Staring Down a Bullet

Twice in the last week or so, the specter of expensive car repairs has once again raised its ugly head, only to be easily vanquished.

First, the front-end started making grinding noises again. The knee-jerk reaction was to assume that the newly replaced hub bearing was going out. Further inspection showed that the lugnuts had loosened, allowing the rotor to wobble slightly and drag against the brake pads. Tightening the lugnuts stopped the grinding noise.

Then on Friday, the transmission decides it doesn't want to shift properly, often going into neutral instead of the correct gear. I envision thousands of dollars in repair bill, money that I really don't have and surely don't want to spend. I decided to take a huge gamble and change the fluid and filter, thinking that it probably won't work but holding out hope that it does.

And guess what? It works. The transmission is now shifting correctly.

So two near misses in a little over a week. With the way my luck is going, maybe I should be sure and buy a lottery ticket.

What is Normal?

Who decides where we draw that fine line between sanity and insanity? Between reality and fantasy? If reality is based upon perception, then everyone perceives his or her own little reality.Can we say that our reality is any more real than someone else’s? Who decides what reality is? If we say that reality is what the majority of people accept as real, then in a sense there is no true reality but only a series of accepted norms. What if the majority is wrong about our perceptions and our vision of reality is completely false? Then those who we judge insane are really those who are sane and we are living in a fantasy.

No one can be completely sane. One hundred percent sanity would force a person to deal with this world in all its uncut, raw form without any of our built-in escape mechanisms. Sensory overload and mass confusion would soon result, forcing the person over the brink into complete insanity. Therefore, Sanity-Insanity cannot be measured upon a linear continuum but rather is truly circular in nature, with the difference between complete sanity and insanity separated by only the slimmest of margins, yet there is the whole area of the rest of the circle representing the varying degrees of sanity-insanity. Taken to its logical (?) conclusion then, all of us are insane in varying degrees. Each person has different facets of their personality that deals with life’s daily ups and downs. We compartmentalize our feelings and emotions into each of these variations on our personality, yet we retain enough sanity to realize that these personalities cannot be separated from the whole. Those suffering from multiple personality disorder cannot retain enough sanity to hold these facets together and the seam is torn and the versions of the personality become personalities unto themselves.

Somewhere along this circular continuum that defines sanity-insanity is a line that society has proscribed as the “acceptable” line of sanity. If the True line of sanity lies at the point described earlier where one hundred percent sanity meets one hundred percent insanity, then society’s acceptable line is one hundred eighty degrees opposite of this true line. That is, we draw a line somewhere where our senses tell us someone has gone too far towards insanity on this circular continuum. If society’s vision of sanity-insanity is the exact opposite of what is real, then everyone is society is actually delusional…

After the Storm

Well, the downpour has stopped and life has returned to some semblance of normal, at least "normal" for me.

Someone stole money out of my bank account, but there's not a thing I can do about it. The price of auto parts today amounts to nothing more than highway robbery and I have indeed been robbed. But the good news is that my truck is up and running again and I was fortunate enough to be able to do all of the work myself, or the theft would have been even greater.

I've got only eight days of school left, with the last two days being early release days. As much as the students look forward to the summer, the teachers are even more anxious. By the end of May, I'm as close to the brink of insanity as I'd ever want to get and desperately need those two months off to regain my senses.

When it rains...

... it pours.

First, it was the brakes going out. Fixed that Friday evening, only to have a wheel bearing fail this morning. This is a part that no auto parts store within a hundred-mile radius carries. Several have offered to order the part, but it will be at least two days before it arrives. Great, just great.

So I'm stuck without a vehicle. In some cities, that's not a problem, but in Texas, it's almost impossible to go about your daily life without one.

Sitting by the dock of the bay...

... watching the sun fade away, wasting time.

Good beer, good magaritas, good food, good company, and a good (sort of) view.

Slight disappointment that there were no oysters on the half shell, but they did have really good calamari and a lobster bisque...

... and then I woke up.

Sometimes our lives imitate our dreams and vice-versa.

Lawnmowers in the Attic

It was a lazy Sunday, one perfect for taking a nice, long nap. Of course, Sunday afternoons are also perfect for mowing the lawn, so it didn't surprise me to hear the sound of a lawnmower engine running, disturbing me from my sleep.

Until I realized that the sound was coming from my attic...

Whiskey?

Tango?

Foxtrot?

My first thought was, "How in the hell did someone manage to get a lawnmower into my attic without me knowing?"

My second thought was, "There's no grass in the attic, what the hell are they mowing?"

I grudgingly arose to try and decipher the origins of this rather odd noise. I pull the access ladder down and the noise becomes louder. The lawnmower, or whatever, is definitely runnning in the attic.

The prime suspect is the central A/C unit, which is not a good proposition in Texas in May. Then my eyes wandered to the A/C intake. "Hmmmm, when was the last time I changed the filter?"

A closer inspection confirmed that it had been "a very long while" because it was incredibly dirty. I surmised that the lawnmower sound was caused by the A/C intake vibrating as it tried to suck air through this dirty filter.

Five minutes later, after turning off the A/C and replacing the filter, the lawnmower was gone. Till the next time I don't replace the A/C filter...

Hate Me

Great song by a band from Houston. Exceptional lyrics, far beyond what I would expect from today's music scene.

And it sums it all up... trying to push someone away because that is what's best for them. How many of us believe that we are cursed, that our touch is the anti-Midas touch? How everything we come into contact with is doomed to fail? So we push people away so they won't get hurt... or maybe we push people away so that we won't get hurt. We desperately avoid taking another chance because it's simply not worth the pain in the end.

Humans wage war against others because we wage war within ourselves. There's the part of us that we love pitted against the part of us that we hate. And we transfer all that we hate to someone else so that we don't have to look too hard at ourselves. We hate others because we hate ourselves, and, in essence, we make the whole world our scapegoats for our own inadequacies.