worse. Somethign like that was very hard to do in the 1990s. I had a full academic scholarship including living expenses, but my scholarship money would not come in for the year that I was taking off. I didnt have the safety net that parents owe their children, they were still alive, but they had never been "parents" to me in any way other than in the sense that they gave birth the same as stray cats and dogs in the back yard. I didnt have any savings. I had been completely on my own since age 17. So I had nobody to help pay rent for me, give me any advice, or in any way make this transition easier. I wasn't on good terms with grandparents or with my many aunts/uncles/cousins by default - they hated my parents. They also hated me, but I have no idea why. I had never asked them for money. I had been a straight A high school student (admittedly at a 23rd rate public school in a bad zipcode), and I had straight As in college, a top tier research university. I had never been in trouble with the police or had any behavior problems. I didn't use drugs very often because I had to concentrate on my studies, and when I did, it was low key.)
You could go nearly anywhere on Greyhound for $60 so I bought a bus ticket. The first place I went was New Orleans. While wandering around and hanging with gutterpunks and other homeless in the French Quarter, I ran into a friend from my home town, Monkey. He was nearly 10 years older than me and also living on the street. He showed me how to function on the street. He showed me a few squats, and my favorite was on top of a wall abutting an abandoned warehouse on the bank of the Mississippi just up stream from the French Quarter. It was high enough that nobody could see us up there. Other humans and pigs wouldn't bother you. The former rob you. The latter beat you, take you to jail, and sometimes shoot you if you are homeless. He showed me where to get food. There were several soup kitchens and feeding stations within walking distance of our squat. There was also a grocery store, Verti Marte, on Governor Nuchols in the French Quarter that sold a Po' Boy or a Meat and Three for $5. It was enough food to last all day. He showed me University of New Orleans on the edge of Lake Pontchartrain. They didn't ckeck IDs at the university gymJ. We would blend in with the students, and go in and lift weights, but the main point was to take a shower and do a little laundry. The stalls had doors on them so I would wash my underwear and socks with shampoo.
The dream started as soon as I closed my eyes. There was no obvious transition in awareness. I noticed dream characters talking to me. Plots lines and back sotries unfolded to reveal different dream seauences very quickly. I'm standing on a city street on the edge of an ocean. There are a few pedestrians walking quickly. It's getting dark and a storm is moving in fast. I felt the urgent need to find shelter. Heavy storm clouds were over the ocean. The wind was picking up. I didn't have any money or anywhere to go. I didn't know anyone. In the dream, I remembered back to a winter I spent homeless in New Orleans. I remembered that Monkey had a spot on a wall next to an abandoned warehouse on the Mississipi river just upriver from the French Quarter. We would climb it and sleep on top. It was sheltered by an overhanging roof.
To my left (West) is a sea wall. It lines the sidewalk for 100 meters or so and ends against a brick building seven stories tall. The city extends to the east, but tall buildings block the view. I climbed the wall and looked down the other side. There was a pit, like looking down from the top of a hydroelectric dam where the water is pouring. It was very deep. A srip of land and another wall was on the other side and beyond that, the ocean.
The backstory to the dream popped into my head like a déja vu. I was on the planet Deneb gamma. It was a colony world of the Orion Arm Hegemony. I had been shipped here on a sublight transport ship, but there had been an accident during my cryosleep. My life support system had malfunçioned and fried the memory centers of my brain. I didn't know who I was or why I was there. All of my bank information, assuming I had any, had been lost. I didn't have any money. There was no Emergency Contact information on me.
At this point, the flow of the dream started to break up. Suddenly, I was on the other side of the pit, on the strip of land looking out at the ocean. Ragged black clouds, violent wind. Now I was standing on top of the far wall, and I could see the ocean.
A maelström miles across, turning very slowly. It looked like it would swallow the city on the edge of the sea. It was extremely deep and the bottom was hidden in blackness. It could have been a black hole. I was still lucid but was convinced that the dream was real. I really thought I was about to die. Now, I was on the lip of the maelström being tossed around in the water, feeling and hearing the raging wind and sea spray. I had already crossed the event horizon and was falling in. I would be annihilated.
