Catharsis

As customary on Thanksgiving, one sits back and counts their blessings regarding everything in their life until that moment. Mine didn't occur until much later, after the green bean casserole and countless pies consumed have not yet made their journey through my lower GI tract. Among some of the things that have happened within the last year, friends have come, some have gone, and life altering events have definitely shaped some of my thoughts and actions since. I thought I'd share something I haven't spoken about for a while outside of one person.

Last year, I was in a minor accident. It was hard enough to total my Neon, but not hard enough to deploy the airbags or seriously injure myself. That is to say I didn't escape unscathed. The moment of impact was shared with several people. The moron who hit me, myself and my friend Wilson. He happened to be on the phone with me at the time and heard the airbags in the other car deploy. After gaining my bearings after impact, I remember telling Wilson the intersection I was at and he came to my aide immediately.

The lingering effects of any accident vary from person to person. Mine was whiplash. I had a difficult time doing simple tasks such as dialing a phone, answering a question about time displayed on a digital clock and forming sentences longer than 6 words. In the hours after the accident, I had the car towed to my body shop of choice and tried to get back into a normal routine. I was advised heavily by several people, my doctor included not to head to work that day and just relax and recover. In a matter of weeks my life would start to change for the better, it just took some time to get over what happened.

After it was said and done, I was out of a car due to it being a write off. My head was still in repair mode and I had no outlet of my own to assist. I had the use of the Ranger, but at the time, my dad was still using it. I had to bite the bullet and jump back into the dealerships and buy myself another car. One of the dealerships closest to my house had this gorgeous blue Mustang convertible that I was compelled to test drive. The salesman was a great guy. The topics were general wants vs. needs and covered the gamut of "typical convertible shake over rough road" to "my old convertible made that same squeak" but my heart and my head really wasn't into it.

I knew it was pretty bad when I stepped behind the wheel of a 2008 Charger RT and other than a slight semi forming in my jeans from the sound of the engine and smell of the leather seats I was still out of it from the accident. I was very disconnected. While we were testing the car (doing 112mph down the freeway) we turned around and went down a quiet stretch of road near the dealership. The headlights illuminated a few really out of place items in a field. We stopped and took a look at the field and saw three unrestored electric trolley cars from the city of El Paso. The salesman and I both said how bizarre it was for them to be just abandoned in this field. I knew I had to go back. This was the answer to help clear my head.

I headed out there the next day with my camera in hand and no real focus to the day except let the images speak to me. I stood in front of the three trolleys for about 10 minutes, just taking them in visually. I turned on the camera and let the lens tell the stories that were forming in my head to the images I was seeing. The deeper I got into the images, the better I felt. I started to walk a little closer to the cars, getting inside one to take pictures of its dashboard. Bakeolite switches and 1930s era controls as fractured as my head were a welcome sight to see.



I had lost all track of time. I spent a full hour among the ruins. It was now my time to leave. I walked back to the Ranger and went home. I uploaded the images to my computer and left them there. I took them out and ran them through photoshop every now and then to learn some techniques but I really just would not pay attention to them. It wasn't their time yet to come back into the spotlight. But now it is. I turned off my TV this evening and had to start thumbing through them. I took myself back to that afternoon and the state of mind I was trying to recover from. Its amazing how the brain works at times trying to heal itself and what its capable of doing. Several of the pictures took on more meaning once I edited them, one is actually my desktop wallpaper.

I needed to write about these pictures this evening to finally get past the accident and move on.

Spiderman vs. Karma

I sat in class one day during a break in curriculum when I overheard two instructors talking about karmic events. One instructor was tossing an antenna ball up in the air and catching it 90% of the time, one time rolling my direction and got a good look at it. Hard plastic, it was a Spider-man antenna ball.

I picked it up, inspected it a moment and then tossed it back to him. He included me in the conversation saying how he was at the office parking lot of a business associate he works for privately and one of the employees at the business had bragged about seeing the antenna ball on this one car, and snagged it. So, the boss hears it, snags it off the employees car and sticks it on his own.

I smile realizing where this is going.

The instructor then says two or three days later he is back at the office park and sees that the boss' car still has the Spider-man on the antenna. At the end of his job at the office, he walks out and pops the ball off the antenna and heads to the school where he triumphantly yet clumsily tosses it in the air.

One week later, it still sits on top of his antenna on his car in the parking lot.

So, walking into school one evening I park near his car, get out & snag it off his antenna and throw it in the glove box of my car. Later on during class break, he mentions that Spider-man is missing from his car. He laughs realizing what happened to him, but still asks everyone in class if we took it. I did the best acting of my life and said nothing more than "nope" or some other disavow.

This was back in 2003.

I am still in possession of Spider-man. I contemplated keeping him here at my desk at work, but considering lunches disappear mysteriously I don't think he will be a permanent feature at my desk.

PS, I never finished getting certified for computer repair/maintenance. Guess that was my karma.

Sprucing Up

You might see a few small tweaks to the website. Im just playing with some new upgrades and features (like the car at the top of the page).

iPhone MMS (Much Mischief Suspected)

I ditched Sprint like a bad date back in January of this year for the iPhone. Yes, I went to a higher rate plan, and yes AT&T is a conglomerate, and yes you are nit-picking something I really enjoy (haters) but the one thing I had to endure these 9 months had been the lack of proper MMS capabilities. I was no stranger to this, the last phone I had was a TREO "smart phone" that needed to connect to a website to view MMS photos sent by friends.

I didn't mind this. I was used to it.

Well, after a few hiccups here and there and Apple's promise to have MMS before the end of summer (a few days late, but still) on the 25th of this month all iPhone users will be able to send and receive MMS messages all they want.

Something that I have been thinking about, though. AT&T has contended that the reason they shuffled their feet in not allowing MMS messages is because the iPhone is the equivalent of an SUV. The data consumption is epic. The phone uses (when cruising the 3G network) something close to 3X the data a "dumb" phone uses.

Personally, I switch to a wifi signal for extensive data & web browsing.

But this has me wondering how well AT&T's network will hold up to the millions of iPhone owners simultaneously sending images and videos to friends in a half-hearted triumphant display of our phones new capability that was standard on the cheapest free phones for sale on the market.

Well, Im going to test it out myself. I do not have the 3GS. I do not have the ability to record video. But I have TONS of very large files saved to my photo folder. I am going to find the largest image I can and send it to EVERYONE in my phonebook. Several times.

Guess time will tell.

Road Trip

So, It started with a half-assed plan to just grab Evelyn and head out to Las Cruces to visit Wilson and possibly pig out at a restaurant. With summer winding down, the weather starting to cool, I had not been able to really head out on a true road trip. I have the perfect vehicle for it.

It's also the time of the season for the annual Hatch Chile Festival. Hatch is a good one hundred miles away from the house, but thought it would be great to just get out and enjoy the journey. So after filling up, Evelyn and I hit the freeway to Las Cruces to meet up with Wilson & haul to the festival. Evelyn & I ended up meeting up with Wilson, sitting on his favorite ride (FJR 1300) I dropped the top & we jumped onto the highway another 22 miles to Hatch, just north of Las Cruces.

At ludicrous speed.

A reason there aren't that many pictures of the actual event. It was like a fair/ carnival on dirt, but without the sort of pomp & circumstance that usually a fun-filled frivolity comes with. It wasn't what I thought it would be. It was a fair. There was one thing that I really really loved while there. It's a "Hit & Miss" engine. I never thought I would see one in real life, let alone running a slew of modified hand crank ice cream makers. The ice cream being made? Green chile ice cream.

So, we didn't leave empty handed. Evelyn & Wilson bought and split a full bag of roasted Hatch chiles. The entire way home, we could not get away from the smell of roasted chiles. Wilson had stowed his 10 pound bag in the "trunk" on his bike, and we had our haul in the trunk. No matter who was leading the way home, we were following the smell of chile.

Back in Las Cruces, Wilson & I parted ways, Ev & I were hungry. We stopped at a Red Lobster and single handedly decimated the shrimp population in Las Cruces in one hour. By the end of the night, we went thru 200 miles of absolutely gorgeous roads, a half tank of gas, 60+ some-odd number of shrimp, one 20 pound bag of chile and two trunks that still smell of chile.

Next time I make this journey, I will take a proper camera. It was definitely an adventure worth doing all over again.