Ridge Walker

Running On Empty

Sitting in the bar of the Sheraton Towers in Manhattan waiting for the day to come at me. It is not quite yet 9a.m. so they of course are not serving alcohol. The far corner of the bar is serving Starbucks Coffee and some pastries. There is a fair crowd here and by the noise level they are just starting their second cup. I’m sitting in a plush leather chair doing what I do best.

At ten I will walk over to the Hilton and walk through the show floor. The show is LegalTech. This is the third industry I have worked in since I started my career some years ago. I started in Telecom, moved to Market Research, and am now in Legal. If you care to separate Telecom out into to Enterprise and Network then this is my fourth industry. The big difference with legal is the suits. That’s not a surprise right? If any industry would be wearing a suit it would be the legal industry. I would throw in banking and finance into that mix too.

I don’t have a suit. I used to have three but I got too fat to wear them so I donated them to the clothing drive. The Architect is getting married in May and as the time draws ever nearer I am feeling the need to acquire a nice suit. Today though I am wearing my Brooks Brothers country club attire. Light colored cotton slacks, I would call the color putty I think, a blue pinstripe shirt, my blue blazer with the shiny brass buttons, and a dark red burgundy tie complete the picture. As it is a mere forty some degrees out I have my dark gray wool herringbone top coat with my Wallace Plaid scarf. I may not have a suit, I may look out of place with this crowd, but by god I look nice. Nobody would look at me in wonder and disgust with one of those, “Who let HIM in,” kind of stares. The most they would do is think something like, “Hey old man, I say! The country club is up the parkway a bit, can I get you a car?”

The motion of my job has remained the same throughout. Yesterday was rather fun actually because I got to do my job without Creme getting in the way. Thor and I walked the show floor, talked with vendors, and put together some deals. It all seemed normal to tell the truth. If Creme were along, and trust me he tried pretty hard to get an invite into our twosome, he just would have mucked things up. He would have meant well, he always does, but he would have still mucked it all up.

This is all a diversion though. It is absolutely engaging and wonderful, but a diversion nonetheless. The truth is I begin to grow bored with life. All I see is pain. I see how to let go. I think I see the path to some future happiness even. It is the letting go that I am working with. It is surprisingly hard for me. This only serves to make me sometimes cynical of life, and sometimes submissive. This part alone fascinates me and will continue to until the day I die. The rest of life? It’s boring.

Freedom

The music is too loud but I’m trying not to care. The truth is I’m not caring about much of anything anymore. I look at this dispassionately and shrug my shoulders. To me it is freedom. Perhaps, I think to myself, that I have finally realized that everything has been taken from me. To realize this is freedom. No one can do anything to me. No one can hurt me anymore. There is nothing left to hurt. There are no more tears to cry. They have all been used up. It occurs to me too at this point that there is a fine line between humility and the loss of hope, or is it a wide gulf? The feelings are close to the same for me. Go ahead I say to myself and do what you want to me. I no longer care. It no longer matters. At last I am willing to submit to everything you can throw at me. There is none of me left to offer a protest.

Life has simplified things in a way that I always knew it would. I am amazed, to tell the truth, that more people don’t come to the same conclusion. This makes me laugh. We are all wrapped up in our own little world, including me, aren’t we? Just as I think why can’t everyone see things this way, the rest of you are wrapped up in your worlds, no doubt thinking the same thing. I remember reading a definition of truth that I still like. It is to see things as they are, as they were, and as they are to come. Nice isn’t it. Do you see things as they are? Do any of us? How hard is it to let go of our illusions?

I used to try to figure these kind of things out. I still do actually, and always will. It’s an Einsteinian kind of riddle though, like trying to figure out what’s inside of the watch when there is no way you can take a look inside. Our perspective limits what we can see. This reality of ours is too perfectly constructed. There is no way, but then you wouldn’t expect any less from him would you? The only thing you can do is try and live inside your fantasy world and keep sustaining it as best you can, or you can submit. Submitting is at once the most painful thing, and the easiest. My Zen readings would remind me it is the only path to enlightenment. I now believe this is true.

So don’t offer me any pity, because I really don’t need it. I am free at last.

Just As Well

He realized she was not going to come. He looked at the half empty cup of Joe he had been slowly working on. The desire to drink it had left him and if he were of a more violent mood he would go ahead and sling it across the room. That brought a mirth filled laugh to his lips. Anger had been carefully trained out of him so all he could do was sit here and dispassionately analyze and categorize his life, summing up all the mistakes he had made, all the reasons it would have been better if he had not been.

Not that he was suicidal mind you. No, the will to live was strong within him and that made him laugh too. More life, more years, more misery. It all seemed a cruel joke to him. He glanced at his watch and saw it was almost time to leave. He had set the time before he walked through the doors here. If she hadn't shown in forty five minutes from the time he had asked her to be here he would leave. "Times up bitch," he thought to himself.

It really was just as well too he thought to himself as he stood up and gathered his things. All it would have accomplished was to rub more salt into an open wound that would never heal. He started walking towards the door and heard a voice call out, "See you later Ben." It was the Barista behind the bar at this coffee shop. He had been coming here forever and they knew him by name, and by drink.

He smiled and nodded in her direction. "Later Sarah," as he reflected that the only friends he had were those who didn't really know him.

In Hiding

If you found me here, don’t tell anyone. I’m hiding.

To divert myself I have done a couple of things. I picked up a Weis & Hickman fantasy book that I hadn’t read yet. These two are Ridge Walker Porn. Every time I pick up one of their books I just, “One more page myself through to the end in one sitting, two tops. As you know I have also banned myself from blogging at Wordpress. Finally, I have revamped typepad which I still can’t bring myself to cancel, even though it’s a pay site, because it was my first blog ever. It has strong sentimental ties.

Serendipitously I had a dear friend from the past further divert my attention. She is a wonderful person and I have regretted that our paths diverged. I first got to know her at “I” which treated her badly. I suggested we go out for drinks after work. She told me she had time for just one drink. We still laugh at my reply. I don’t remember it exactly but it was something to the effect that just one beer really wasn’t worth my time. Yeah, I’m still a little red faced about actually saying something like that.

Anyway, out of the blue she ‘follows’ me on Twitter. This makes me smile that someone has actually done that, she’s my first, and second that it was her. She has no idea what she did for me because making me smile just now is a gift of the rarest and best sorts. So N, Thank you.

NaNoMomOPuffO

Two days to NaNo and I’m flip flopping, not that it’s more than a passing interest to most of you. I have to fill this page up some how though. I was all wild on working out my plot. If you’ve never tried that it’s incredibly hard, at least for the Ridge Walker, and about as fun as watching bread rise. I think Bergsteiger really gets off on this kind of thing though, so perhaps it’s just to each his own. So it may just be because I just finished Lisey’s Story, by Stephen King, but my strategy is now to paint my first scene really well and then let the story tell itself. It’s much easier, much more fun, and highly creative. OK, it’s a heck of a lot easier too, and it is human nature, imo, to be lazy which for some large category of things, I am a master at.
I talked to mom today. The MAC showed up right on schedule. The officer and a gentleman came over and set it up. They had everything except a Cat 5 cable. Why they couldn’t use the one from the old PC I don’t know. I asked mom and she wasn’t sure. Officer and a Gentleman offered to go out to Staples, or wherever get one and bring one right back. It was getting late and mom was getting tired and she said why didn’t he come back on Saturday because Officer and a Gentleman works in Seattle and gets home late every night. I admire this self control. Me? I would have told him to get his butt in gear and not let the door hit him in the ass on the way out. So she will be back on line Saturday. What they set up though went off without a hitch.
Creme Puff was all serious today like he’s going to solve this problem. This may mean CTO talked to him after Border Collie yelled at him. It probably does in fact. This doesn’t chance the fact that he’s incompetent to do his job. Border Collie was out this afternoon. It’s just the way my mind works but my first thought is that she’s interviewing. It’s certainly a likely scenario but I don’t have enough history with Border Collie to make any certain guess. If she came and told me she was walking unless Creme Puff was fired you’d feel the rushing of wind as I ran to his office and kicked his butt out the door into the parking lot.

. . . and she's back

With a little good luck a certain person currently residing in the Pacific Northwest will receive a very large box from UPS tomorrow that along with thousands of packing peanuts contains an iMAC that is more beautiful than you can perhaps imagine, and a free printer that cost a mere hundred dollars before rebate. She wont know how to hook it up because she came of age when the radio was the evenings entertainment. There was no hook up with a radio. You just plugged it in. Think about that for a minute, no internet, no cable with three hundred channels, no broadcast TV with four channels, no iPods, nothing, just the radio. Bergsteiger’s ex’s dad will be enlisted to come over and hook it up. He probably has me beat by a mere ten years. He was career navy, an officer and a gentleman if you will, and a hell of a nice guy. He’s never seen a MAC but knows PC’s reasonable well. He just might convert to the cult once he’s finished uncrating this bad boy.
The DSL has been turned back on. All that will need to be done is to unplug the Cat 5 from the old PC and plug it into the MAC. The old PC will need to be disposed of in some fashion. With a little luck the officer and a gentleman will do his duty there. That’s it. Easy peasy right?
This will end well over a month of enforced absence from the internet. That would absolutely kill me, in fact I know for a fact I couldn’t do it. I would have done whatever it takes to gotten plugged back in. I’ve done this in the past. She grew up with radio though so no internet was a bother, because among other things she couldn’t read my blog. It was very doable though because she has broadcast TV. Yeah, not even cable.
When I first started this blog about three and a half years ago I sent her the link. I told her she was free to read it as often or as seldom as she pleased but there was just one rule. OK, two. She must not use my real name, and she must not ever gush and tell the rest of you what a wonderful boy I am, and how she is so proud of me, or anything that would disclose our relationship. She agreed and was true to her word.
She is from an age, is it the radio age I wonder, where your word meant something. I’m not saying it doesn’t now, for the right people it still does, just that with her and those of her age, if you said something then by God you backed it up or you didn’t say it. I understand that the importance character has to me, was passed down by her. It was a wonderful gift and as you know is highly prized by me. She continues to show me the way. I have the courage to walk my path in no small part because she continues to show me it is possible to do so with courage and grace.
Still, that doesn’t stop me from noting that in the next day or too she will be returning. That is of course unless something goes wrong. Yeah, I have my list of just what that could be. A MAC is the easiest thing in the world to set up and use too. To make it easier we bought it out here and did all that. All she has to do is get the officer and a gentleman to unbox it for her and plug it all in. How could you possibly screw that up? Easy! I can think of several ways just off the top of my head. I’m not going to rest easy until she comments in one of these entries. When she does feel free to welcome her back. There’s just two rules. You can’t use my real name (if you know it) and you cant gush and tell her what a wonderful boy I am and how she must be so proud of me or anything that would disclose our relationship. OK?

It's Not About Me

Today will be busy and this is likely the only moments of true solitude I will have. It’s all ok though, and that’s a strange thing for me to say. Sometime about 9 a.m. or so I will go back home and pick the Chef up. We’re going to go over to our church and clean it because it’s our turn. I figure that will take a good two hours. Mostly it’s just vacuuming everything and if it were me I would get it done in an hour flat, but since the Chef is along it will be a more complete job (sigh). “Ridge Walker did you mop the bathrooms? No Chef. Ridge Walker did you . . . No Chef.” That’s what the second hour will be filled with.
I have to give a talk tonight at this church meeting. It’s a Saturday evening adults only thing. It’s only 15 minutes and I have been thinking about it all week but have yet to put the words down. Now I know many of you would rather die than speak in public and the Ridge Walker is not one of you. He lives for moments like this. Seriously. It’s like sitting down to write an entry here only longer, and that means better. Then I get to stand up and deliver and for some reason that really does it for me too. It’s not an ego thing of, “Look at me! Look at me!” It’s more the same reason I started this blog. I can share a point of view that is uniquely me, and therefore at least slightly different than what may have been considered, and also feel the connection that we are all in this together, we are all one. All this is to say that I have to devote sufficient time after the cleaning thing to write out this talk. I could bang it out in an hour but more likely I will suck up much more.
I went to the gym yesterday and it rocked! I love going to the gym! I want to go again today but cleaning and the talk comes first. If I don’t make it today, likely, I’ll hit it tomorrow. I’m not sure what the compound moves are the Architect was talking about. He is the master and I am the student when it comes to all things gym. Next time we’re together though I’m going to make him show me.
In the evening I’ll be at the meeting thing.
The reason this doesn’t bother me, devoting my day to things not Ridge Walker, is something I note. Like most of humanity I think, my life and thoughts have revolved around me. Recently though I have begun to enjoy doing things for others, for a cause larger than myself, every bit as much as taking care of the Ridge Walker. This is undiscovered country for me. It strikes me as the same kind of thing as Lewis signing up to be a Red Cross volunteer. At some point in your life you realize you need to and are ready to give back.
I was walking through the gym yesterday feeling my fifty year old body respond to the stress I was putting it through. I saw much younger people in far better condition than I, doing much more than I. They no doubt saw an aging man trying to get back in shape. What I see when I consider myself now is far different. I am comfortable with life now. I move through it with the increasing understanding that it has a beginning and an end, and that there are phases we move through. I am at last comfortable with where I am and feel very much an eternal being having a mortal experience. When it is over I want to be completely used up. Rather than hold on to my youth, or keep all my attention on satisfying the Ridge Walker I just want to be present and act as best I can today. Increasingly I’m finding that doing that really isn’t about me at all.

Fogging The Mirror

Creme Puff hit bottom today and it made me smile. No, I’m not proud of that either but it’s true. Yesterday we, Border Collie and I at the end of an intervention with him, told him in an oh by the way fashion that if he said, “I have to be honest with you,” more than three times in any meeting we were in ever again he was buying us all lunch, no questions asked. The phrase is one of many that rolls off his tongue way too often. That probably makes us seem petty I know. It gets worse. I then offered to make up a Creme Puff bingo sheet to pass out in meetings. You know what I’m talking about right? You may have seen the corporate lingo bingo sheets. It’s filled with the slogans du jour and the first one to get a row filled in any direction wins. You’re sitting in a long boring meeting and all of a sudden somebody yells out, “Bingo!” Well, Border Collie fell in love with the idea, but it embarrassed Creme Puff. Even I expect better of myself. All I can say is it came out before I could stop it just like Creme Puff did a week or so ago. He seems to bring it out in me. Alecto knows.
So today he comes in looking like his wife just left him and he found out by reading a note attached to his dogs head that was laying next to him in bed when he woke up, like that scene from Godfather. I’m pretty sure it wasn’t our leaning on him the day before. We were firm but kind, well considerate anyway. Creme Puff and I talk.
The light is gone from him. His body language is telling me that he really loved that dog and he’s not sure life can go on without him. Finally, sensing that he is not going to bare his soul to me unless I ask him to, I do. He tells me he just today, finally realized he can’t do this job. Hell I could have told him that at the end of week one. Ok, I’m sorry that was a value free moment. He goes on and says things are too effed up, he doesn’t have the right kind of talent to work with, and there’s too much that needs fixing, and it all has to be done immediately. I agree with him by saying that he is in a very difficult place.
I mention this to Border Collie a bit later and she makes me feel like Mother Teresa. She responds with something like, “Good! The little eff does nothing! We used to get defects fixed in two days and now we can’t do it in a month.” Compared to her I am the soul of compassion. I love working with her because she is absolutely insanely good at her job. She may be the best I have ever seen, and I’ve been around the block a few times. Working with such talent comes at a price though, and not everyone can pony up.
In a later conversation with Creme Puff he expresses frustration in dealing with Border Collie. He is saying things like everything is a crises with her, everything an emergency. He tells me he is trying to impress her with his mastery of process in dealing with these problems of hers. At this point I’m not sure whether to laugh at him, cry for him, or pity him.
It’s exactly the wrong approach for dealing with Border Collie. When she roars you answer her call just as soon as you can, as good as you can. If you do this you will be a part of her pack. You will be one of her big dogs and she will take care of you. If you try and impress her any other way she will either rip you to shreds, or rip you to shreds and leave you for the wolves. So how do I tell Creme Puff this? I can’t. If I tried he would tell me how clearly impossible this all was. It’s not possible to try and convince him because he knows he’s right. I know this because I have tried before. He is in over his head and I think he’s just now realizing it. He may have selectively forgot by tomorrow, but today he knows. I’ve worked with talent that could step into his job and turn things around and they’re worth every penny they demand.
So yeah, he made me smile today. Not because I took any delight in his pain or discomfort. I don’t. I smiled because he had a moment today when he saw things as they really are. Life held a mirror up for him and he opened his eyes and looked. Such moments are always painful, because you see yourself wrinkles and warts and all. If you can force yourself to just be in that oh so painful moment, they are incredibly valuable, because once you know the truth you can finally start to walk your path. Before that it’s all just pretending.

Tonight Is The Night

McDonald’s is chaos. There are lots of little kids and mommy’s scattered throughout the establishment. I actually like this, it makes me smile. Even the cute little girl, not yet three, in the Hello Kitty boots that started crying for some reason. She too makes me smile. The rest of the crowd is composed of laborers, immigrant and otherwise with a very few white collar working stiffs like me thrown in to round things out. Today was a day to get out of the office and this is serving me perfectly. I don’t have to be back until 1:00 p.m. at which time I will run the meeting where I will make Creme Puff tells us about all the wonderful things he’s been doing.
Tonight is the night (knock on wood) when we finally pick up the Chef’s car. I have talked to Kevin a half dozen times in the last three days. I like Kevin a lot. He is everything a good sales person should be. He is everything Mark, our Credit Union boy is not. There is still a non zero chance the car will not be the one we have continually asked for but that would stretch even the Ridge Walker’s worst case scenario. For that to happen Kevin would have to be a rare blending of a complete idiot that comes across as very competent when you talk to them. I know they exist because I have worked with them in the past. They are unbelievably dangerous so I can’t believe that they work as salesmen at auto dealership. That’s putting an all too rare talent to waste. You usually only find them in places where their eff ups cost big time bucks, lots of zero’s after the one.
As a bonus here the price is under 18K which is our benchmark for just about any car we buy any more. If I ever pay much more than that you will know that I have come into my inheritance, and you can bet that whatever I got has some serious performance and looks (like one of those Caddy V series, say an ETS).
Assuming this goes down without a hitch tonight things will get simpler from here on out too. I will no longer have to park the car at the train station and walk home a few evenings a week. I can start going to the gym again. The Chef can do her chefly things with her own car with no need to synch up with me. It may not sound like much to you but from where I sit this is big.
This has been a lesson in patience. I’d say it’s something I’m good at but I really don’t know if that’s true. I’m better than some and worse than others I suppose. Ranting would have been easy. I could have yelled and screamed, as could have the Chef, and it wouldn’t have gotten our car any quicker. I tend to be one who will push from within, rather than tear down from outside. It’s really the way I’m wired so I can’t take much credit for it. Mostly I think this is the right approach, but as God is my witness if we don’t drive up and see a blue Nissan Versa SL Hatchback with a charcoal colored interior there will be Hell to pay!

For God’s Sake No One Else Quit

Loosing a friend, even one as “casual” as one you know only on the web is never a good thing. Lewis found that out today when he mistakenly took Alecto’s mourning the passing of Amy’s blog for her dropping out herself. I can’t imagine Alecto quitting blogging, not unless she lands a contract for the book she’s going to start in NaNo next week, and if that happens I’m not going to know whether to love her or hate her for it. I can imagine her writing 30 little snippets this week and scheduling them to post all next month though when she’s really NaNoing, but that’s the worst I think she could do in terms of quitting blogging.
I have some experience loosing friends, online and otherwise. I’m sure we all do. If I think back on just the last years since the new millennium though I can think of no less than four that have left the inner circle. The first was when I went to lunch with Megan and inadvertently said something that offended her. I’m pretty sure she was offended at the time, and I apologized at the time. She has never talked to me since though and after a couple of attempts I just quit trying. What are you going to do right?
The second I blogged about. I had inside information that our office manager was going to get fired, was told not to tell her, and didn’t. I took her out to lunch and gave her my very best subtle hints. They passed right over her head. She has never spoke to me again either. I will go on record here and say that while I thought I was doing the right thing at the time by keeping my promise not to tell, if I had it to do again, I would have told her. On a personal level it was the right thing to do and I didn’t do it.
The third, and fourth are more a case of things just drifting away. With both these people I still talk on occasion but I always have the distinct feeling that I am being held at arms length. It’s weird and with one of them I even noted it in a conversation and it passed unnoticed. I know this kind of thing happens so I try not to obsess on it.
I feel a bit off from the rest of you to start with and let me tell you this does nothing to help, the loosing friends thing. Alecto very kindly tells me that we are all of us weird. Perhaps. Some of us can beat the rest of you though, no problem.
So if you’re reading this, and you write a blog I read regularly promise me you won’t quit, not for a while at least. If you want to know who you are just check the links on the right. One is OK. Two is going to give some of us a complex or send us into a dark depression.