This Ain't No Party

Montana is beautiful. It is beautiful beyond anything I had ever seen and it is beautiful beyond anything I can ever accurately describe. I wake up every morning and still can't believe I am here.

For the average citizen (of which I am one) it is very unregulated by the government on what you can and can not do. They seem to let common sense rule and it seems to work. Imagine that.

The people here are nice for the most part. There is no inner-city pretense bullshit to deal with. Douchebags and bagettes are minimal. People say hi to complete strangers. They stop to ask if you need help if you are pulled off the road. People who work in retail stores are pleasant and polite. It's a whole different planet than the one I had become so used to.

With the exception of an oil spill or two and some old mining towns cum Superfund sites, it's a very clean state, not fucked up by people for the most part. The cattle ranchers have the power here so occasionally the residents and some wildlife loses out. This part isn't good but it's unavoidable in a state where less than a million people live and ranchers foot a huge part of the tax bill.

Making a living here is hard. I'm guessing that 60% or better of the jobs are blue-collar back-breaking jobs. People don't get wealthy working here. They get by.

It can be deadly here. The rattler above was taken in my driveway after he rattled and lunged at me and the dog. There's wolves, bears, mountain lions, and poisonous reptiles. You have to keep your wits about you or you could end up dead pretty easily.

The weather can be harsh. Like 60mph+ winds in -20˚F temperatures. You can be dead in minutes. I had many days like this this past winter.

After I photographed the above snake, I took the shovel out of my truck and beat him to death. He had no fear of me and made no attempt at fleeing. If I didn't get him, he would eventually get me or my dog.

After I killed him, I stood in the middle of the road in a surreal moment of "Where the hell am I that I just had to beat a snake to death?", and I slowly whispered the word Montana into the wind.

It only gets better.

I wake up in the early morning and watch the sun rise over snow capped mountains. I see deer and elk pass by my cabin, eagles and hawks soaring in the thermals, coyotes heading back to their den before full light.

I take my dog and we walk into the nearby hills or along the Yellowstone river, aimlessly. There's nowhere we have to be.

I visit friends and watch the dogs play. We break bread together at dinnertime. I'll have a glass of wine and stare at the mountains with my jaw slack at the view.

I'll split wood for the fire. Cook healthy and wholesome dinners, fall asleep to the sounds of the world. One where I hear no motors, no other people, no music coming from a car window at 2:00 AM.

I may be one of the luckiest sons of bitches in the world.

I made it.

After driving for five days, the dog and I finally made it to Montana. We've been here a week now and still can't believe I am here.

I have been staying with friends in the next town over because all my stuff is in a big truck somewhere in the country as I write this. Tomorrow I will be reunited with all my stuff some time in the afternoon. I can't wait to sleep in my own bed again.

My friends have been amazing hosts. Mind you, adding me and one dog to a mix of them, 3 cats, two of their own dogs and 7 horses, we probably don't add much commotion. I am however indebted to them for the rest of my life. That's just the way I am.

I have tried my best to keep up with my job. They too have been amazingly generous with my transition. At least after my stuff gets here tomorrow I will be able to set up my office and actually work when I am supposed to.

It's been quite a ride thus far. I will try to keep writing a bit more faithfully.

On a last note, this picture was just a little abandoned building in a beautiful pasture. The sun was setting and I really wanted to get a picture of it.

For those playing the home version...

Yeah, this is where I will be living before the end of October.

What more do I need to say?

If you're interested in taking a one-way drive to Montana with me and the dog sometime in October, just let me know.

Yeah, I'm out.

At about 2:30 this morning I was awakened by the thump-thump-thump of some asshat idling in front of my place from horrible distorted house music booming from his car. On the way to work the people on the bus all smelled. From the bus stop to my office I dodged used condoms, human feces and used needles (sharps, gimmicks, works). I'm officially done.

I am moving to Montana. I have friends there and they are scouting places for me. I am going there in a few weeks as well to find a place if I don't have one before then, or to start getting it ready to live in if I do.

I will work at something that brings in dollars.

I will farm a little, hunt, fish, take photographs, and play with the dog.

I'm going to get a second dog.

I am done with this life.

This "work my ass off until the day I die just to live in the second (sometimes third) most expensive city in the country" life.

What the fuck have I been thinking?

Montana.

Big Sky Country.

I'm gone.

This isn't what I pictured.

I mentioned some time ago that I bought a DSLR camera. Since then I have taken thousands of shots, mostly of assorted wildlife with a smattering of my dog and a few people. I don't do well photographing people or landscapes for the most part. The former because I have absolutely no idea how to capture the right moment, the latter more often than not I don't have a wide-angle lens with me. And even if I did have the right lens with me I doubt I could frame the shot properly.

But what I seem to have is this eerie ability to capture animals. And by eerie, I mean that when I look through the viewfinder and start taking the picture, what I see at that moment is in no way what I end up with once I get home and start going through them. I can't quite explain it other than to tell you that when I look through the day's work, I am constantly saying "I can't believe I took that picture!".

It's a combination of how did I end up at the right place at the right time, and that the photos have a "wow" factor that I didn't see at all at the moment of capture. And I don't photoshop them to create something that wasn't there.

One of my friends says it's because I have a "natural talent" for it. I don't have a clue. But I am just gonna keep shooting. The two photos in this post are from this past week. These are wild animals. The hawk had just scored a squirrel when I spotted it and he calmly sat in the tree and enjoyed his spoils. The deer didn't bolt even though I had come crashing out of the woods trying to get away from some particularly voracious deer flies. The hawk should have flown away, the deer should have bolted.


I'm not complaining. I am thankful that I am getting the opportunity to see these things at this level.

Hotel, motel, Holiday Inn

When I was 18 I checked into the first motel in my life. It was a Motel 6 in Needles, California. It cost $9.99 for the night and an extra 75 cents if you wanted a TV.

I hadn't slept in a bed for nearly week at that point so I splurged the 75 cents for the TV as well. This was living.

Five days previously I had thrown out most of my possessions, said my goodbyes, cleaned out what paltry bank accounts I had, and left Boston for LA in my 1970 Oldsmobile 442. I slept in the back of the car for the first five nights which entailed finding somewhere safe and relatively hidden to pull off the road, take all the stuff out of the back seat, put what I could in the front seat with the rest on the the ground beside the car so I could at least sort of lay down to sleep. The car was a two-door coupe and really wasn't meant for sleeping. It was fucking fast, though.

I don't know why I picked LA as a destination. Then, like now, I think I just wanted to get away. I had no family to speak of, and no real roots that made it difficult to leave. I wasn't in the least bit attached to my life here on the east coast.

The ride out was relatively uneventful. I drove route 66 whenever I could, courtesy of the song of the same name. I went through some tough areas for long-hair, drug ingesting, wise-ass jewish boys. Georgia, North Dakota, Texas... all places not normally associated with the likes of me at that time. I sort of zigzagged across the country as I had never seen any of it before. I picked up a hitchhiker who was from the Black Hills of South Dakota. He was an interesting guy that didn't have too many branches on the family tree. He also had the potential to kill me for my car and possessions in the blink of an eye, but he didn't. He was dead broke. I shared some food and drink with him but politely declined when he asked if he could sleep on the floor at wherever I was staying that night. I didn't tell him I was staying in the car that night as well.

I woke up that morning in Needles after my first good night's sleep in six nights. I took advantage of the free (awful) coffee and donuts in the front office as paying for that hotel meant no food for the next 24 hours or so. It was time to get moving again.

I remember driving through the San Bernardino Mountains on my way into LA. They were cool, clean, and beautiful. I was exhilarated as I slowly drove up through the mountain passes. The big V8 rumble seeming dwarfed in all this majesty. I thought to myself, "Wow, this is gonna be a great adventure in LA."

Hours later descending into the town of San Bernardino I looked far ahead and saw only this gray haze. I had no idea what it was. I checked the map a few times and realized; This is LA.

And so it was.

It is all too clear now

It has recently become all too clear that I really need to just get the hell out. My job, my house, my life, this city. I'm done with all of it in more ways than I can even explain.

I've got to a job that pays well but I don't want to do any more. Time crawls by when I am at the job yet flies by mercilessly at all other times. It's a cruel joke of sorts I feel.

I have spent far too many years doing what I do because in a way it's all that I know. Over the past couple years I have intentionally slowed down a bit, worked less, try to enjoy life outside of the office walls.

What I have learned in those couple of years is that the work life will kill you. It runs you down, it breaks your spirit, it crushes morale. I've been a VP and I've been a flunky several times on each. Money aside, one is not necessarily better than the other. You are just shit on by less people as a VP than as a flunky.

My goal is a simpler life. Probably work harder than I ever have before, but one where it makes a difference. Run a small farm, tend to crops, tend to animals. There's no sleeping in. But it's easily worth it.

If the stars align and I get off my ass, maybe even find someone I can spend that part of my life with. That part is a big if.

So that's where I am.

It's time to get going. Time to take a chance and stop waiting for everything to be perfect. I've proven I can survive. 

Put down the smart phone, turn off the iPod

take off the big stupid sunglasses and take a look around you.

Let me say right up front, I am not a big fan of people in general. Not that there is anything wrong with them as a whole, but for the most part I am pretty quiet and prefer to keep to myself. That being said, I think the proliferation of smart phones, mp3 players, and other electronic devices has brought any sort of possible interaction between people that may not know each other, and many that do, to a screeching halt. It has also taken once-communicating people and turned them into individual islands in a sea of other individual islands. If I think that people are too cut off, believe me, they are.

I see them all. The second they get on the bus or sit down at a cafe, out comes the phone and they stare at their e-mail for 30 minutes, maybe writing one, maybe reading a few. But although it takes the average person about five minutes to go through 100 e-mails (because if you get that many, you know which ones you can disregard, and I speak from experience as I used to get upwards of 300 per day), they sit these and scroll up and down the list, read the same one over and over, move icons around on their screen, then go back to just staring at the same email for the entire time. The iPod set isn't much different. I see you flipping through the songs endlessly just to see the pictures of the CD cover making sure you never look up from that all-important Lady Gaga picture while something completely different plays in your earphones. Laptops, iPads, and other units like this further distract one from the real world.

I see the couple that sits down together, both pulling out their respective devices and not a word is spoken between them. They both try to act as though there is something important on their Blackberry so they don't have to talk to each other. One is inevitably the glance-up-occasionally-and-look-thoughtful type while the other makes it a point to never stray from looking at their Blackberry. Besides, what would they have to say to each other that they haven't posted on their wall anyway?

We have built our personal cones of silence. Our own isolation booths. We pay more attention to a bit of wire and silicon than we do to people, animals, or our surroundings. Unlike most people, I see it as a setback for the human race, not progress. The inability and unwillingness to communicate, to be part of the world around you, to experience things.

I will continue to not own a smart phone. I will continue to leave my iPod in my desk draw as I have for the last three years. Be careful if you put your phone down or take your earphones out though, someone like me may try to talk to you.

eDeath of a friend

A friend of mine died last week. The way I found out was the same way 12 of my other friends found out. Through FaceBook.

That being said, just a note that my deceased friend was notorious for dropping off the radar for days/weeks/months at a time so the fact that no one had seen or heard from him for days was not out of the ordinary and no cause for alarm under normal circumstances.

Unlike in a cyberpunk story where the protagonist dies and leaves some sort of digital representation of himself still aware and creating things in the big neural net forever, my friends digital fingerprint will just slowly vanish. Since his death you will never see his IM icon come on-line again, never get another email from him, and slowly the kind words that people are posting to his FaceBook wall will come to a stop. Eventually  someone in his family will request that FaceBook take it down, and they will.

It used to be a phone call or a knock on the door. You knew by the tone of voice or look in their eye before they said word one. But it was that brief human interaction, two people, perhaps strangers shared that moment together that brought closure, finality, and sorrow.

Now, it's words on a web page. Close your browser and maybe it hasn't really happened. Maybe if we all hit F5 enough times the person will come back.

I did talk to three of my friends that day, and met with one for coffee. But the digital world seemed to have robbed some honor and respect from my friend's passing.

Picture This redux.

I've recently bought a new camera, a DSLR with a few lenses and assorted other stuff. I'm learning a lot about the actual mechanics of photography through trial and error as well as some coworkers and Flickr commenters. For example, I took a walk for a couple of hours yesterday specifically to shoot some birds along the Charles River, unfortunately the shots didn't come out near as good as I thought they would/should have. My coworker who is a very good photographer looked at them and immediately told me what the issue was. Lesson learned.

ISO, f-stop, aperture openings, focal lengths, exposures, etc...It's a lot for my little brain to handle.

I'm enjoying going out on photo missions though. I don't take the dog because she'll spook anything that I may want to photograph. It's peaceful even if there are people all around because I am not focusing on them at all. They are going about their business and I mine.

On an off note, how fucked up is it that I have to worry about being labeled a pervert or worse because I saw a little girl trying to sneak up on one of those big nasty Canada Geese and thought It would make a cute picture but worried that someone might think my intent was less than it seemed. So no pictures were taken. This world saddens me sometimes.

Walking along in the unseasonably warm weather this past weekend and that nagging thought of how do I get out of work life was scratching somewhere at the back of my brain stem again. I wanted to wake up this morning, feed the animals, clean the barn, start readying the fields for planting. Not ride on a bus, walk past the dirt, debris and homeless, then sit in a mind-numbing office for eight hours creating stuff that won't mean shit in the big picture. I need to somehow hasten my departure from this lifestyle.

A tree grows in Boston

One of my coworkers had an avocado at lunch the other day. I asked if anyone had ever grown an avocado plant from the seed. They looked at me like I had three heads as I described the method. None of them had ever done it.

This is my windowsill at work.

The technology age ruins some of life's simple pleasures.

Cracked Actor

A milestone birthday for me this past weekend. I'm not old enough to be an AARP member yet, but a milestone none the less.

On a more pensive hike that normal this weekend I took stock of where I am in my life, what I have accomplished, what I have failed in, the good, and the bad, and where I am going.

I have been lucky enough to have a couple great relationships, one of them was with my (ex)wife as we were together around 17 years in total. I have only had one real horrific relationship which left me somewhat broken and battered for a period of time. If I am fortunate enough to have one more last great relationship, I think I will have done better than I could ever hoped.

I have a small but great group of friends. Occasionally one drops off and I hope I will continue to occasionally make new friends. I'm not that easy to be friends with by the way.

When you are breathing your last and someone is writing the epitaph for your gravestone, no mention of your career will be on there. As much as we are not truly defined by what we have done for work, nor how much money we made, it is amazing how much of our lives are consumed by work. I've worked for Fortune 5 companies and companies with only 5 employees. I've started a couple of businesses, been part of a few technology startups and have had both fabulously successes and spectacular failures. I guess you could say I am at break even. For the most part I have fully enjoyed the many different careers I have taken on, but looking back, having worked at least full time for the last 36 years has got to be the consistent low point in my life. It's the thing that doesn't mean anything in the big picture.

I still have a few big goals to take on and conquer. I have the energy and most of the motivation. One last lifestyle change. This one's for me.

I've come on a few years from my Hollywood highs
The best of the last, the cleanest star they ever had
I'm stiff on my legend, the films that I made
Forget that i'm fifty cause you just got paid

Let's Face It

I've been on Facebook for six months now.

I have collected 67 "friends" which in reality is about 10x the number of people I consider friends in the non-virtual world.

I have ignored 29 requests to "friend" someone with whom I have no desire to have any contact with in any world, be it real or virtual.

I will not friend anyone that has more than 400 "friends" already. Their ego should be sufficiently stroked without me.

I have become a "fan" of 4 pages. My sister's, one of my friends, the place where I bathe my dog, and BBC America.

And I really don't care who my friends have become fans of.

I play no games, farmer things, mafia things, of aquarium things.

On to the whole thing. If you've ever kept a blog you find that people will reduce the number of tiimes they email or call you because they feel that you have put your entire life out on the blog. Which in my case is 100% untrue as only about 3 people know who writes this blog in the real world. And from talking to my friends who have also kept blogs, they too suffered similar declines in true communications.

Facebook makes it even worse because for the most part, people will take your one or two lines as a "Well, that sums him/her up, no need to talk to them" mentality whether they do it intentionally or not. Making the mistake of not communicating with a friend because you see them write blurbs on Facebook can't be good for society as a whole. I have recently been forcing myself to at least email my friends with more substantial happenings than the latest dinner I cooked. I like the results.

I continue to make the mistake that because people (friends) have cut down on the communication with you outside of facebook, that maybe Facebook is the place to voice an idea or opinion like you would in person. How wrong can one be? Point to a news article, express a political opinion, try to talk about an issue that affects many people and it falls on deaf ears and eyes. I post a picture of my dog and it gets all sorts of response.

So take Facebook as fun, as pure entertainment, as something to kill time with while at work.

Reconnect with your friends in the real world. They're much better.